‘Siempreviva’, Don DeLillo in the face of death

“Like the author, I’m fascinated by death,” Salva Bolta warns El Cultural with transparent honesty. The ‘author’ he refers to is none other than Don DeLillo. He does so because next Thursday, 28, he will premiere an adaptation of his work at the Naves del Español Love-Lies-Bleeding, which in the compilation of the North American writer’s theater released by Seix Barral in 2011 was translated as Blood of love deceived. Bolta’s montage is titled, however, Siempreviva. “It is one of the popular names by which the flower referred to in the original title is known”, clarifies the Valencian chameleon from the regista, who left such a good taste in his mouth just over a year ago with My italian movie at the Spanish Theater.

Now he enters openly into the thorny moral debate of euthanasia (‘good death’). Three characters are grouped around the bed of Alex Macklin, a successful artist who at age 70 is lying in a vegetative state. They are his current young wife, his ex-wife and his son. All three agree that if he could express his will, Macklin would decide to put an end to that sterile existence. But the dilemma uncovers between these disenchanted beings quarrels that have to do with emotional dependence, loyalty and, ultimately, with love. “DeLillo writes Always alive to offer us the possibility of looking into the real trenches, to the places of friction where those binary positions are diluted to which contemporary society educates us, ”says Bolta.

In any case, he clarifies that the work is not about a clash between two opposing views: euthanasia yes / euthanasia no. “The most interesting thing about this function is that this issue, which we deal with in relative terms, approaching it from legal, ethical, political or religious aspects, is here something ‘real’, something concrete, that happens in the lives of people and not in places of discussion ”, he specifies.

Those in charge of capturing it on stage are Paco Azorín and Alessandro Arcangeli, who take DeLillo’s spatial dimension as a starting point: “A remote region between Arizona and New Mexico”. There, some dialogues take place, started by Felipe García Vélez, Mélida Molina, Marina Salas and Carlos Troya in which clear echoes of Pinter resonate. “Like him, DeLillo uses an enigmatic and disturbing prose, a steely sense of humor, a desire to harbor things that language itself is not capable of communicating, ideas that are impossible to articulate, and spaces for the silence of the characters that avoid addressing significant issues and fundamental, that avoid trying ”.

@ alberojeda77

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