Rafael Arozarena's (1923-2009) novel 'Mararía', set in the Lanzarote village of Femés, comes to the theater. On June 29th and 30th, as well as July 1st, it will be performed at the Pérez Galdós Theater in collaboration with Unahoramenos productions, as part of the project called 'Segunda Lectura'.
Arozarena wrote 'Mararía' in Femés, the conejera town located between the volcanic summit of the Atalaya de las Mujeres and the Los Ajaches massif, the oldest mountain in Lanzarote, with about seven million years. In Femés, where the writer was employed at the age of twenty working for the Telefónica company as a technician in the process of installing the antennas in the aforementioned watchtower, he composed this epic and disturbing tale first published in 1973 that has ended up becoming an iconic work of Canarian literature.
The Tenerife writer was inspired by a vision he had one afternoon when he contemplated the silhouette of a nonagenarian old woman with an unsettling gaze whom, at first, he mistook for a young woman. The woman, whom many mistook for a witch, fascinated a twenty-year-old Arozarena in such a way that he then began to inquire among the residents of Femés about details of her intriguing life.
Almost thirty years later, he gathered his notes in the novel with which he was a finalist for the Nadal Prize, although before he had already published the poem 'María la de Femés', contained in a book entitled A la sombra de los cuervos. In that poem, the author pointed out that that woman had "half-moon shoulders, breasts like two Teides and a belly like a dune".
It should be remembered that this year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the first edition of Arozarena's most celebrated work.
The premiere of the theatrical version of 'Mararía la de Femés' directed by Mario Vega will feature the actors Marta Viera and Mingo Ruano, as well as the participation of the singer LAJALADA (Belén Álvarez Doreste), who will perform live the original musical repertoire of the montage whose lyrics have been written by Yeray Rodríguez, also the author of the dramaturgical adaptation of this production that only about 200 spectators per performance will contemplate in an immersive way on the stage of the Pérez Galdós Theater. In the play there will be a constant dialogue between the poetic nature of the text, the music and the audiovisual support. It is very possible that the aforementioned montage will tour some stages in the Canary Islands after being premiered in Gran Canaria.
The verse writer Yeray Rodríguez continues to place Mararía in Femés, as it could not be otherwise. "My name is María and I am from Femés, from the south of the south. I am all the Marías, I have all the names and all the tragedies and I keep under my volcano skin, words that boil, that have no meaning underground," he collects in his dramaturgical version. In this re-reading, Rodríguez, whose outstanding line of research is Canarian literature, gives voice to a Mararía silenced and relegated to oblivion because, according to Arozarena himself, "now because she is old no one remembers who she was." This revisiting of one of the culminating works of our literature is achieved because the story that the author highlights is not only the story of Mararía la de Femés, it is the story of all the Marías, of all those displaced, marginalized and forgotten women.