The play, titled “La lluvia amarilla” (“The Yellow Rain”) and produced by “Corral de García” Performing Arts Center, is based on the novel of the same name by the Spanish writer Julio Llamazares, published in the mid-1980s. Its protagonist is Andrés, the last inhabitant of Ainielle, a village in the Aragonese Pyrenees, and it is a long monologue in which the character painfully describes the gradual abandonment of the village by its inhabitants until been relegated to the most absolute loneliness. The novel, intensely poetic, is one of the best-known of its author, it had enormous success and numerous editions and with it he anticipated more than twenty five years the problem of “la España vacía” (the empty Spain), which is currently hotly topical.
On the occasion of the performance of the play, the author of the novel, Julio Llamazares, has been invited to visit the city and to hold a meeting with the participants in the reading clubs of the Municipal Library, who have read the book as part of their activities and who will have the opportunity to talk with its author and then enjoy the theatrical adaptation of his work, which will take place at the Alkázar, the municipal theater of Plasencia, at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, May 24.
The members of the Urbact Local Group of the Project “Residents of the Future” have also been invited to this representation. It is a project led by the Croatian city of Šibenik in which Plasencia, together with eight other European cities, is working to prepare action plans to try to stop the loss of population in small and medium-sized cities in Europe and return to the path of growth. Although the situation presented in the play is extreme, the virtual disappearance of a village, it is considered close to the objectives of the project and the experience will serve as a basis to be able to discuss, in future meetings of the Urbact Local Group, on the emotional aspects of population loss.
