In August 1985, Carmen Martín Gaite traveled to New York, invited by Vassar College in the nearby city of Poughkeepsie. Just four months earlier, his daughter, Marta, had died of AIDS at just 29 years old. Before starting classes, … He spent a few weeks in the Big Apple, and that was where his novel was conceived.Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattanpublished in 1990.
In 2009, the playwright Lucia Miranda (Valladolid, 1982) traveled to New York to study at the same Vassar College. He lived there for three years, and there the need to bring ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’ to the theater arose. «I had read the novel – says the author and director – when I was eleven or twelve years old. My mother gave it to me at a Book Fair. I liked it so much that the following year I went to the fair again with him and Carmen Martin Gaite he signed it for me; In the dedication he wrote: ‘Happy re-reading and loss for Manhattan.’ And that’s what I did, reread it and get lost in Manhattan.
«’Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’ gave me the desire to travel, increased my desire to read and fueled my imagination about what it would be like to live in a city like New York, where in a single day you can meet a millionaire and a beggar, as he passes to Sara Allen, the protagonist of the novel. The playwright discovers that Carmen Martín Gaite traveled to New York with a notebook that her daughter, already sick, had given her and that she had never used. She put it in her suitcase to accompany her on that trip. In that notebook he began to write ‘Little Red Riding Hood…’ When I arrived at the Vassar College Everyone told me about Carmen and they told me about the intrastory of the novel. One day, while we were reading ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’ in class, I discovered that one of my students knew a lot about the history of the book; He knew things that I didn’t know. And when I asked him where he had read all that he tells me, he told me: ‘Nowhere; I am Sara Allen.’ And she told me that she was the daughter of the English translator of Martín Gaite’s works and that the character was named Sara after her.
«I have wanted to do ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’ for the stage since I started doing theater – confesses Lucía Miranda -. And even more so since I left New York twelve years ago, and even more so since I became the mother of a girl, three years ago. That’s why when Juan Mayorga offered him the Abbey Theater For him to start a project, he didn’t hesitate: it would be ‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan’. Today it premieres on this stage, where it will be until February 24 performed by Mamen García, Miriam Montilla, Carmen Navarro, Carolina Yuste -On February 8 he will replace him Bald Sea– and the double bassist Marcel Mihok. The artistic team is made up of Alessio Meloni (set design and props), Anna Tusell (costumes), Pedro Yagüe (lighting) and Nacho Bilbao (music). The latter assures that the music of the performance should not be about Manhattan, but about Carmen in Manhattan; «and panaderas, jotas, Galician songs…»
‘Little Red Riding Hood in Manhattan,’ says Lucía Miranda, «tells the story of Sara Allena girl who lives in Brooklyn and dreams of Manhattan. One day he runs away from home to visit his grandmother, a former music hall singer, and gets lost in a timeless journey through diners, movie sets and Central Park. On her journey she meets a millionaire pastry chef and an ageless beggar, and with both she will share two secrets that will help her find her way to freedom.
“I want to do this play,” the playwright continues, “because like Gaite, ‘I would never want to leave New York,’ and it is my way of continuing there.” He says of the work that “it is a story about the children we were and the grandparents we will be. About freedom and loneliness, and the loneliness of exercising your freedom. About what New York is, as an example of the adventure into the uncertain. And about the journey: that of Carmen Martín Gaite, that of Sara Allen, mine, that of all of us who one day decided to leave the known to live the adventure of being ourselves.
Carrying out the fantastic universe that Carmen Martín Gaite created in the novel has not been an easy task, Lucía Miranda acknowledges. «I have had a terrible time; I did not study playwriting, I write from intuition and from a person who has been in the theater since a very young age, but facing the version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ has been very difficult. Many characters, many spaces… I have tried be faithful to Carmen and be true to myself; I wanted it to not exceed an hour and a half and to be able to accommodate a children’s, youth, and adult audience… Whether I was right or not, the public has to say.
#Red #Riding #Hood #Manhattan #Carmen #Martín #Gaite #walks #York
