Description
The Magician
Book Summary
A play that explores the boundaries between reality and suggestion, stemming from a hypnotic experience. Juan Mayorga, one of the most significant contemporary playwrights, constructs a brief and intense piece where an apparently innocent magic act triggers a profound transformation in the protagonist. The reader will find a theatrical text that delves into the fragility of identity and the power of fiction to reconfigure reality.
What is it about?
The action takes place inside a house. Nadia returns from the theater and finds her husband and daughter preparing dinner. During the performance, Nadia participated in a hypnosis session led by an unknown magician, who seemed awkward and harmless. In the trance, the Magician made her fly over the city rooftops. What initially seems like a parlor game turns unsettling: Nadia has returned transformed. The play unfolds within the domestic space, where the extraordinary breaks into everyday life and challenges the characters' certainties. Mayorga draws on a personal anecdote—he himself volunteered for a hypnosis experiment and was rejected—to construct a fiction that examines how suggestion can alter the perception of oneself and others.
Main Themes
- Identity and its fragility in the face of suggestion.
- The transformative power of fiction and theater.
- The relationship between the real and the imagined.
- Family dynamics in the face of the extraordinary.
- Control and the loss of control over one's own experience.
Who is it recommended for?
For readers interested in contemporary theater, especially short plays with high symbolic density. Also for those seeking texts that explore the limits of perception and the construction of reality from a literary perspective. It is suitable for both performing arts students and theater enthusiasts who value precision of language and suggestion over explicit action.
What this book offers
- A reading experience that invites you to question the border between the real and the suggested.
- An example of contemporary theatrical writing with a precise and evocative use of language.
- A short play that can be read in a single sitting, yet leaves open questions about identity and memory.
- A text that works both for individual reading and for stage performance.
- The possibility to delve into the creative universe of one of the most awarded playwrights on the current scene.
Technical Data
- Author: Mayorga Ruano, Juan
- Publisher: Ediciones La Uña Rota
- Language: Spanish
- Topic: PLAYS, THEATRICAL TEXTS
- Collection: LIBROS ROBADOS
- Binding: Paperback
- Publication date: November 2018
- Number of pages: 92
- Weight: 178 g
Editorial Review
A theatrical piece that condenses the central obsessions of Juan Mayorga into a few pages: the power of fiction, the vulnerability of identity, and the tension between the domestic and the extraordinary. The play is especially attractive to those who seek a theater of ideas, where the conflict unfolds from a minimal situation that is nonetheless charged with consequences. Its brevity and closed structure make it an accessible read, without sacrificing the depth that characterizes the author.