Image of ‘The Giants of the Mountain’. Photograph by Bruno Rascão
The Fernán Gómez Theater. Cultural Center of the Villa, part of the Department of Culture, Tourism, and Sports, extends for one more week the show The Giants of the Mountain, a production based on the latest text by Italian playwright and Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello, which has been a success since its premiere on January 21st. The play will continue until Sunday, March 2nd.
The Giants of the Mountain is an unfinished piece that takes the audience to the limit between fable and reality. César Barló directs six actors and three actresses —Teresa Alonso, Juan Carlos Arráez, Samuel Blanco, Moisés Chic, David Ortega, José Gonçalo Pais, Javi Rodenas, Natalia Rodríguez, and Paula Susavila— playing with the magical realism that Pirandello proposes in this 1937 text, which had not been on stage for almost 50 years.
The production offers another novelty: its staging does not only take place on the stage of the Jardiel Poncela Hall, but involves other spaces of the theater, such as the lobby, so the audience accompanies the actors in this itinerant show.
About The Giants of the Mountain
A company of comedians, led by Countess Ilse, arrives at Scalogna, a place on an island at the foot of the mountain. Cotrone, the Magician, welcomes the company with the hope that they will stay in that mansion full of spirits and ghosts. The comedians, in absolute precariousness, believe they can perform a representation of the Fable of the Changed Son, a previous work by Pirandello that was never staged but serves as the basis for The Giants of the Mountain. They hope to escape misery, but nothing could be further from their expectations.
The magician Cotrone, their host, suggests that dreams live there, those that consciousness sometimes rejects to avoid feeling outside of society. This situation creates conflict within the company. Now they must decide if they want to perform in the world they come from or prefer to stay in this ideal place, where everything seems possible. When they finally decide to present their show to the world of the giants, they suffer as they see how the world of the material and the prosaic no longer communicates with the world of art. And their proposal is rejected by the attending audience.
From there arise the questions posed by The Giants of the Mountain: How can we resist the force of a system that cuts off dreams and imposes established roles on us? Can we create a space in our lives where our desires can be pursued and realized? That is the magic of the text and the basis of this proposal for the audience of the 21st century.
About the company
AlmaViva Teatro presents a daring production that explores how we relate to ‘the other’ and what stance we take in life, engaging in a dialogue with the audience from the most genuine and human perspective. The company arrives at the Fernán Gómez Theater. Cultural Center of the Villa after nearly 20 years of experience. Throughout this time, they have researched little-performed texts, always with a social impact and a staging based on the relationship with the audience, seeking an experience that leaves a lasting impression and conveys a social human perspective through theater.
