A Season to Be - Season 23/24

Maybe it was when I was 12 years old..., or 13, or 14, I don't remember the exact date, and it probably doesn't matter... It was a moment when I was in front of a painting, I don't remember exactly who the artist was, I think it might have been Matisse... but it could have been Miró, Monet, or Modigliani... Sometimes I'd bet my hand that it was Matisse, other times I wasn't so sure, but that probably doesn't matter much either. What I do know for sure is that I stood there, captivated by a force I recognized as true, and something exploded within me.

I was there, looking at a painting that someone had created a long time ago, and I felt completely connected to him and his work. As the excitement grew within me, the connection between us strengthened. And I thought (or over time, I've thought that I must have thought...) that if such a connection could be created between two strangers, it also opened up the possibility of creating connections with other people I didn't know and couldn't even imagine existed and establishing a new way of understanding and connecting with the world. I must thank the opportunity to have found myself in front of that painting that day and to have learned to look at it before others, and after that, to have learned to look at so many things in everyday life as if they were paintings...

Today, I would like to tell you that over time, I have often rediscovered that sensation.

Perhaps this is the idea behind preparing and presenting a season in our theater. To teach something we've prepared with friends on the stage to other friends we don't know who are in front of that stage. To make emotions explode within you and hope they are stored in your mind and heart. To create a sense of family. To connect through images and in a special setting. That's the aspiration of our profession. To tell you stories and offer you personal, artistic, historical, sad or funny images, both comic and always, always, tragic. I believe that if we manage to achieve even a small part of this beautiful dream, we will feel happier. I am convinced that through theater, very strong relationships are created, and that explosion I remember from my childhood and youth is recreated. To create a sense of family among us: that strange and special world that one believes is within can be shared. By doing so, you don't feel alone, not so alone.

After elaborating these proposals and putting them on the calendar, after talking to the artists and promoters of each one, with the producers and technicians, with all the people involved, after measuring the economic difficulties, taking risks, and even after having to set aside some other very interesting proposals with immense sorrow in our hearts, we realize that in almost all of them, there is something profoundly related to family. We wanted to create a family, and we find ourselves talking about family without even actively seeking it, in one way or another, in all the productions.

The Castells family and the Pla-Solina family — whom we will call Travy — speak to us about so many things through their history, making it a way of life and expression. But they are not the only ones, there is also another generation, the people from 'Col·lectiu Pedant a missa i repicant', who, without explicitly familial ties, embrace a life together and a way of living it. About the problems that family ties bring to poor Hamlet, I think there is little to add because we all know them... what will be important is the ironic and sarcastic way of explaining them in this monologue. And there are also family ties present in La Trena, with three women from different parts of the world struggling not to be what is expected of them. But also the story of the family in Filumena Marturano, with its problems on the day of the wedding, its children, its new husband, a story born from the great theater of the De Filippo family (which in turn comes from the Scarpetta family); and also the play that Tennessee Williams wrote with autobiographical echoes, The Glass Menagerie, where siblings battle their mother and an entire generation... two shows where family is at the center of the story, told from the couch in their homes. And even where the season ends, with All Birds, a family that fights against itself and against the terrible history that they and all of humanity have been dragging along since the Second World War, narrated by three generations in conflict, where civilizations blend, cultural heritages, chromosome inheritances, discord between generations, disagreements, and reunions.

We live in a society where people talk to themselves on the street, and we feel more than ever the need to connect to it, even if it's through the actor who speaks alone on stage while seeking an open and free spectator to communicate with.

We hope to have the strength and insight to achieve it, and the joy to attempt it.