A stage, a text, a hundred men and 24 hours of performance ahead. This summarizes the proposal of The second womanthe interpretive marathon that María Hervás faces today (from 6:00 p.m.) at the Teatro Central in Seville. In it, the actress and her successive partners They perform over and over again a scene between a man and a woman in a relationship that has lost its creativity and romance, inspired by the film Opening Night by John Cassavetes. But the final result is unpredictable in each of them, since none of the hundred different Martys has met Virginia before – the character played by Hervás – and most of them are not professional actors. An experience that is also cinematic, as the audience is offered a wide-angle view of the action, while multiple cameras capture and share live close-ups
Of course, before those 24 hours there are 24 hours beforehand in which the protagonist must do a strong concentration exercise. “I am a very diurnal person, and for the first performance we did in Barcelona I tried to change my habits and go to bed later and later. In the end it turned out badly for me, I ended up staying awake for 37 hours,” she recalls. “I am quite capable of leaving fear and nerves aside, but when the time comes to face it, I start to sleep worse, these are things that I cannot control, my meals are disorganized, my body asks for sweeter… ”.
The product of a collaboration between the Grec 2024 Festival of Barcelona and the Teatro Central of Seville, this work directed by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall has the attraction for Hervás of not having done a single rehearsal with any of his eventual companions. “That is the most exciting thing, being there and wondering who that human being is, why he looks at me like that, what his voice is like, his gestures. Find the particularity of each one of them,” he explains. “It is one of the things that investigates The second womanto what extent identity is a fixed thing, or is it a construct that is manufactured in relation to the people in front of you. For me, it is about connecting with unknown people, trying to adapt to what that person is proposing at that moment.”
Listen to your own desire
But the development of montage has allowed María Hervás to also explore hidden areas of herself. “One of the things it has taught me is to connect with my own desire. We women have always been taught to satisfy male desire and cover our own. We have been so obedient since we were children, that when I have wanted to ask myself what I want, I have not been able to give myself an answer. My therapist once asked me, and I said ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, we have to work to be connected with what you want,’ he told me.”
“I can do that in the play, and the directors insisted on it a lot,” she continues. “If you want to laugh, do it, if you want to dance, do it. If you don’t want to, stop. There is something whimsical in all this seen from the outside, but it all starts from listening to one’s own desire. “It is one of the most revolutionary things that can be done on stage.”
Does this imply, in some way, a feminist position? “I think the directors have never mentioned that term, which doesn’t mean it isn’t one,” says Hervás. “But I would first go to humanism, it is a work that greatly affects the connection between human beings. There is our vulnerability, our fear, our joy. It’s more universal, too. It dialogues and questions a lot about the relationship between gender binarism. It very easily allows the viewer to see how anchored we are in our roles. It is not my goal to dismantle it, but I do allow myself to question it from where I am.”
How to eat seeds
After the aforementioned first experience in Barcelona, where “I didn’t expect many things that happened, and I think the public was surprised too,” Hervás is confident that the Seville event will once again be a blank page that will be filled with completely different situations. unexpected. “The level of surprise is so high that there are people who think ‘come on, I’ll see two or three and I’ll leave’, but it’s like eating pipes, you can’t stop. And there are those who end up staying 24 hours a day.”
Finally, when asked if she has any kind of fear about being a woman alone in front of so many men, Hervás recalls a recent survey in which many women were asked: if you were walking alone at night in a forest, would you Who would you rather meet, a man, or a bear? And a high percentage responded that it was a bear. “It is a failure of brotherhood and the understanding that should exist between the sexes,” he says. “But no, I’m not afraid. The difference with the day-to-day life of a woman is that we face that hegemonic masculinity that objectifies us without having chosen it. It appears to us like an emergency situation in a jungle. Here I have chosen everything, consciously, to provide a framework that serves as a mirror to a community, the spectators, and from there we can draw conclusions and reflections of our behaviors.”
“What’s more, I feel enthusiasm,” he concludes. “I am highlighting something so that this community can analyze things for which they do not have time in their daily lives. I feel very supported by the entire team, I take control of the show at all times and, if someone violates me, I remove them from the scene immediately. And people empathize so much with what happens on stage, that if something happened to me I’m sure they would jump to eat whoever alive.”
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