Paco Bezerra, three years after the censorship of his work on Saint Teresa: "I don't feel defeated, I'm renewed."

The Comédie-Française , the most prestigious theatrical institution in France, will host this Monday the dramatized reading of Muero Porque No Muero (La Vida Doble de Teresa) , the work written by the playwright Paco Bezerra (Almería, 47 years old) that was censored by the Popular Party three years ago , when it was removed from the programming designed by the then artistic director of the Teatros del Canal, Blanca Li.

The reading will be led by actress Françoise Gillard, with dramaturgy and staging by director Aristeo Tordesillas on the stage of the Vieux Colombier Theatre. “I've never been to that theater. It's a place I never thought I'd be able to go, but I think it puts the play where it deserves, gives it the value it deserves, and removes all the patina of a work that could have been written with provocative intent without any artistic quality. That doubt, for those who haven't read it, is completely dispelled by the significance of La Comédie-Française, and I also believe it's a slap in the face to Spain, where no one is willing to perform it,” Bezerra reflects in an interview with this newspaper last Wednesday. La Comédie-Française schedules the reading of three texts every year in the Foreign Writings series. Paco Bezerra, Chinese author Pat To Yan, and Russian author Natalia Lizorkina have been chosen for this season, which closes on Monday.

This reading at the temple of French theatre is the culmination of three years of painful professional and personal hardship suffered by Paco Bezerra, winner of the 2009 National Prize for Dramatic Literature for Inside the Earth . It all began in July 2022 when the playwright received a call from the management of the Teatros del Canal, a centre that depends on the Community of Madrid, governed by the Popular Party, announcing that his play Muero Porque No Muero would not be programmed in the 22/23 season, as the centre's artistic director Blanca Li had assured him, citing a lack of budget.

The play is a monologue in which Teresa of Jesus is resurrected and returns to present-day Spain, where she is forced to reassemble her body, linking all the dismembered pieces scattered around the world, more than 500 years after her death. The play, which received the SGAE Jardiel Poncela Theatre Award in November 2021, was to be directed by Matías Umpiérrez and performed by Belén Cuesta. The decision to withdraw "Muero Porque No Muero " was made by the Madrid Board of Directors for Culture and Tourism, in a meeting attended by Blanca Li, among others, and Marta Rivera de la Cruz, the then Minister of Culture, and now the Madrid City Council's Delegate for Culture, Tourism, and Sport.

In theater, there is a discourse full of concepts like solidarity, honesty, and commitment, but in practice, it is absolutely the opposite.

Paco Bezerra

Almost three years have passed since then, and Paco Bezerra confesses to feeling renewed. “I don't feel defeated; I feel renewed thanks to cinema,” he asserts, albeit with a somewhat bitter aftertaste. He doesn't want to play the victim or complain too much, but the reality is that the theater industry, both public and private, has turned its back on him. Since the censorship of I Die Because I Don't Die , he hasn't received any offers from any theater in Spain, he hasn't premiered a single performance, and he hasn't written a single play. His first performed work—“for which the public paid their ticket”—was in 2011 with the premiere of The School of Disobedience , directed by Luis Luque, currently the director of Nave 10 del Matadero , which is run by the Madrid City Council.

This production was followed a year later by Grooming, which premiered at the Teatro de la Abadía in Madrid, under the direction of José Luis Gómez and starring Antonio de la Torre and Nausicaa Bonnín. Since then, every year, Paco Bezerra has seen how, season after season, his texts ( Mr. Ye Loved Dragons, The Little Pony, Phaedra's Heart, The Maids or Oedipus Through the Flames , among others) have a place in the programming of major public and private theaters, from the National Drama Center, the Teatro Español, Las Naves del Matadero, as well as the Mérida International Classical Theater Festival and theaters around the world.

But that ended in July 2022. “Life goes on, people forget, and many of those with whom you had a professional relationship begin to drift away. My life is nothing like the one I had back then,” says Bezerra, who formed a very solid professional partnership with playwright Luis Luque, with whom she premiered a total of nine productions, the latest being Oedipus, Through the Flames , which was on tour at the time. “This goes to show that in theater, there is a discourse full of concepts like solidarity, honesty, and commitment, and that, in practice, it is absolutely the opposite. In theater, and specifically in Madrid, a discourse is sold that is then never put into practice. And I say this with all the pain and disappointment in the world, and also with all the experience, because I am seeing it with my own eyes. It is an absolutely hypocritical discourse, used only to make money. In Madrid, theater is in the hands of politicians. There is no theatrical independence in Madrid. I am stupefied to see how part of the theater profession, many of them friends and people I admired, have taken a backseat to my censorship case,” laments Paco Bezerra, who has seen, however, how actresses such as Nathalie Poza, Ana Belén, Gloria Muñoz, María León, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón , Julieta Serrano, and others have lent their voices and their commitment to the dramatized readings that have been performed in Madrid. several Spanish cities and some foreign ones.

Pedro Almodóvar already said this at the first session of these readings, held at the Sala Berlanga in Madrid in November 2022. “I never imagined I would attend an event against censorship today,” the filmmaker said.

The audiovisual sector is precisely where Bezerra has found professional salvation. He wrote the fifth episode of the Netflix series Superstar , which premieres in July. It was produced by Los Javis (Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi) and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. He is also in the process of writing the script for a film project by actor Pedro Alonso, in addition to other important commissions yet to be finalized. “I live today thanks to cinema. I've lost the desire to write plays. I don't want to continue working in such a hypocritical place,” confesses this playwright who, despite everything, maintains his artistic commitment. “We don't know all the good that comes with the bad that happens to us.”