A MASSIVE MEME ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF SADNESS. Ghosting, benching, sadfishing… Words that hide a painful reality: you’re not relevant. And that’s just how Goethe’s Werther must have felt when he was trying to win Lotte. The German writer opened himself up completely in this blockbuster and started making his own pain into a business. In a world where we’re constantly required to be “different and genuine”, are we marketing our tears?
Les penes del jove Werther is a show full of incentives and contrasts that uses Goethe’s work as a base to discuss the marketing of sadness, emotional fascism and identity as spectacle. When did pain become a business opportunity?
Mel Salvatierra is an actress who has finally obtained her wish: performing a stand-up show inspired by Goethe’s Werther. However, the process of the piece has been a total nightmare. With only one actress, a frenzied set-up and a lot of black humour, the show is served in the shape of neo-varietés, full of millenial references such as Emo culture, sad memes and Lana del Rey.
Miquel Mas Fiol is a director and dramaturg. Aged 26, he founded theatrical company Ovnipresents. He has written and directed, among other works, Passatgers de Braianer (2015), Recursos iNhumans (2016) and S’inunda Venècia (2017), shown in Mallorca and Barcelona. He was awarded the Premi Mediterrani de Teatre Pare Colom 2020 for his piece Primavera de bèsties, which premiered at the Teatre Principal de Palma in 2021, and in Barcelona, at the Tantarantana Theatre in 2022. The same year he premiered Càndid o l’optimisme in Barcelona, a show about the tyranny of happiness that was shortlisted for the On el teatre batega callout by Teatres de Proximitat. Also in 2022, at the Mostra d’Igualada, he presented his show Cr#sh. Tothom pot caure, a creation for teenagers about mental health (La Villaroel, 2022/23 season). He is currently the resident director at Tantarantana Theatre in Barcelona, where he will direct two productions over two consecutive seasons. In 2023 he premiered Les penes del jove Werther, an adaptation of Goethe’s work. This show is the second part of the Trilogia de la Condició Millenial that he began with Càndid o l’optimisme.
Mel Salvatierra is an actress, a graduate of Barcelona’s Col-legi del Teatre. She continued her training under directors such as Pablo Messiez, Àlex Rigola, Ivan Morales, Pau Carrió and Andrés Lima. She has worked on shows such as Eva contra Eva by Pau Mir, directed by Silvia Munt; La Gavina directed by Àlex Rigola, which premiered at La Villarroel; El desig atrapat per la cua directed by Fèlix Pons and dramatised reading Amor, matrimoni i altres assumptes menors directed by Iván Morales at Sala Beckett, among others. Her work for film and television includes a part in the film Miró directed by Oriol Ferrer, and roles in series such as HIT (RTVE) and Benvinguts a la Família (TV3).
