Micomicón Teatro puts on stage a double victim, of ETA and Francoism, in ‘Our dead’

2024-01-04 23:01:51

They are hot days, above 30 degrees. It is June 2017, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has been excavating and recovering remains from grave number 1 in the Guadalajara cemetery for days. The Argentine magistrate María Servini ordered through the principle of universal justice a new search to find the remains of Ascensión Mendieta’s father, Timoteo, a UGT union member who was murdered four months after the end of the Spanish Civil War.

In those days of excitement and work, Laila Ripoll and Mariano Llorente, from the Micomicón theater company, shared the vicissitudes and emotions of the exhumation with the ARMH technicians and had the opportunity to talk and experience nerves and confessions with Ascensión. “We were writing a previous work, The forest thickens, and we were able to be there, sitting with her while they were removing the earth. I was very impressed by that woman, her tenacity and her humanity. And that was when I started thinking about it, what if this woman had been Basque, and one of her sons had been murdered by ETA due to circumstances? She wouldn’t leave my mind, that’s how this work began to take shape,” Mariano Llorente tells this newspaper about the birth of Our deada work that will premiere on January 18 at the Fourth Wall Room.