VIOLENCIA

The parents of a child killed in a school shootout meet six years after the tragedy with the parents of the shooter, a young man who committed suicide after the event. For 90 minutes, the four parents confront the final stage of mourning their children’s deaths. The plot is from the film Mass, written and directed by American Fran Kranz in 2019, his debut work as a director, which Spaniard Diego Garrido has adapted and directed for the stage, also his theatre debut.

‘When I went to see it at the cinema, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an extremely necessary film,’ states the young man, a precocious talent who started off studying classic guitar, worked his way up to a black belt in karate and a degree in international relations, before diving deep into performing and cinema. Garrido studied cinema in Los Angeles with a Fulbright scholarship in 2018 and 2019, and the following year delved into human rights and race and gender studies in New York to understand ‘how to handle topics related to minorities and politics in audiovisual projects’.

After seeing Mass at the cinema, Garrido contacted Kranz. Within two weeks, they had already swapped several emails and reached an agreement. Kranz then granted him the rights for his film’s first theatre adaptation. At that time, Garrido had come to understand the core of the conflict Americans had with violence and weapons, one of the themes of Mass. ‘But I also saw with the passing of time – he claims – that the underlying problem is not local, but global. It is mental health. Something that the consecutive crises in the West are taking to the limit, especially among young people.’ And that is the crux of VIOLENCIA, a criticism of a system that is destroying our youth and their mental health through discourses of hate on social media and the easy access to arms. Everything is expressed in this four-way conversation, where the parents put their guilt, rage, pain, shock and final forgiveness on the table.

To Garrido, the most important thing in this work ‘is how the characters seek the people who are directly responsible… but end up understanding that sometimes the problem is structural, and that it is meaningless to point the finger at a specific individual, but instead the structure that upholds everyone. How to name it? How to change it? I think that is the dilemma posed to us. And that in a world replete with populism and binary discourses, the most profound and complex reflections may be very healing for viewers.’