LThe Young Lady of Trevélez by Carlos Arniches, considered his masterpiece, is the play chosen to begin this new phase at the helm of the Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa theater. I believe it is the mission of a public theater to revisit our fundamental authors; only then will we ensure that the public, and especially the new generations, understand and enjoy our theatrical repertoire.
Possibly contributing to this decision was my having already ventured into Arniches’s tragicomic territory. In the 1990s, I had the opportunity to stage He’s My Man and The Madness of Don Juan. I have reread all of Arniches’s plays, wondering which one offered the most potential for a 21st-century staging, the one that most connected with our society, and, without a doubt, it could only be The Young Lady of Trevélez. It was the play that truly moved me and also amused me (there’s no need to be afraid of this word). Like Valle-Inclán, though in his own way, with the comic relief of his arm, Arniches holds a distorting mirror up to Spanish reality and turns the Trevélez family into a grotesque tragedy. This is the story of a cruel joke played by some dilettante and idle young men on a woman.
Synopsis:
In Villanea, a small provincial town, a group of idle young men decide to play a cruel joke on Doña Florita, the least attractive woman in the community, making her believe that the young stranger Numeriano is madly in love with her. The joke is successful at first, but once set in motion, there’s no stopping it, and it heads toward catastrophe; especially because her brother, Don Gonzalo, a man of Herculean physique and choleric temperament, is one of Villanea’s most powerful citizens and is willing to do absolutely anything to ensure Florita achieves the happiness she deserves…