Tender It's a kind of striptease The emotional space between a couple of artists. "You take up more space," Judit Colomer tells Pau Vinyals. And it's true. He's the table and she's the chair in the living room, we're told. That may or may not be the case in their actual home, but it certainly is in the shared experience of this creative performance they both produced. Perhaps it's because she's a good set designer but a debut actress, while he's a good actor with a notable career. Perhaps it's because she's more emotionally grounded and mature, while he's more playful, outgoing, funny, and likes to bare his soul and show off his underwear. Perhaps it's because, ultimately, he represents the eternally dominant baron who explains how they met without her saying a word, and when she wants to speak, he constantly interrupts her. Perhaps it's because he needs to explain his bisexuality to himself and to us.

On stage, they've placed the dining room table and chair as a symbol of their intimacy—this is where they eat, talk, argue, live—but also as a metaphor for the couple they form. "The conclusion is that we are a table and a chair. A table and a chair, Pau," says Judit Colomer (Torelló, 1991) at one point in the show. Tenderwhich premieres this Thursday at the Sala Beckett. Her stage and travel companion is Pau Vinyals (Ravós del Terri, 1986), and together they have created a play that uses their relationship as a starting point to question the legacies of patriarchy, the way we connect with each other, and the implicit rules in relationships.

American playwright Paula Vogel (Providence, Rhode Island, 1951) arrived at the Sala Beckett this Tuesday with pizza for everyone. "Artists need to eat. For a long time, I was a starving playwright and lived below the poverty line. To create well, you need a full stomach," Vogel states. An established author deeply committed to exposing the cracks in society, the artist is visiting Barcelona for the premiere of one of her most poignant and celebrated works. How I learned to driveIn the Catalan version, the show is directed by Marilia Samper and stars Ivan Benet and Mireia Aixalà. It will run from January 28th to March 1st.

Dirty (2023) has been the major success of the young actress, playwright, and director Bárbara Mestanza. A project born from a traumatic personal experience that became a play, a documentary, and a book. "Sucia" (Dirty) was the catharsis, the angry yet defiant cry of a woman who was abused by a masseur without knowing how to react. In her new work, "Cortarse un pie con una motosierra" (Cutting a Foot with a Chainsaw), Mestanza returns to the theme of sexual abuse against women, focusing not so much on the female victims, though that is also present, but on the so-called cancel culture that socially and personally ostracizes aggressors, whether they are guilty or victims of a pariah.

After many years immersed in autofiction, Bárbara Mestanza (Barcelona, ​​1990) finds herself in the opposite camp. The playwright, director, and actress—creator of shows such as All the flowers (2020), The ugliest woman in the world (2021) and Dirty (2020)—leaves behind montages inspired by personal experience and imagines a story of persecution and cancellation starring Mae, a journalist who led the Me Too movement. Some time later, the accused aggressor attempts suicide, and one of the victims publicly states that she did not want to appear in the article. All of this culminates in a thriller about professional errors, abuse of power and social judgments with Mestanza herself, Rosa Boladeras and Júlia Molins on stage. Cutting off a foot with a chainsaw It premieres this Friday at the Teatre de Salt, as part of Temporada Alta, and will be performed at the Sala Beckett from January 14th to February 8th.

The fight for accessible transportation and public buildings for people with disabilities has been constant. So has the fight to improve their lives. While we can walk normally, we don't appreciate the advantages of unrestricted mobility, but when, due to an accident, our body is confined to a wheelchair, we face life differently. And, it must be said, it's not easy. That's what happened to Amanda's mother while she was cleaning. The daughter is heading to an independent living office to find out how to apply for dependency benefits. There she meets Benito, a man in a wheelchair, a volunteer with the organization who helps those affected.

When Franco died on November 20, 1975, those who celebrated did so at home. "Many of us started on a bottle of cava we'd been keeping in the fridge for months, but the party couldn't happen," recalls Toni Casares, director of the Sala Beckett, who was 10 years old at the time. Fifty years later, the Poblenou theater has organized a celebration-performance in collaboration with writer and director Eduard Olesti and Club Editor. The event is titled Acute renal failureThe event will take place on November 19th, starting at 9:30 p.m., and will be, above all, a joyful and carnival-like gathering with live music, surprising surprises, and texts by Mercè Rodoreda, Blai Bonet, and Joan Sales.

