Pere Arquillué directs 'Grand Canyon,' a show about lost dreams.

BarcelonaThe playwright Sergi Pompermayer (Barcelona, ​​​​1967) began writing the American Trilogy after fulfilling a dream: to travel a section of Route 66 in the United States with his partner, actress Mireia Aixalà, and reach the Grand Canyon. There, the idea of creating three plays rooted in Catalonia, but with the colonial past as a backdrop, was born. The first to premiere was America, about the fall from grace of a bourgeois family and its links to slavery, and now comes Grand Canyon, which I had actually written before. Directed by Pere Arquillué, the production is part of the Grec festival and will be at La Villarroel from this Sunday until August 3.

The spark of Grand Canyon It's a conversation Pompermayer had with the guide, a Navajo Indian, during the visit to that place so representative of the United States. "He explained to us that in 1680, an alliance of Navajos and Hopis revolted against the colonizers, killed 400 and expelled up to 2,000 from their lands. That's where the idea of trying to tell this story came from, in order to understand myself, my family, and my country." In the script, Pompermayer places a couple (played by Joan Carreras and Mireia Aixalà) with a daughter (Maria Morera) living in a small town where everyone knows each other. The mother is in charge of a supermarket; the father, Pedro, fixes things on farms and houses and has a somewhat demented assistant (Guillem Balart). The cast of characters is completed by a bar owner (Eduard Buch) and an immigrant prostitute (Mar Pawlowsky).

Pompermayer explains that, on this occasion, the protagonist's family is lower class to connect directly with their origins. "My father was an immigrant; I come from a very poor working-class family. My grandfather acted as my father, and he inspired the character of Pedro," notes the playwright, who adds that Grand Canyon wants to be "a tribute to people with no education, with nothing, with a lot of love but who didn't know how to manage it." Pedro is the protagonist of the story, a man trapped in the endogamous web of the town who, suddenly, collides with the lost dreams of his childhood and youth. "As a child, I absorbed that rage and dissatisfaction of wanting to change the world and the impossibility of doing so. I wanted to reflect how, for people in my class and perhaps for others as well, the system and the powers that be make us believe in dreams but at the same time do everything possible because we don't achieve them," Pompermayer emphasizes.

Characters on the Tightrope

The production speaks of lost dreams, but also of how far we are willing to go to recover them, and it does so by placing the characters on a tightrope, making them move between drama and comedy. "In this show, dream and reality, individual and collective sacrifice, the awareness of death through what it means to live, and also love, both carnal and other kinds, circulate. It's a story about self-redemption and, at the same time, as a society," Arquillué summarizes. The staging transitions between "a more realistic theater" and "other theatrical codes that lead us toward play," says the director, who also highlights the character of the prostitute as the magical element of the performance. "She is a fallen angel, someone who travels through nature and lives in a place where lies don't exist," he explains. "Her story takes us to the roundabouts on the outskirts of towns, where special things happen."