This season, at the Liberal Arts Center of the Brossa Foundation, playwright Queralt Riera presented not one piece, but three. In October, Dona premiered, with Les Antonietes, which talks about loneliness, relationships, prostitution… Last Sunday, the functions of Jo porn, tu porno, also released, which is approaching the rape pornography, with Alba Sáez and Encarni Sánchez, directed by Magda Puyo.
And this week Pruna rests there, which is directed by the author herself and who explains as follows: “Laura Calvet, who is one of the actresses in the play, when she turned 30 she discovered that she had suffered childhood abuse. Since she was an actress, she decided she wanted to do a creative project and sought me out, I was very interested, and we presented ourselves at the Adrià Gual award, which we won.”
Riera explains that a lot was documented about child abuse: “The whole team was devastated, because it’s one thing to read articles, but when we got in touch with the Vicki Bernadet Foundation, the reality hit us a little bit face We saw that the statistic that says that one in three children has been abused before the age of 20 was also met. With ten people in the team, during the process of creating the work we discovered that, in addition to Laura, two other people had suffered abuse: Carlos Gallardo and I.”
“Many people who have suffered child abuse are never aware of it – he continues -. And many are so in adult life, because children, when they are abused, have no awareness of what sexuality is.”
Despite the drama these facts entail, the work goes further: “Pruna confronts the public with the reality of child abuse, which is not something that happens in a school with a priest once in a while, but happens within the family. 80% of child abuse is within the family or the closest circle. And 50% of these abuses are inflicted by the father”.
Riera considers that, as a society, “we don’t want to confront it or look at it, because it hurts us to assume that there is an abuser in every family”. But he points out that “the play is also a song about love, about life: it is a very poetic and very restorative work; it heals a wound that hurts, but at the same time it also has a beautiful ending and does a kind of poetic justice”.
The author and director confesses to being influenced by classical Greek theater and thinks that “one of the important functions of the theater is to provoke catharsis in the spectators, that the people who go to the theater enter in a certain way, take a more or less intense emotional journey and return home relieved, and perhaps with a slightly fuller conscience.”
And he clarifies: “It’s not a work like this that you go home dusted with.” This work ends very peacefully, because the people who are survivors of abuse continue to live and can be happy, and they have a life journey and lessons to learn apart from all this”. Finally, Riera remembers that today Friday there will be an after-party with Vicki Bernadet.
