An Introduction to the World of the Western
When we enter the Sala Flyhard to see Brief introduction to the western ‒ it will be there until June 24‒, three of the performers are already on stage. Before getting into their respective characters, they sing My Rifle, Pony and Me, from the film Rio Bravo (1959), which places us in very specific cultural coordinates. Anna Tantull’s scenography, simple but very well thought out, has a bench, a chair and a stool, all very rustic, in a wood that matches the slats that cover half the wall in saloon style ‒the part upper will act as a screen‒; on the other wall, covered with Western movie posters, five cinema seats are lined up. Joan Yago’s work is not a western, but this genre of film – much to the taste of Llàtzer Garcia, who directs the show – serves contextually to talk about four men who ride alone and without an esma. The evocative setting – on one of the sides there is a bit of dirt and all – will help illuminate some aspects of the interaction.
A Group of Men in Crisis
The action takes place in a time of crisis and cuts. In the hall program, Yago gives the reference of the year 2012, although he finished writing the play in 2016. The suicidal behavior of a desperate citizen due to his extreme precarious situation and the weather in what has the system left him ‒ brings to mind the case of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia ‒ unleashes a solidarity wave of protests among citizens and impacts the lives of four men from the same family. The father, an employee of an Employment Office, was involved: after informing a user that he could not collect the unemployment benefit, he was assaulted; later, he learned that the man had rammed a car into the office. And, although no one blames him or asks for an explanation, he feels in the eye of the hurricane. Pepo Blasco makes a very complete and believable composition of this public servant who, overcome by the situation, goes through states such as disbelief, anger, consternation and helplessness. Behind the hardness of the pose, you can glimpse a fragility of which he is ashamed.
Exploring Fragile Masculinity
The play tenderly and empathetically explores the fragile masculinity of four losers condemned to stand by each other in an inhospitable world. Both father and son find it difficult to leave the house and get involved in the environment. Trapped as they are in anger and inaction, they exchange the most revealing reproaches: each projects on the other what he hates most about himself. To top it all off, uncle Toni visits them from time to time, a depressed man who feels depressed and takes refuge in therapies and various activities to make life a little more bearable. Too dependent on himself, overcome by anxiety, he declares himself unable to help anyone. Oriol Guinart, who plays him, shows us that he is unstable and suspicious, with deep-rooted obsessions, an impotent grudge and a lucidity that no one recognizes.
The Imaginary of the American West
In the text, published in Teatre reunit de Joan Yago (Arola Editors, 2021), each of the scenes has the title of a western, and there is some sort of diffuse relationship between the filmic reference and the vicissitudes or derivation of the characters in the sequence The imaginary of the American West no longer defines these men, but somehow paralyzes them. And it endorses, as an enormously limiting frame of mind, the Manichean polarization between good and bad that still today conditions the reception of fiction and is very powerful on social networks. Projected on the wall of the Flyhard are, among others, fragments of the films The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Wild Group (1969), the photograph of the signing of the treaty of Fort Laramie and the portraits of Tatanka Iyotake and Buffalo Bill.
A Tender and Empathetic Look
The play tenderly and empathetically explores the fragile masculinity of four losers condemned to stand by each other in an inhospitable world. A silent devastation takes over them, a “violence without anger” that is “like cholesterol”. In this sense, the moment when the uncle shares an anecdote and his brother, no matter how hard he tries, doesn’t know how to be genuinely interested in it, is brilliant – in terms of interpretations, especially. The grandfather, after a moment of lucidity ‒“Before we were poor and now we’re in crisis”, sinks back into a mental space that bursts, comically and effectively, into the realistic interaction of others. The reference to the Dance of the Spirits impacts the family gathering and triggers the analogies with the force of a revelation. Is it possible to switch sides? Try to redo the bridges? It’s time for a cowboy to dream…