Four girls share a flat, supervised by social services due to their intellectual disabilities. And a judge opens a process to decide whether to forcefully sterilize one of them, Marga, with a free sexual life with men and women. Marga escapes and occupies an abandoned house. And the police are looking for her. It is Easy Reading, a novel by Cristina Morales that won the National Narrative Award in 2019. A comic and tragic story about four non-normal people, that is, with great difficulties in adapting to the norms, which Alberto San Juan has now turned into a theatrical production that includes actors with cerebral palsy such as Marcos Mayo, Anna Marchessi and Desirée Cascales and that opens this Friday at the National Dramatic Center in Madrid and will be at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona in April. A montage with which San Juan (Madrid, 1968), he affirms, wants to "explode the concept of disability."
In this sense, the director recalls at the press conference what he snapped at when they met the actress and dancer Desirée Cascales, who was a decisive source for Morales's novel and whose way of speaking, says San Juan, "you can perfectly understand , but you have to really listen to it, not while looking at your phone”: “Desirée told me: you are disabled, you don't understand me, I understand you perfectly”, she recalls with a laugh.
And he acknowledges that "when we started rehearsing this production there were three normative actresses and four with functional diversity, but today it is a cast of seven people, each one different, from their father and mother, and each one with your circumstance. Although it is true that living through a diagnosis of a disability, like being in a wheelchair, involves common experiences that make a difference”, he concludes. And he reasons that with Easy Reading they want to "vindicate the concept of human beings, of living beings, because there is no living being that does not need to be helped with something or the ability to help with something."
In this sense, she says that the work deals with the power that society exercises over these women, but also with power in general, "the desire to live and the difficulty of doing so in a society defined by power as the will to dominate." That is why he summarizes that "the social order divides us into categories, a division that I think sometimes serves to generate a subordinate population, your identity is fag, disabled, poor, black, theater director, which are fictions that for it to happen an encounter between two human beings should be dissolved. The creation process has been to dissolve these fictions that separate us into differentiated identities, in which some help and others have to be helped, some protect and others have to be protected, some govern and others have to be governed”.
"The subject that Lectura Fácil deals with in depth -he summarizes- is not so much the so-called disability and functional diversity but rather the general incapacity suffered by the population as a whole when it comes to governing ourselves, of participating in the government of common affairs that determine our daily life, it is a show that speaks of power as the will to dominate one over the other, a society that interferes with living beings and prevents living life to the full”.
She remembers that when it came to adapting the novel, her first proposal was that Cristina Morales herself do it, “but she could not due to other commitments, although the dance-theater group of which she is a part collaborates in the choreographic part, Iniciativa Sexual Femenina ”. In the end, he cut out the 400 pages of the novel himself and did so by moving the action from Barcelona to Madrid, adding his own speech to the judge and to two people who attend therapy with the protagonists.
The last modification was to make the normative interpreters of the work have a diagnosed disability that is not specified: "They are people in extreme situations and whoever has suffered a state of anxiety or a depressive state knows what it is to be out of control, in a state alienated or upset that daily life itself can lead you to by having to fit yourself into a mold that is artificial for them”.
Four people who live in a supervised apartment which, he says, can be taken as a metaphor for society as a whole. “Each one is defined by the position they occupy with respect to that power that governs them: from the one who tries to adapt to the one who analyzes it critically but does not act, who does not analyze it but leaves home and who generates another reality in their head to move on," he concludes.
