In August 1967, and unknown virus broke out in the German town of Marburg, rapidly killing 23 people. This historical event is the background for the first of four interrelated stories in Guillem Clua’s Marburg. From there, leaping 14 years into the future, the action takes the audience to Lake Marburg, Pennsylvania in 1981, the day Ronald Reagan suffered an assassination attempt and also the day that a conservative Republican family loses its only son. We see another Marburg in South Africa on New Year’s Eve 1999, on the verge of a new millennium, where an alleged miracle is investigated by a priest and defended by an African missionary; and, finally, there is a move to the present in Marburg, Australia, where an online date between a gay meteorologist and a teen-ager will change their lives forever. The action shifts between the four locales and times seamlessly, and each Marburg is linked to another by at least one character. In the closing scene of the play, time differences are totally erased and the four Marburgs become a dramatic whole, as a bell tolls midnight to usher in the new millennium.
Promised Land is a farce on the subject of climate change and the inefficiency of international organizations to stop its terrible consequences. The play is set in the future at the United Nations headquarters in New York City and tells the story of the president and the diplomatic delegation of a fictitious country, Malvati, that is about to sink under the sea. Comedy, melodrama, political intrigue and mythology intertwine to make Promised Land one of Guillem Clua’s more reality-aware plays but also one of his funniest. Although an array of characters appear in the play, the script requires only four actors. Clua has given the roles of the mythological Malvati, one self-satisfied UN official, and some twenty-five delegates from different countries to a single actor. It can only be called an actor’s tour-de-force.
Translation of both plays by Marion Peter Holt.
Although Guillem Clua is one of the most promising voices in a new generation of Catalan playwrights born in the 1970s, he was still considered marginal in his native Barcelona until the critically-acclaimed production of Marburg at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in 2010. The following year his taut and chilling chamber musical Killer, with a score by Xavier Mestres, became a resounding success in Barcelona and has since been staged abroad. In 2011 he completed Promised Land, in which he combines comedy, pungent political satire, and mythology to create a provocative play about the consequences of climate change. His innovative gay comedy Smiley: A Love Story opened in November 2012. It was a critical and popular success, achieving more than 200 performances and winning the Butaca Awards for Best Play, Best Lead Actor, and Best Production. TimeOut-Barcelona named it Best Play of the Year. Clua is best known abroad for his earlier disturbing, political drama Skin in Flames, which has had five productions to date in the United States.
Marion Peter Holt
Marion Peter Holt is a writer and a translator of contemporary Catalan and Spanish theatre. His translations of plays by Buero-Vallejo, López Rubio, Skármeta, and other dramatists have been staged in New York and London, and by regional and university theatres throughout the United States, including the Wilma Theatre, Chicago’s Bailiwick Repertory, the Atlanta Alliance Theatre, and the San Diego Repertory. In June 2010, his translation of Sergi Belbel’s Blood had its Australian premiere at TheatreWorks-Melbourne. His most recent translations are Guillem Clua’s Marburg, which is featured in the spring 2011 issue of TheatreForum, Clua’s provocative farce on climate change, Promised Land, and Clua’s inventive gay love story, Smiley. He is an emeritus professor of Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and has been a visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and Barcelona’s Institut del Teatre.
