our city
Author: Thornton Wilder, adapted by Llàtzer Garcia
Direction: Ferran Utzet
Performers: Rosa Renom, Guillem Balart, Paula Malia, Rosa Boladeras, Oriol Genís, Albert Triola, Isabel Rocatti, Carles Martínez, Mercè Pons, Xavier Ripoll, Tai Fati, Biel Montoro, Lluís Oliver, Jenny Beacraft and Josep Sobrevals
Place and date: Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc (11/X/2023) ????
“Earth, you are too wonderful for anyone to notice,” the young and brilliant Emily summarizes at the end of La nostra ciutat. She has previously made a lacerating observation: “I had never realized how worried and in what darkness people live.” And she insists: “Does any human being ever realize life while he lives it?”
Emily lives in Grover’s Corners, a small town in New Hampshire at the beginning of the 20th century, a more or less orderly world of Congregational churches and small local newspapers, of farmers who still deliver their milk and automobiles that will soon replace horses. The work progresses between 1901 and 1913, but Thornton Wilder writes it from the vantage point of 1938, when the Great War and the Great Depression have already devastated millions of lives and Roosevelt’s new deal fosters a new social contract.
What Wilder advocates, as he did in his previous Pulitzer Prize winner, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which covered the before and after of the five deaths when an Inca bridge fell in Peru in 1714, is another way of looking and living. life. In La nostra ciutat he does it through a traditional story, full of breakfasts, choir meetings, gossip about the town drunk and a small love story with the luminous Guillem Balart and Paula Malia. Some scenes in which, however, there is always something vaguely disturbing, advocated by the metatheatrical game proposed by the author and interpreted so well by Ferran Utzet’s direction.
The play has no scenery, little more than some chairs, and what it does have is a narrator, a more than effective Rosa Renom, who knows the destinies of those around her and who breaks the fourth wall again and again in the middle of a clean space with echoes of both theatrical play and mental space. Even that mind of God that a young citizen speaks of. A space in which the actors shine in the light and excite in the elegant sunset that Utzet proposes, in front of stars that seem the only ones capable of uniting us.
