By Cristina Colmena
It’s complicated.
Life is not a fairy tale, that’s why love is not always a happy ending. The play shows three different couples and their struggle to be happy even when they don’t know how. Sometimes it seems so complicated that you even prefer to keep a distance, and stay
alone instead of taking the risk of falling in love. On the other hand sometimes what should be a happy couple is just only a fake, where people feel even more lonely and scared than living alone. Love and loneliness seems to be the two sides of the same emptiness. Desire and troubles. No clue about how to do it well.
Love and the difficulties of communication between people is something that appears always in my short stories. I started to write this play in New York as a challenge to explore the possibilities of theatre to show how tricky this love thing is. I think that a stage is a kind of lab jar where you can observe human behavior dealing with issues like loneliness, fear and dissatisfaction. Theatre also allows you to look into how the dialogue sometimes can become an obstacle instead of a bridge to connect with the other.
Most of the time everyone of us live in our own bubble, unable to understand other realities. That isolation is a kind of protection but also a wall that separates you from the person who sleeps besides you.
I always use a sour and sweet humor and also a surrealistic look about everyday life. I think that everyone experiences some kind of estrangement about reality that open spaces for reflection about what we call normal. Mixing laughs and feelings of awkwardness make you realize how absurd is life. And love.
Happily Ever After opens on Thursday, March 13, 2014
At Mead Theatre Lab at FLASHPOINT
916 G Street, NW, Washington DC 20001