Santa Teresa de Jesús is still valid. His mysticism has permeated the creative process that has brought together three very different ways of making theater and has crystallized in the work Mal de coraçon, which premieres this Thursday in the TNC’s Workshops room (until 21 of May). The three performers are from the Company Solità ria, the playwright is Victoria Szpunberg and the director is Andrea Jiménez, from Teatro en Vilo.
In a bar there works a waitress who, in fact, is an actress but who has to earn her living with this job, “like so many other actresses”, declares Júlia Barceló, the actress who plays her. In the bar they soak their troubles and escape from reality “a university professor pierced by the pain that life generates for him, by loneliness, and in this bar he finds a place where he can be heard, a space where he can forget for a while â€, explains the actor Pol López; and “a person in love, but with a person who does not love him and who has left him; he feels an unbearable pain, which brings out all the pains he has had in his life”, this is how the actor Pau Vinyals defines his character.
And is it all a drama? Not. All the creators of this performative piece assure that there is a lot of humor. And Saint Teresa? Well, his mysticism, the pain he suffered in his trances, is what has inspired this creative process until reaching a bar. “We have a bar in a theater with three bands, which generates comings and goings that open towards the mystic – explains the director from Madrid. We have worked to generate mystical thinking from an absolutely everyday and down-to-earth fact.”
“We set it in a bar, because I didn’t want to do any biography of any nun or anything religious – declares Szpunberg-. A bar is also a refuge, where people get away from everyday life. There is a state of drunkenness that recalls the loss of the senses reached by mystics, and we also chose a bar because we wanted to do something playful, full of a sense of humor.”
In addition to reading the mystics, the playwright has spoken with cloistered nuns to get to know their world and distill it into this work, Mal de coraçon, one of the ailments that Saint Teresa claimed to suffer from. The work deals with guilt and forgiveness, and “how to deal with the pain and frustration of living in this world marked by immediate desire”, concludes the director of the TNC, Carme Portaceli.