Teatro Español y Naves del Español

Despierta

by Ana Rayo
Theater
Despierta ©Jesus Ugalde
Date
September 10
October 31, 2021
Price
18€
Time
Tuesday to Sunday / 7:30pm 
Duration
1 hour 15 min
Post-show talk

BEING A WOMAN AMIDST JOKES, SWEAR WORDS AND TRUTHS

Ana Rayo says that her play presents an improved version of herself. My impression, on the other hand, is that she lays herself bare in front of us with what is a heart-breaking, funny and committed text.

She explains that when she was a child, she would have liked to have been a man so as not to have had to put up with the humiliations and insults she has been subjected to. She has undergone several different therapies, eating disorders, weeping and quests to tackle human stupidity. She attacks hypocrisy, double standards and says that the liberation of women is the liberation of humanity...

Rayo’s tale is about overcoming sexist stereotypes, which have become educational errors, in order to move forward with equal rights and obligations. She writes to overcome an existential crisis. Comicality is her saving grace, because otherwise she wouldn’t even feel like swimming in the sea, a sea that she sees as being awash with the corpses of people who have tried to reach the shores of Europe.

Her words move me almost as much as the blows she received alongside her mother, the co-protagonist of this story. Amidst jokes, swear words and truths, we move from the 1950s to the present day. In actual fact, the jokes serve to convey her pain, her surprise at the way women were educated during the Franco years. Kinder Küche Kirche are the foundations of the Nazi ideology that was applied during the last Spanish dictatorship and, as she says: these were the domains of women: children, kitchen and church. That is why she is full of rage, which she combines with a personal, simple pedagogy and a certain degree of optimism.

She succeeds in paying a moving tribute to her mother and to herself. Victims of an unjust, disturbing and disturbed education. She offers us her work as if it were an abused and bruised bouquet of flowers, although she does manage to make it scathing and beautiful. Retrieving archives of traumas from an emotional memory, she hurls them at us with clarity, fed up with abuses. Enough is enough. It is precisely this “Enough is enough” that draws me into this production.

Accompanied by the author and the actress, we travel through the different eras with nuances in the costumes, the light and the sound. Without sparing any pain or humour, we breathe to keep walking to the rhythm of clicking heels and bare feet. Together with her and some excellent collaborators, we became involved in this adventure to overcome the damage and to stimulate the desire to build a more beautiful world that is respectful of women.

Natalia Menéndez

Cast and Creative Team

Playwright Ana Rayo

Directed by Natalia Menéndez

Cast Ana Rayo

Off-stage voices: Alma Baeza Ortega, Ana Rayo, Benito Sagredo, Blanca Serrano, Juan Margallo, Merlín Baeza Ortega, Óscar Martínez-Gil, Petra Martínez and Pili Margallo                                                                                                                                 

Set design Alfonso Barajas

Lighting design Juanjo Llorens

Costume design Lorenzo Caprile

Music composed by Mariano Marín

Choreography Mónica Runde

Assistant director: Pilar Valenciano

Assistant director in residence at the Teatro Español: Marlene Michaelis

Executive producer Barco Pirata

A production by Teatro Español and Barco Pirata

 

Teatro Accesible

Audio description

Magnetic loop

Subtitling for the deaf

Amplified sound

Iconos de accesibilidad proporcionados por Teatro Accesible