“We are all incapacitated by power”

After being successfully performed in Madrid and on tour, the theatrical adaptation of the novel Lectura fácil, by Cristina Morales, arrives at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona.

The actor Alberto San Juan signs the dramaturgy and direction of this piece, which takes place in a supervised apartment in Barcelona where four women live by decision of the public welfare services. The border between disability and the right to govern oneself is in question when one of them escapes and is persecuted by a judge.

“My interpretation of the novel –San Juan declares to La Vanguardia– is that the apartment where the four people with a diagnosis of intellectual disability live is a metaphor for society as a whole. It is a society governed by a system of hierarchical power, in which we are all, in some way, disabled by power to participate in the government of our lives in common and when making decisions.

When he published Easy Reading, Morales explained that the novel tried to “explode the concept of disability” and San Juan has endorsed this premise, in “a very free adaptation”: “Dividing the population into capable and disabled, white or black, man or woman or any other category is an artifice that only serves the system of power and domination that we suffer. Life is of infinite diversity and richness, physical and mental, and if it worked, not with the power of some over others, but with one another, it would not be a problem, on the contrary: it would be a richness”.

But it is not a utopia: “There is longing, but this story speaks of oppression,” continues the director. “The author, through the character of Nati, states that the only real division is between jailers and inmates. She genders it in the novel, because she considers that power is macho: the attitude of dominance is a macho quality. I think it’s pretty realistic because at the pinnacle of power is the white, straight, money man.”

After the theatrical work, San Juan concludes that “at the beginning there were three normative actresses and four with functional diversity, but now there are seven interpreters.” They are Desirée Cascales Xalma, Laura Galán, Pilar Gómez, Marcos Mayo, Anna Marchessi, Pablo Sánchez and Estefanía de los Santos.

Easy reading, “which also has a lot of humor”, is a co-production of the National Drama Center and Bitò Produccions, and will be at the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc until April 23.