MIAMI.- The work rgia written and directed by Roco Hoces and Julia Moyano represented by spainopened the 38th edition of the International Festival of theater Hispanic from Miami, giving the public a show that was well conceived in its general structure, although unnecessarily feminist and androphobic.
The text and staging are based on testimonies and real events that occurred in the infamous Miraflores mental hospital, in Sevillaa center where (it is narrated) women were admitted for various reasons, even as young as 7 years old, and many died there.
The play is a dynamic, modern stage ensemble, with great support from multimedia, which manages to create an overwhelming atmosphere, in which a group of five social workers who worked as caregivers in the psychiatric hospital, tell their lives and what they experienced there. These same women double as the inmates, achieving a successful theatrical game.
During the hour-long performance, the group of actresses combines their lines, setting the tone for the play, while executing several successful choreographies that give plasticity and mobility to the show. The scene where a hundred medicines fall to the floor, while they naturally recount different episodes, is very successful.
Another successful moment occurs when each actress, playing a sick person, moves around the stage followed by a video camera, which is projected onto the screen covering the entire scene. In general, the choreographies are successful.
rgia It seeks to be provocative from the title itself, since the viewer reads it as an orgy, and it very well could be, an orgy of blood, abuse, pain, mistreatment and generalized excesses.
The text launches gratuitous attacks on men. However, it says that the nuns who ran the psychiatric hospital were cruel and inhuman, and the workers are also described as women in charge, so that the good and bad that took place there were the responsibility of women. It is necessary to point out that there are psychiatric centers for men, where the same horrors also occur, based on the same premises.
Regardless of the feminist approach, the proposal of the Spanish company La rara carries a message of social protest, a cry for no more, a demand for dignity for the sick confined in mental hospitals. That is why the successful ending, when the Salta la Tapia Festival takes place, which marked the closing of this Seville institution.
The work of the actresses is projected with simplicity and for a work like rgia It is another contribution. Cristina Almazán, Eloisa Cantón, Eva Gallego, Julia Moyano and Roco Haces develop their characters with fluidity, allowing everything to happen easily, even changing clothes and even nudes in scenes that occur naturally.
Without a doubt, rgia It is a work for a theater festival, it brings together all the elements that separate it from the hackneyed, to achieve a dramatic atmosphere that impresses the public.