Four years ago, Peruvian playwright and director Chela de Ferrari, founder of the renowned La Plaza theater in Lima, heard one of the ushers define himself as an actor. “It was Jaime Cruz, a young man with Down syndrome, who worked with us. After hearing him say that, I invited him over for coffee and immediately after the conversation I wanted to do a Hamlet with him. I saw him clearly with the prince’s crown. And I asked myself: what does theater history’s most famous question, to be or not to be, mean for people who are struggling to find places where they are taken seriously,” De Ferrari recalled over the phone. Shortly after, the wish came true and the resulting show, which has seven other actors with Down syndrome and weaves their personal stories into Shakespeare’s original, achieved such success after its premiere in 2019 that it has now toured Spain for the first time Station in Madrid as part of the regular program of the Centro Dramático Nacional (CDN) from yesterday to Sunday and in July at the Grec de Barcelona, Fresca de Alicante, Mapas de Canarias and Mit de Ribadavia festivals.
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However, De Ferrari emphasizes that in order to achieve this success, many concerns had to be overcome in advance. “Hardly anyone came to the premieres. I understand that there are many preconceived notions about this type of work. But immediately word of mouth spread and the space filled,” he explains. Jaime Cruz, who was involved in the creation process in addition to interpreting the work, also assures over the phone that he always wanted to be an actor and never wavered, even though the rehearsals were “very hard”. And it seems clear that his future is up for grabs: “I want to keep touring around the world. Work in television and film. And off to the Oscars!”
From left to right: Anna Marchessi, Emilio Gavira, Carlota Gaviño (top), Irene Serrano and Natalia Huarte (bottom), in Super Normal. Photo: LUZ SORIA
A decade ago it would have been unthinkable for a Hamlet to aim for an international tour of top-class stages and festivals. Traditionally, theater has been seen as an employment or therapeutic tool for people with disabilities and, in parallel, as a means of increasing their visibility in society, but never with artistic ambitions, let alone commercial expectations. That seems to be changing around the world, including in Spain: without ringing the bell and still light years away from other European countries like Britain or France, it’s fair to say that Spanish performing arts is showing an increasingly porous diversity in both characters and Subjects.
Just look at the billboard these days. In addition to Hamlet by Chela de Ferrari on CDN, the show Els àngels no tenen fills (Angels have no children) premiered last night at the Akadèmia Theater in Barcelona, performed by a mixed cast of actors with and without disabilities. At the invitation of the National Classical Theater Company (CNTC), British actress Sara Beer, who suffered from the same type of scoliosis that suffered King Richard III, asked herself last week. of England suffered in the play Richard III The evil that Shakespeare established in the tragedy he dedicated to that historical figure was fixed for eternity. From tomorrow until July 3rd, the latest show by the famous Yllana Company Comedy Champions will be performed on the Marquina stage in Madrid, also with a mixed cast. And it’s likely that one of next season’s most successful productions will be Easy Reading, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, for which Cristina Morales won the National Prize for Literature in 2019, starring four sisters with intellectual disabilities, who will star Autumn at CDN and spring at Lliure in Barcelona, directed by Alberto San Juan.
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From left to right: Marc Buxaderas, Berta Camps and Andrea Álvarez, in “Els àngels no tenen fills” Sílvia Poch
And the public gets big surprises. One of the phenomena of the ending season was Supernormal, a work by Esther F. Carrodeguas that focuses on the sexuality of people with disabilities, which swept after its premiere last March on CDN with a mixed cast and directed by Inaki Rikarte. Not even the author herself expected that. “I’ve been into theater for a number of years and I’ve never had such a response from the public as Supernormal. After each performance, I always received messages from viewers on my social networks thanking me. Some for opening a new window on the world. Others who already knew this window to make it visible. And others were just shocked because they couldn’t imagine that they could have so much fun on a show with those qualities,” Carrodeguas recalled in a phone conversation with EL PAÍS.
