A few centuries ago, Saint Teresa of Jesus baptized her suffering and her mysterious illness as "mal de coraçon" (heart sickness), a very beautiful and very graphic way of explaining this persistent pain of the soul that makes you live in the world without a clear direction. And that is exactly what happens to the characters of Mal de coraçon, the proposal written by Victoria Szpunberg and directed by Andrea Jiménez that can be seen at La Villarroel.
The play locks us in a city bar on a night where a universal deluge has collapsed and stopped the outside world. This space becomes a kind of cloistered convent: a refuge for three disoriented anti-heroes who need to escape reality. A decadent atmosphere where whiskey glasses and a soundtrack of karaoke songs accompany the characters' wounds.
Three urban martyrs in search of solace
Mal de coraçón shifts its focus to delve into the sorrow of each character in this wandering triangle. On one side, we find the barmaid, who is precisely named María (Júlia Barceló). Everything in the play has a very biblical aroma: the two come to her as salvation, wanting to take refuge in the arms of a woman who shows herself to be kind, pious, and very patient. María represents the saint because she is the one who welcomes them into her temple: the bar.
But she also has her own heart sickness. Her dream is to be an actress, but she is always rejected. Her pain is that of not being seen, a frustration that mixes a bit with a contemporary feminist discourse. To try to alleviate this emptiness, María turns to TikTok and social media to lecture and try to be the actress everyone expects her to be nowadays. She is willing to do anything (to become an influencer or go on a diet, if necessary) to succeed, but they still don't see her.
Around her, we find two equally broken souls. On one side, we have the Professor (Pol López), an alcoholic and depressed man who has made the bar his home. He is a frustrated being who has lost everything and plays at being "the bad guy" in the story. This nuance is magnificent: the Professor resigns himself to playing this role of the bad guy in a world where we need culprits to survive better. When the other character, the Lover, judges and accuses him, he prefers to agree with him and tell him what he wants to hear rather than defend himself. He assumes this role out of pure sacrifice, because behind the monster hides another martyr of the night.
The third and last character is the Lover (Pau Vinyals), who suffers such visceral heartbreak that it seems to have perforated his entrails and stuck to his skin. His pain is so clear and evident that it disturbs and completely destroys him. He wallows so much in his own tragedy that he lives it as an absolute maximum, and uses this clear evil to hide and protect himself from all the other pains he might feel.
The liturgy of the bar and 2.0 salvation
The great success of the proposal is how it turns the bar into a place of contemporary worship where characters seek the comfort and shelter that people once found in faith. Humans need explanations, answers, and protection, and here the bar provides it all using a liturgy copied from the ecclesiastical.
Without intending to give spoilers, the way the characters are baptized and eat the consecrated host is, simply, one of the best parts of the play. It's like a "2.0 baptism" of the salvation we seek today. In the same way that Saint Teresa sought answers and comfort before an image of the wounded Christ, we now cling to any clue. We no longer know where faith is, but any simulacrum serves us to feel protected in a world that causes so much pain.
Humor and karaoke blur Teresian thought
The great handicap of the play is that the message is held together with tweezers and has to be searched for almost with a magnifying glass. The spectacle, the unrestrained humor, the live music, and the surreal situations that chain together in the bar end up devouring the message that the text intends to communicate. The content that the author wanted to transmit and the historical depth of Saint Teresa are thus lost. The spectator has a great time during the journey, but the entertainment overrides the message and leaves you with the feeling of not quite understanding where they are taking you.
Sometimes, the interpretations are too revved up. Especially Pau Vinyals' Lover, who moves in such an extremely high tone that, with so much crying and so much self-pity, it becomes heavy and can become tiring. It's a shame, because it's perfectly understood that his intention is to embody the most horrifying and visceral pain of the night, but the excess of histrionics plays a trick on him.
The mirror of Saint Teresa
But to understand the background of Mal de coraçon, one must approach the figure of Teresa de Ávila. In the mid-16th century, this nun faced a Church dominated by men who, frightened by her voice, branded her a fraud or possessed. In her time, it was believed that women should be silent, but she raised her voice, defended her spiritual freedom, and intelligently managed her fame.
Victoria Szpunberg's text appropriates this spirit in a very astute way. Saint Teresa's mysticism was nourished by moments of ecstasy, visions, and carnal pain through wounds, flagellations, and penances. Mal de coraçon takes all this Teresian heritage and equates it with our own current torments. The waitress in the play, María, in her obsession with preparing for the rock musical casting about the saint, involuntarily replicates this struggle against a system that wants to subjugate and invisibilize her.
Teresa de Ávila went from experiencing severe health episodes to living periods of love for life, where she fostered her pleasure for music and poetry. And this is what we also see in the characters of this bar: they move along this same fine line that separates death from life, represented by scenes of music and celebration.
An apotheosis ending
Where the play gains its full raison d'être is in the ending. The closing is a true celebration, a celebration of life where the message transforms into a beautiful song full of hope. This is when it is understood that the theater has also become this space of contemporary worship where the souls of the city unite to achieve salvation from the emptiness of life.
Because, for many of us, the theater is our sacred temple.