NO HABLES CON EXTRAÑOS

Helena Tornero goes one step beyond the traditional label. Although historical memory is the driving force behind *No hables con extraños*, the piece moves within a territory that specialists often call transgenerational memory or postmemory. Rather than focusing only on the facts of the past — the Civil War, exile, Francoism… — the play explores how the silence of those closest to us is inherited. It is the idea that unresolved traumas “travel” through the emotional DNA of the family.

Although it uses a dramatic structure, the work has a strong investigative component. We could call it an archaeology of affections. It does not seek merely to offer a lesson in history, but to reconstruct broken pieces. Sometimes, when we speak about our most recent past, we realise that we are actually speaking about our present, about things happening to us right now, about wounds that are still open, about stories that have yet to be closed. Epigenetics tells us that the body has “long-term memory”, not only in the brain, but also in the chemistry that surrounds our genes. In the play, this means that the stress of the executioners and the trauma of the victims left molecular marks that, decades later, still surface in some of the characters as physical and psychological symptoms.

(Questions from the past, fragments of the present. Theatre as a barricade against oblivion).