Cuban Theater Digital Archive

Play script (Spanish)

Notes:

Lila, la mariposa is one of the most poetic texts in Cuban theatre. It criticizes melodrama while recreating the Havana of the fifties. Lila especially focuses on the complicated relations between parents and children, or, as Virgilio Piñera has said, "the sentimental education that our parents have given us."

These are recurring themes in Cuban drama of that period. What distinguishes Lila from other works of that era is the quality of its language, going beyond psychological solutions or the results of social investigation, and the discovery of a metaphorical quality that discloses the essential keys to a cultural identity.

Looking beyond that period, Lila looks back on the Cuban cultural heritage and its traditions connected to its profound Spanish roots. Perhaps that explains why in different stagings of Ferrer's work the point of-view taken, when preparing the script and when coming from a contemporary period, is shifting Lila's ideas by opening up the stylistic staging possibilities instead of recreating the fifies. What is needed to replace the look from the fifites to the ninties, is to search for what is permanent while at the same time examine the changes, the influences, the processes of integration of a culutral idenity, necessarily enriched in those later years by other experiences. (Raquel Carrió)