What would happen if we were to meet again with that teacher who taught us to read and write and ask us such basic questions as what we have done with our lives, what have we left behind, to ask us to put on the rear-view mirror? And that she asked us a question of enormous simplicity and complexity: Are you happy? The answer is The White Room, a work from the National Prize for Dramatic Literature 2022, Josep Maria Miró (Vic, 1977), which now arrives until April 9 at the small room of the Spanish Theater, with the Argentine Lautaro Perotti as director.
Perotti already directed the work at the Barcelona premiere, in Catalan, in the small Sala FlyHard, with just over thirty seats, during the Grec festival in 2021. And now he repeats as the director with the translation by Eva Vallines and with one of the actresses of that cast, Paula Blanco. She is accompanied in the Sala Margarita Xirgu by the Spanish artist Lola Casamayor -Miss Mercedes-, Jon Arias and Santi Marín in a piece that her author defines as "a dialogue with our childhood". "There is a wonderful phrase by Sartre that says that childhood decides. This space explores how it has decided, how we have built our identity, what things we have left behind. A child can live wonderful moments but also do and receive damage, And it's important how that builds for us as adults."
For Miró, the author of works represented in dozens of countries, such as Archimedes' Principle, The White Room "is a chamber work, and Lautaro has done an actor's treatment, minimalist, going to detail. It is important that the viewer closes it A beautiful thing happened in Barcelona: there were people who, when they came to see the play and saw this figure of Miss Mercedes, who has something of a Dickens Christmas story, told us that their lady's name was Montserrat, or Pilar, and they did a journey to that teacher or teachers that we have all had and that have shaped us as individuals".
In the play, the teacher meets successively with three of her former students in an accidental way after 30 years. Then they will meet. "There are four characters with many edges and contradictions," says Perotti, and assures that as a director he finds it exciting "working with actors and actresses that has to do with secrets, hidden things, things that people don't show We don't want them to know, but they determine our day-to-day behavior". "Our work above all had to do with discovering what things mobilize these four characters without the need to represent it, exhibit it, but that it is an internal motor that forces them to do or hide the things they go through in the work."
A production that, he remarks, "addresses many topics, but above all it has to do with rediscovering moments of education, training, the initial years, so decisive in the construction of human beings, of each one of us" . "Today there are names, protocols, they know, they identify things that can happen in the schoolyards and they know how to act, they know how to proceed, and they know that the child is not responsible, but that there are adults who have to be Pay attention. This did not exist long ago. And it forced each one to train and do what they could with their lives. And that is central to the work, to see how these four characters can survive the shortcomings or problems of the first age in training", says Perotti.
For Miró, "it is not a nostalgic work, but rather it talks about the need to order the past. When you order it, you try to balance the satisfactory and excellent things and also the negative ones. There are many things in the balance for these characters to order their present by looking at their past". The actors assure that they want to see "how the public enters with us inside this white room, they occupy it, inhabit it, and how they leave. That they enjoy it, suffer it, cry, confront things from the past. It is the portrait of a generation where what we lived at school often stayed there. He talks about backpacks and places that we have been placing and sometimes we have been able to heal, but other times they have remained like a large cyst and we dare not open it. Miss Mercedes He comes precisely to put a mirror on us and for many people in the public the journey he gives him will be interesting".
