The ten essential works to understand the history of theater

1

Confession or the Bait of Sin

JOSEP PALAU I FABRE, 2000

Palau i Fabre, the Picassian par excellence, is one of my three Kings of the East.The Confession or the Bait of Sinit is his most poetic and obscene work at the same time. One of his constants is provocation through sex. One day I asked him what he would have liked to be if he weren't a man, and Palau replied: "a bull." I identify him with the precaution of placing some lattices between the audience and the show. Location, a church, with a confessional and an altar. The actors, naked.

2

Interior

MAURICE MAETERLINCK, 1894

Maeterlinck, a symbolist, studied the world of bees and other insects and butterflies. Interior is his most ambitious and least performed work but, along withThe Intruder, it was staged by the modernists of Sitges' Cau Ferrat, at the end of the 19th century. It evokes, at night, through a window, the peaceful after-dinner conversation of a family. People from the village arrive with the news of the suicide of the family's eldest daughter. They don't know how to communicate it to the family, serene and joyful. The night fatally lengthens and the silences become tense, eternal

3

Diumenge

JOAN BROSSA, 1964

A one-act play, with prologue and epilogue, a comedy with three characters. White living room with a sofa set and a Tàpies. The footlights make and unmake the stage. Brossa, vertebrated Dau al Set. He called his theater "scenic poetry": reviving genres and characters of traditional theater, from a new language, the wonderland and a dragon's throat that turns the plot into an obstacle and the word into pictorial writing.

4

Poet in New York

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, 1929-1930

García Lorca, author of theGypsy Balladsand ofBlood Wedding, drastically closes his previous work to face inPoet in New Yorkhis homosexuality and redirect his gaze towards blackness. New York fascinates him. "Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! Blood has no doors on a face-up night."Poet in New Yorkit is not conceived as theater but it is theater. Of yesterday, of today and of tomorrow. It is a "landscape of the urinating crowd" of "the vomiting crowd." I believe it is essential to bring Poet in New York to the stage.

5

Road to Damascus

AUGUST STRINDBERG, 1899

"We are expelled from Paradise," Strindberg tells us, and also that "since childhood we have sought God, but have only found the Devil." He inspired Bergman. He is a playwright who plays with life and death.Road to Damascus, which has as its nucleus a family, the couple, with anxieties and conflicts and which, as Ezra Pound says, is "the antenna of the species." Art and neurosis according to Strindberg justify our own schizophrenia and that is why it is a good medicine for schizophrenia.

6

The Oresteia

AESCHYLUS, 458 BC.

The only complete theatrical trilogy that comes down to us from the classics is by Aeschylus, in the 5th century and, in the 21st century, it becomes The Oresteia. It tells us about families, then with deified and mythological characters. It goes beyond time. Two estranged brothers, a woman, Clytemnestra, who awaits the return of her husband, Agamemnon, and who is nevertheless Aegisthus' lover. Agamemnon kills his daughter Iphigenia. To preserve her adultery, Clytemnestra kills her husband. Orestes, the son, decides to avenge his father's death at the urging of Electra, his sister. A story of revenge that Aeschylus denounces as an act of justice.

7

Bohemian Lights

RAMÓN DEL VALLE-INCLÁN, 1920

Esperpento: reality deformed by the convex mirror. A protagonist, Max Estrella, in an absurd, nocturnal, brilliant, and hungry Madrid. About fifty characters parade around these Bohemian Lights. And among them, Max Estrella, Don Latino, and Pica Lagartos, who tells us that "the world is a controversy," while Don Latino confirms that "Spain is a grotesque farce." Blind people, sad and weary women, a twilight atmosphere, dark, nocturnal, and profound in the Goyaesque blackness of this country called Spain.

8

Nausica

JOAN MARAGALL, 1908-1911

Nausica, Maragall's work, becomes intoxicated with Ulysses like a god who has descended from heaven, just as Maragall is also possessed by the legend. Nausica, the protagonist of the tragedy, becomes a lyrical and epic character. However, for Maragall, the art of theater is an impure art, although paradoxically he rediscovers in Guimerà the model of a lyrical and romantic poet and playwright. TheNausicaof Maragall becomes, however, a rare bird in the theatrical landscape of the moment

9

Julius Caesar

SHAKESPEARE, 1959

Julio CésarIt deals with the conspiracy against the Roman dictator, led by Marcus Brutus. The scene of Caesar's death at the hands of Brutus is a memory of humanity. Caesar dazzles, a figure of a tragic character. His democratic republic collapses due to the ambition of the clans surrounding him. Brutus, who leads the rebellion, oscillates between betrayal and esteem. In Orson Welles' staging, the protagonists wore Nazi and fascist uniforms.Julio Césarrepresents a power struggle that still allows us to interpret our restless 21st century.

10

Right You Are (If You Think So)

LUIGI PIRANDELLO, 1917

Pirandello, Nobel Prize in Literature, deeply rooted in a Sicily with Neapolitan perfumes, tenderly depicts a spontaneous, fresh, popular, contradictory, almost domestic society. He exalts life from the theater and theater from life, with anxieties and concerns. His theater breathes Mediterranean spirit, areas of violent shadows and festive suns. Scents of lemon trees. It is to penetrate deep Sicily, and also to stroll through the narrow streets of Naples with balconies from which hang images of all kinds and photographs of husbands, grandfathers, or children who have already passed away.