SO NOW?
A Basque cottage, isolated by the snow. Two persons, face to face. In their past, a wound, difficult to heal: one of them lost the man he loved in an attack; the other one is the mother of the man who committed that attack. A desiderable solution, a demand of forgiveness, a reason not to forgive… So now? Two persons talk with no censorship, from those words often used as simple pamphlets, to those higher thoughts reached through individual reflection and experience. These two persons´ story is not what we could have foreseen.
CAST Teresa Ibáñez, Iker Ortiz de Zarate
PLAYWRIGHT / DIRECTOR Iker Ortiz de Zarate
LENGTH 90 min
This piece was staged by the first time at the Principal Theatre of Vitoria Gasteiz, on june 2nd 2011
A mother sees how time goes by while her son is in prison, hundreds of kilometres away from their homeland. She fights to get him to fulfill his punishment near home. One man, who could forgive if he listened to his own feelings, obliges himself not to do so, considering he doesn´t have the right to forgive the man who killed the man he loved.
Two human beings, hurt by the acts of others. Two love stories, the brutal collision of two loyalties, of two totally opposite points of view: one fights pushed by emotions, by motherhood; the other one, leaving all emotions deliberately aside, fights and maintains his militancy pushed by his ethical reflection.
A fiction to spread reflection. Can two persons be right and, even so, not reach an agreement?
“So now?”, far from what we could foresee, portrays two persons, each one of them defined by his/her characteristics, abilities, doubts and mistakes, far from any kind of political ideology, so that we can see them as individuals, develop a sense of empathy towards them and, that way, really understand their behavior, their pain, and the difficulty to solve this situation.
"So now?" puts in front of us two persons who talk with no censorship, from the pamphlet easy words to the most delicate ones, dictated by intimate experience. They are not a “typical mother” or a “typical widow”. Their story, which wants to help spread reflection from the stage, is not what we could have foreseen.
… which story is?
So now? is the very first theatre play that, setting the plot in the Basque Country nowadays, portrays the consequences of terrorism in our lives. It was released in 2011, six months before the ETA announced the end of its activity. Since then, it has been staged at the Cervantes Institute of Manhattan, Kupferberg Centre for the Arts of the University of New York, University Ca Foscaria of Venice, New Voices Festival of Paris, Gaia Theatre of Havane, Kompassi Multicultural Center of Kuopio (Finland) or Gran Teatro del Cibao in Santiago de Los Caballeros (Dominican Republic), amongst others.
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