A show about life after an unexpected death

BarcelonaThere are two great creative engines that keep appearing in the works of playwright and director Llàtzer Garcia: siblings and death. Regarding the former, they had appeared in other shows by the creator such as La pols (2014), which at the same time explored the loss of a father. And he had also spoken about death in Al final, les visions (2022). Now Garcia approaches the two themes from a different perspective: the occurrence of an unexpected accident that turns the lives of three more or less united sisters into a tragedy. The show is titled Grans bardisses and last year it won the Quim Masó prize. After cancelling its premiere at the last Grec festival, on October 11th it arrives at the Teatre de Salt, within the Temporada Alta festival, and from February 25th it will be seen at the Teatre Lliure.

"It is a daily-life play until a catastrophic accident occurs and everything changes. They try to reposition themselves as best they can, but they realize that emotions are uncontrollable and that they cannot share their pain," explains the playwright. The three sisters—played by Anna Alarcón, Clàudia Benito, and Maria Casellas—come from a dysfunctional family and among themselves they try to stick together and support each other, even though life does not make it easy for them. "They are three terribly different women who, together, know how to move forward," says Garcia, who adds that the seed of the show is a loss he experienced three years ago.

To maintain their bond, every year for Sant Jordi the protagonists meet in a kind of mountain refuge that their father tried to build without success. "How do you interpret someone's death due to a tragic and abrupt accident? It is a play of very intense emotions, with a fragile balance. We have tried to keep everything very contained and for the emotions to come out accidentally," points out Alarcón. From her point of view, although death marks the entire show, it is a story "about a very beautiful will to live that the protagonists have." In this sense, Garcia stresses that the text contains humor and that he has sought to express himself through fiction "without making a serious play, but rather a light one."

Apart from the three sisters, there is a fourth character absent from the stage but very present in the story, the protagonists' mother. "She is a woman who has never wanted to face her responsibility, an addict to the Hollywood of Judy Garland who has fled from the present through fiction," describes the playwright. This character will have a strong influence on the sisters' existences and, even, "she will be invoked at the end and will take on great importance," says Garcia.

Boost for the country's authors

The performances of Grans bardisses overlap with other Temporada Alta projects to promote local authors. One of the most established, already turned into a classic, is the 16th Catalan Dramaturgy Tournament, which will kick off on October 5th. This year, Àfrica Alonso, Elena Santiago, Elisenda Coll, Miquel Ferrer, Pau Vinyals, Roser Vilajosana, Tomàs Verdú, and Xavi Morató will compete. As always, the texts will be presented without revealing their authorship—performed by professional actors and actresses—and, after each bout, the audience will decide which proposal moves on to the next round. Another one of the festival's proposals is the Llibràlegs cycle, which brings dramatized readings to libraries in Girona. On this occasion, the pieces will be by Marta Aran, Marta Buchaca, Pere Riera, and Joan Yago and will be performed and directed by Meritxell Yanes and David Marcé.