The work in question is a hooligan comedy with a character devoted to sexually assisting people with disabilities, leading the playwright to turn the magnifying glass on various issues: from rape to the paternalism with which they are treated in this one Senses, which in many cases leads to forced sterilization. All of this unfolds with a large dose of black humor and deliberate political incorrectness, breaking down taboos and hackneyed thoughts on the subject. Possibly the impact the audience felt upon watching the performance was similar to that experienced by the author herself a decade ago, as she began to delve into the universe of disability when she was invited to give drama workshops for the group: “I was amazed at how little I knew. And I found their stories as theatrical raw material just as interesting as those of people without disabilities. Or even more shocking, because they are universally ignored realities. Approaching this work, the first thing I imposed on myself, of course, was not to be paternalistic and just work as I would with any other production,” says Carrodeguas. The same attitude is perceived behind the staging staged by Rikarte. Perhaps therein lies much of the congregation’s success.
Actress Sara Beer in Richard III Redux. Photo: panoptical photography
One of the performers of Supernormales was Anna Marchesi, a Catalan actress with cerebral palsy who is also a screenwriter and has worked on the television series Amar es para siempre and Luimelia. And not only is she one of those chosen to cast the adaptation of Easy Reading, which will premiere on CDN in the fall, but she will also take part in the series inspired by the same novel, which will air soon the Movistar Plus+ platform, entitled Easy. Interestingly, he doesn’t play the same role in both versions, which dispels the notion that an actor with a disability can only play characters with the same condition. “As one of the protagonists of Supernormal already said: the most important thing to advance here is not that there is a blind Ofelia, but that a blind woman can play Ofelia without her blindness being a representative feature of the character,” emphasizes Marchesi .
According to Marchesi, this big leap has not yet taken place in Spain. “We’ve come a long way with the presence of characters and actors with disabilities in fiction. This has led to many people both inside and outside the group having more and more references and realizing that it can be done. This happened to me when I was a teenager watching El Langui in the movie El Trick del Manco. But there is one more step to be taken: that disability is not a plot generator and does not allow it to flow into the arguments either,” says the interpreter and screenwriter.
Gloria Ramos, in Masters of Comedy.
But the progress that Marchesi acknowledges is evident, and initiatives such as the festival A Different View of the CDN, which ran from 2013 to 2019 and from which come successes such as Cáscaras empty, a work by Laila Ripoll and Magda Labarga, sent to the Mass murder commemorates people with disabilities committed by the National Socialists in the so-called T4 operation. Equally important was the success of the film Champions, which is where Yllana’s comedy show Champions comes from, starring some of the actors from that film. Without forgetting the important contribution of the Special Stages project, launched in 2006 by the Catalan playwright and director Claudia Cedò, both school and production producer, who over the years has demolished many prejudices about the artistic possibilities of inclusive theatre has , in addition to creating a pool of professional interpreters with very different characteristics.
One of the shows that came out of this project is the very one that premiered last night at the Akadèmia in Barcelona, Els àngels no tenen fills, which in turn comes from another for which tickets were sold last season at the National Theater of Catalonia were sold out. Mare de sucre (Sugar Mother), which addressed the right of women with disabilities to be mothers. Cedò interviewed so many people to write this work that he decided to make a new one with everything he had left in the inkwell, as a kind of making-off of the first one. The success of this proposal, the subject of which at first seems very inferior, is easily explained by the author: “The protagonist is a girl with a disability who wants to become a mother, but this is a feeling that many people can identify with because it is universal is. And that’s what we focus on, because that’s where the theatrics come from.”
Cedò also notes a great progress in recent years in terms of representing new and varied realities on Spanish stages, in parallel with a progressive awareness of the spectators. And he is optimistic: “Let’s say the topic is out of the drawer, although there is still a long way to go. That at some point an actor in a wheelchair can play roles where that doesn’t matter.”
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