A plan for Venezuela, honest and demanding

Venezuela is the paradigm of theoretically rich South American states subjected to historical political disjunctions between left-wing spaces that, wrapped in the flags of revolution, promise and do not deliver, and right-wing spaces abducted by the rules of maximum profit that promise and also do not deliver, between the defense of identity —they call it patriotism— and selling out to the highest bidder. Today's Venezuela is the Venezuela between, on the one hand, the inoperative and incapable Chavista dictatorship sold to the American mafia by the executors of utopia and, on the other, the siren songs of an opposition led by a candidate who trusted the same gang that doesn't even let her return to her country.

A schizophrenia that particularly affects the eight million Venezuelans displaced around the world. A schizophrenia that the Catalan playwright Enric Nolla, born and educated in Caracas, has poured into an intense and powerful impromptu that exposes without taking sides, that asks who the toad is, and that appeals to the sense of belonging to the community.

The proposal takes the title from a popular Mexican saying and is articulated as an exercise in autofiction in the voice and body of Dailyn Valdivieso, a telenovela actress in Caracas and now a student at the Institut del Teatre. And what an actress! Valdivieso navigates through pain and joy, through love and death, illuminates herself and dims, questions Caribbean female archetypes, reclaims another femininity, dances, and sings.

It must be said that Nolla's directorial debut is surprisingly demanding and poignant, achieving the movements of this kind of score of emotions with absolute effectiveness. Honest to the end, the author acknowledges that the play is not finished after the country's latest tragedy. He makes a record of it. A record of the thousands of deaths, of the thousands of victims who suffer and will suffer. Theatrically, it is a proposal that asks to reach a larger audience. An audience that will surely enjoy it like the sixty or so people who applauded enthusiastically on the rooftop of the Fundació Joia, which lent its terrace for this unique activity by the promoter Terrats en Cultura. Bravo!