Three Comedies: Behind the Scenes in Eden, Rigmaroles, and The Other William

Introduction/ Jaime Salom: A Life in Theater

FOR MORE THAN FOUR DECADES, popular and critical acclaim has regularly accompanied the singular dramatic output of Jaime Salom. This retired ophthalmologist from Catalonia, an esteemed elder statesman of Madrid’s theater world,has remained a steady countervailing force to the momentary tyranny of fleeting artistic vogues and continues to be one of Spain’s most successful playwrights . Salom’s sprawling oeuvre defies ready summary even as the confounding diversity of his forty-plus plays grows more complex with each new work produced.This remarkably varied collection repeatedly resists authoritative discussion of “typical” subject matters,“usual” modes of expression, or “characteristic ” techniques. Over the course of his career, Salom has been the winner of the coveted National Literature Prize and was twice awarded the Espectador y la Crítica Prize for the best play of the year staged in Madrid. It is difficult not to marvel at the succession of prestigious theatrical honors his work has won:the Crítica de Barcelona (twice), Fraga, Bravo, Fastenrath, Álvarez Quintero, and Espinosa y Cortina Prizes, the last three awarded by the Spanish Royal Academy . Salom’s artistic production has not been limited to dramatic genres; he is also the author of two novels, scores of essays, television scripts, and adaptations Introduction JAIME SALOM: A LIFE IN THEATER I N T R O D U C T I O N 2 of both Max Frisch’s Die Chinesische Mauer and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. Remarkably, given the trajectory of his distinguished career, it is still too early to speculate about Salom’s permanent place in Spanish literary history, as the author, born in Barcelona on Christmas Day, 1925, remains as active a dramatist as ever. He has premiered, at the pace characteristic of his sustained productivity , five plays over the last seven years. The far-reaching cultural tragedy of twentieth-century Spain remains the devastation unleashed on artistic production under the repressive Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) following the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Salom was not yet a teenager at the outbreak of what would be his nation’s defining modern conflict, a vengeful, punishing war that, by some estimates, claimed the lives of a million Spaniards and would leave its bloody imprint on the country’s psyche for decades. Within this historical context, Salom’s dramatic activity predictably reflects the various shifts in intellectual climate vis-à-vis the flourishing of the arts and receptivity to new ideas.An early spate of rather conventional “morality plays” met no resistance from hard-line authorities. However, once Salom undertook to write plays of more immediate sociopolitical relevance at the waning of the Franco regime, he did encounter increased hostility from critics and some unwanted attention from official precincts. Censors predictably kept their eyes on Salom’s developing interest in historical drama. Both the theatergoing public and the authorities noticed the growth in Salom’s personal perspective on the nature of existence to accommodate the human desire for greater individual freedom and self-determination. In light of this evolution of tolerance and sympathy,the author came to be embraced not so much as the playwright of conscientious objection to autocratic rule as something less political and therefore more enduring.Today, Jaime Salom is best characterized as one of the leading dramatic figures to play out onstage the messy moral quandaries of what it means to lead a good life in Francoist and democratic Spain. Salom’s reputation to date remains that of a dramatist not given to easy moral dicta, a writer profoundly engaged with the confusing philosophical intricacies of everyday existence. Salom’s achievements as one of Spain’s foremost contemporary playwrights, flowering as they did at a critical moment in his nation’s history, have garnered him his share of international renown. Besides the numerous stagings of his plays throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, a number of Salom’s works have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, German,Arabic, Romanian , Flemish, Slovak, and Catalan.Two of his plays, in fact—the early sainete- I N T R O D U C T I O N 3 like La gran aventura [The Big Adventure] (1961) and La lluna de Valencia [The Moon OverValencia] (1992), a musical version of El señor de las patrañas (Rigmaroles ) (1990)—were originally written in the language of his native Catalonia. Later in 1990 his play Las Casas, una hoguera al amanecer (Bonfire at Dawn) would...