An act of claim. And in reparation. After the accusations of censorship of the Community of Madrid for removing I die because I do not die (Teresa's double life) from the programming of its Teatros del Canal, and after Vox was happy in the Madrid Assembly that this was not represented "harmful and grotesque" work on Teresa de Jesús, on Tuesday night the work by Pazo Bezerra, winner of the XXX Jardiel Poncela Prize, went on stage. And, with some truly luxurious actresses, one of the greatest on the Spanish scene and who decided to vindicate freedom of expression by putting their voices in this monologue, I die because I don't die swept a packed Sala Berlanga, from the SGAE, in which Pedro Almodóvar, Alfredo Sanzol, Secun de la Rosa or the producer Jesús Cimarro were there, who assured that he has already offered to have it performed for a month in one of his theaters.
Ana Belén, Julieta Serrano, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Nathalie Poza and Gloria Muñoz gave a reading with which they moved and also provoked not a few laughs in their most humorous moments about a work that takes place in two stages. First, in that of Santa Teresa, a rebellious young woman who certainly does not want to get married, an inveterate reader of books who suffers great pain when, after the death of her mother, they make them disappear.
She ends up in a convent where there are daughters of the great houses of Castile and which is more than a house of seclusion is a hotel. Even the boy who wants her and runs away from can visit her. She will want to found very different convents, she will suffer long periods of illness, God will speak to her... and after her death they will cut her apart. Literally. To carry her relics around the world. Centuries later, some nuns will have to declare her incorrupt hand in an American customs office in the "preserved and salted" section.
Precisely in the second part of the work, the saint, in order to come back to life in the 21st century, will have to put herself together. Poor, undocumented, she will end up living on the street, using alcohol, drugs, prostitution to pay for drugs... and in the end, after reflecting on why drugs are prohibited -and the possibility that her mushrooms from the rye bread of many days that she always ate- will end up understanding who she has been and who she is. And she will reinvent herself as Teresa dj.
The actresses achieve moments of particular emotion with the holy ascent to a lion of the Cortes and proclaiming the names of so many forgotten, ignored Spanish writers, and they were enormously applauded in a dramatized reading in which the sound contributed strongly to immerse the public in the tone of the piece, directed by Matías Umpiérrez, who would have been rehearsing it now at the Teatros del Canal.
At the end, after a very long ovation, a colloquium in which Bezerra (Almería, 1978) amusedly assured that "from Santa Teresa I have learned that fear is the devil, that you don't have to be afraid and you have to be brave because, as she said Brown sugar, you only live once". And he remarked that "the intra-history of everything that has happened is pathetic, because in the Madrid Assembly it became clear that they had not read the book. The synopsis that she comes back to life and becomes a whore and a junkie is very reductionist, it would have They had to document themselves a little more. They thought that I was discrediting their figure, that I was a red burner and I was going to laugh at a Catholic figure and for nothing".
And he concluded that "when I read everything Teresa wrote, I almost signed up for the Pope, the figure of God is not denied in this work and it makes you want to get to know this woman better who is not put there to laugh at her If there is any criticism, it is against Spanish society today. If a 60-year-old woman came back to life today without papers, undocumented, our society would leave her relegated to begging, and that could lead her to alcohol, heroin, to prostitute herself to get money. An ordeal that hits the saint because, like Jesus Christ, the saints did not come into the world to have a good time".
