"I've been to every country in Latin America, and I hope to die without ever setting foot in the United States."

BarcelonaThe playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra (Valencia, 1940) arrives at the Atrium Hall with his affable demeanor and soft voice, which he combines with principles and projects of a stone cut stone. About to turn 85, this giant of playwriting—a renovator of the theater, founder of the Beckett Room, defender of the literary dimension of dramaturgy, influential pedagogue and putative father of the contemporary Catalan scene— premieres a new show at the Atrium Hall, the monologue Dr. Frankenstein's Creature,from May 20 to June 1, with Ferran Audi as the performer. Furthermore, the author has several titles in the process of being written or pending release, and is engaged in a long-running battle to open the Teatro del Común, a space for training, research, creation, production, and theatrical exhibition in Madrid—where he has lived for almost 30 years, after 25 in Barcelona—once the project for the Teatro del Común failed. New Border Theater, a kind of Beckett II placed in a Lavapiés corset shop. "I have moments when I think we'll do it anyway, and others when I don't. With the minister, there are lots of smiles, but nothing." He hasn't even tried with the People's Party.

In The creature of dr. Frankenstein takes the protagonist of Mary Shelley's novel and rewrites a version crossed with Report for an academy by Franz Kafka. "He's my absolute master, plagiarism whenever I can," he admits. "I thrive on placing myself in the shadow of the great myths of literature and of characters who are not in my everyday, real universe," he explains. So his monster addresses an audience of academics to claim that he wants to belong to the human world, after spending two centuries on the frontier. "Being unique must be pretty tough," the author ventures. "We have the will to belong to something, to a community, to not be different." Of course, to become human, he will have to "pay a toll" and lose freedom, uniqueness, values that capitalism rightly rewards today, when there are great world leaders who want to stop being human and become monsters. "I don't want to talk about Trump, it makes my stomach turn. Many of his behaviors are so outrageously anomalous that I suppose they feed his ego. But it won't last long," he confides.

Curiosity and risk

Theater is his fuel. "I'll be learning until the very last day. I have a somewhat morbid curiosity; I delve into things that are unfamiliar to me," says the author, who is interested in artificial intelligence and is studying Mapuche. After sixty years of experience and classic titles, such as Ñaque or of lice and actors, Oh, Carmela! and The reader for hours, his theater continues to evolve: "Repeating formulas that you know you've mastered is extremely dangerous. This, for me, is the sterilization of the risk that all writing should have. It has its drawbacks, I won't deny it, because I try to make the text demand things from me, and now I have three plays stuck, I'd like to finish them unfinished."

At a time of general disinterest in news and reality, Sanchis maintains faith in theater and literature. He is convinced that it is because of his Latin American compulsion. "I have been to all the countries of Latin America and I hope to die without having to set foot in the United States. Since the Vietnam War and since the American giant crushed Nicaragua and Cuba, which for me were countries that had an aura of hope and possibility, I have absolutely distanced myself fromAmerican way of life", he says.

For the playwright, the theater has been the place to imagine other possible worlds from fiction. Does the theater still have transformative capacity? "It's a question I ask myself every day: does it really serve any purpose? It's immeasurable. We can't know if any of our characters have done or said something that provokes a reaction in a spectator. Naturally, when I write I try to create at least a crack in the fabric of reality, especially the reality that poses itself as the only possible one." In his role as a researcher, he is now systematizing the three areas that can be transgressive: poetry, humor, and delirium. "What does poetry do, from your point of view? How does humor question, break, and relativize the heaviness of language? How does delirium break structures of perception and thought that seem immovable?" asks Sanchis. Some of my teachers, like Clarice Lispector or Leonora Carrington, Kafka, Beckett and Pinter, are characters who had an anomalous psychological structure. And they all had a very present sense of humor," he says. Bertolt Brecht is the one who framed the foundations of his theater (both in form and content: the class struggle) and psychoanalysis gave philosophical and ideological flight to his literature.

Age has not diminished his drive or his ability. of the American where he notes titles, themes and structures that he wants to write or that he wants to try out in a dramaturgy acting laboratory. He reads up to nine titles. Murder on Poplar Hill, which would close his Civil War trilogy, with Oh, Carmela! and Terror and misery in the first Franco regime, and with whom I would like to talk about the dreams of Republican Spain and the "madmen" of Dalí, Lorca, and Buñuel when they lived in the Residencia de Estudiantes, where, after a murder, "the claws of fascism would be seen as it battles Europeanism." He repeats: "I don't know if I'll have time."