'A tancat menu': Do men never cry?

At the beginning of the play, one of the characters blurts out: "Lamine Yamal and Raphinha were spectacular." They're three men, and they talk about football, but the play isn't about football at all, but about men. It's about three men who are lifelong friends, who meet for lunch every two months in the kitchen of one of their two-star restaurants, which closes down so they can have some quiet time. Because what do men talk about when they're alone?

This is one of the many questions that arise in Jordi Casanovas's play Un menú tancat, which arrives at La Villarroel after 40 performances throughout Catalonia. Llàtzer Garcia directs these three friends, played by Roger Coma, Òscar Muñoz, and Joan Arqué.

“Crying is the last frontier of vulnerability,” says the author, who places three characters in crisis.

Casanovas explains where this text comes from: “After writing Jauría, which shook me as an author and made me question many things about masculinity, I wanted to write this piece, which starts from the question: Why is it so hard for men to cry?”

The author believes that "today, with generations of young people who want to return to the past, this work is very necessary." He adds: "Heterosexual men find it easier to express joy or tears with a football match than with their feelings." That's why one of the characters, the cook played by Arqué, asks them: "How come we've never seen ourselves crying?"

The actor asks himself: "What legitimacy do I have to place them in that position that opens a wound that calls into question their status as friends? How do we manage our vulnerability? In searching for a solution for it, everything ends up going much further," Arqué assures. "In the play, we talk about feminism and we are honest about how we talk about it: it's a very sincere piece. There's no pretense; what is politically correct is very uninteresting, and in theater, conflict is necessary."

Casanovas asserts that “crying is the last frontier of vulnerability.” That's why he places three characters “in a certain personal crisis.” “There's one who tries to adapt, another who doesn't have the tools to adapt, and finally, the cook, who doesn't know what's going on around him.” The play is a dramatic comedy because “behind every joke there's always some truth that isn't so funny.” The playwright explains why a kitchen is the setting: “In Catalan cuisine, there are many successful cooks, but they inherited that from their mothers. And a kitchen is a place of intimacy.”

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On this occasion, it's not the author who directs, but Garcia who has taken the reins, with the assistant director Maria Salarich, a necessary female vision, the artistic team agrees, because, according to Tania Brenlle, director of La Villarroel, "talking about men's feelings is like an oxymoron."

"It's a comedy that touches on places that sometimes aren't so funny, and there are moments when the characters open up and share their feelings, or try to, which is a way of opening up," says Garcia, who asserts that "some men, when they saw it, didn't know what to make of this play, didn't know where to place themselves."

Regarding the masculinity of each character, Muñoz states that his “comes with a lot of prior work, because he doesn't know if he's done it for himself or to please someone else.” While Coma's “masculinity was built in the 1980s, he's very comfortable and sees no need to move from where he is.”