The monster Josep Maria Miró tells us about lives in a small rural community very similar to the one where the multi-award-winning tragedy took place. The most beautiful body ever found on this site(2022) and not far from The housekeeper (2024). In addition to the geographical and mental space (or perhaps because of that very reason), in The monster, as in the aforementioned works, the strange and the incomprehensible become evident within a framework of tense violence.

Next season, the Sala Beckett champions playwriting as an antidote to the malaise of the present. "We live in times of anxiety and a cult of immediacy, drowned by the avalanche of global information, distressed by the apocalyptic feeling. We want to have it all, and ultimately, nothing makes sense," says Sala Beckett director Toni Casares. In this context, the new program aims to "contribute to making text-based theater in Catalan a living language, sufficiently complex and constantly evolving," a "commitment" of the theater that, according to Casares, this year is expressed "with more force and decisiveness than ever."

The 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 The creature of dr. Frankenstein, 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.

Actor Ahmed Tobasi (Jenin, 1984) arrives at the headquarters of the Catalan Association for Peace, laden with four suitcases so bulging that he struggles to get them through the door. It's been five months since the Israeli army attacked the Jenin refugee camp and destroyed his home. Since then, Tobasi has been homeless. "For now, I'm going back around the world and staying where I do my show. My family is all scattered," explains Tobasi, after admitting that he slept little last night, "but much better than in Palestine," where "you can hear the drones 24 hours a day and you never know when a bomb will hit you." The actor is in Catalonia to perform his monologue. And here I am as part of the Incert Festival. He will perform at the Granollers Auditorium (Thursday, May 8), the Teatro Principal in Olot (Friday, May 9), the Sala Beckett (Saturday, May 10 and Sunday, May 11) and the Única in La Seu d'Urgell (Friday, May 16). Tobasi spent his childhood and youth in the Jenin refugee camp and is part of The Freedom Theatre, a community theatre project that has been promoting professional shows with Palestinian companies around the world since 2006. The performer has seen friends and family members die at the hands of the Israeli army. And here I am It's the story of his life told in the first person, because Tobasi is convinced that "it's the best way to show people everything that's happening in Palestine." To construct the text, the actor entrusted himself to playwright Hasan Abdulrazzak and Zoe Lafferty for direction. The show is performed in English with Catalan subtitles and is, according to the actor, "a production about freedom, but not only the freedom of the land, but also of the mind and the individual."

Cristina Clemente (Barcelona, ​​​​1977) is a playwright. She has two plays on the bill, Lapland, at the Teatre Condal, and Women of Radio, at La Villarroel. Both until May 11.

She has lived and lives in the Baix Guinardó neighborhood of Barcelona. "I feel very much from the neighborhood." She went to the Font d'en Fargues school. "It was a pilot school. I did THAT when no one my age was doing it yet." She liked it a lot, "because we didn't call the teacher "Miss" and it was much more modern than other schools."

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Two decades ago, the playwright and director Pau Miró (Barcelona, ​​​​1974) premiered It's raining in Barcelona (2004) in the former Sala Beckett. At that time, Miró's work spoke of "caring for people who come from outside and proudly opening the city to the world," he explains. Now, his view of the Catalan capital has turned upside down. "I felt expelled by the prices, by a city that is increasingly designed for people who only come to consume and who are squeezing Barcelona with economic criteria," explains Miró. This feeling runs through the characters in the work. Expulsion, starring three brothers who meet again after the death of their parents. The show, directed by Toni Casares, can be seen from March 5 to April 6 at the Sala Beckett.

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Sala Beckett has a special history with Bartleby, the scrivener, by Herman Melville (1819-1891). When the theatre was still located in the Gràcia district of Barcelona, it opened in 1989 with a version headed by José Sanchis Sinisterra. Now the story about the clerk's job resignations returns to Beckett with a new adaptation by the playwright and director Llàtzer Garcia based on the translation by Carme Camacho and with the actor Albert Prat at the helm. This artistic tandem has given the form of a monologue to Melville's work and has focused the spotlight on the lawyer who sees how every time he sends a job to his worker, he responds with the phrase: "I would prefer not to do it." The show can be seen until March 9.

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