Saint Teresa of Jesus is still in force. His mysticism has permeated the creative process that has brought together three very different ways of doing theater and has crystallized in the play Mal de coraçon, which opens this Thursday at the TNC’s Tallers (until May 21). The three performers are those of the Companyia Solità ria, the playwright is Victoria Szpunberg and the director is Andrea Jiménez, from Teatro en Vilo.
A waitress works in a bar who, in fact, is an actress but has to earn a living from this job, “like so many other actressesâ€, declares Júlia Barceló, the actress who plays her. In the bar they soak up their ills and flee from reality “a university professor traversed by the pain that life generates, by loneliness, and in this bar he finds a place where they can listen to him, a space where he can forget at some point â€, explains the actor Pol López; and “a lover, but with a person who does not love her and has left him; He feels unbearable pain, which makes all the pain he has had in his life come out of him â€, defines his character in this way, the actor Pau Vinyals.
But is it a drama? Absolutely. All the creators of this performative piece assure that there is a lot of humor. And Saint Teresa? Well, her mysticism, the pain she suffered in her transit, is what has inspired this creative process until it reached a bar. “We have a bar in a theater with three bands, which generates comings and goings that open up towards mysticism,†explains the Madrid director. We have worked to generate mystical thought from an absolutely daily event and keeping our feet on the groundâ€.
“We have placed it in a bar, because I did not want to do any biography of any nun or anything religious,” says Szpunberg. A bar is also a refuge, where people get away from everyday life. There is a drunken state that recalls the loss of senses that mystics reach, and we have also chosen a bar because we wanted it to be something playful, full of sense of humorâ€.
In addition to reading about the mystics, the playwright has spoken with cloistered nuns to get to know their world and distill it in this work, Mal de coraçon, one of the ills Saint Teresa claimed to suffer. The work addresses guilt and forgiveness, and “how to handle the pain and frustration of living in this world marked by immediate desire,” concludes the director of the TNC, Carme Portaceli.
Catalan version, here
