“Hope”: What can a society do without parents or heads?

In the early 80s, a family receives the sudden news that they will be visited by a candidate for the municipal elections. For the father, this is the stroke of luck necessary to change the destiny of his home and, blinded by this hopeful promise, he begins a quixotic enterprise related to the preparations that will involve his wife and children, without realizing the sudden disappearance of the Benjamin of the family.

That is what “Esperanza” is about, the new work directed by Marisol Palacios that will be presented at the Cultural Center of the Pontifical Catholic University starting September 14 with the performance of Lucho Cáceres, Julia Thays, Diego Pérez and Brigitte Jouannet.

Written by the playwright in collaboration with Aldo Miyashiro, the play is based on events that occurred in her own life. “In 1983 I lived in the San Felipe residential area and my dad was crazy because he had managed to get a candidate who was meeting with the neighbors to visit our house.“Palacios recalled in dialogue with Trade. “It was an amazing preparation to clean with my mother and, when the candidate arrived, I swear he was only there for two seconds, said three things, and left.”

This strange incident serves to make a deep reflection not only on the chaos and deterioration of a middle-class family in Lima during one of the worst crises in modern Peru, but also on problems such as the indifference of our leaders and the social situation of the citizenship that are repeated to this day.

“The work is an allegory to this idea of ​​a fatherless society, where heads are focused on the least important while there are bigger problems, in this case the fact that a child has been lost.”says Marisol Palacios.

In this context, “hope” becomes a key concept, not only when giving the title of the work, but also as representative of the aspirations of all the characters that blind them to the present for a hypothetical better future.

For the playwright, setting this work in the 1980s gives the events a temporal distance that allows for a deeper reflection on them. “Going back to that time gives greater force to what is happening in the present, because we realize that we are still the same. It is no longer the Shining Path, but the social upheaval continues to kill people. The economic crisis of that moment is not there, but the social and economic differences remain abysmal”, he opined.

Despite this situation of continuous crisis, the playwright was optimistic about the future of our country. “Peru is a super resilient country and that is also in the work“, considered. “The Peruvian always gets up to start over, and that is where I believe that the hope of this country lies, in each of us..”

“Esperanza” is presented from September 14 to November 20 at the PUCP Cultural Center Theater (Av. Camino Real 1075, San Isidro). Tickets available at the venue’s box office and on the Joinnus and cccpucpencasa.com pages.