Dedicated venues presenting short plays to small audiences had their roots in Madrid, but the concept is being adopted across the Spanish-speaking world. Felicity Hughes tells the story.
On a rainy Thursday night in Madrid the bar of Micro Teatro Por Dinero is packed with a young crowd of theatregoers waiting to catch a short performance in one of the five tiny rooms in the venue’s basement. When our number is called, we’re led into a small dark room where the audience sits pressed up against each other sardine fashion on tiny stools. A door is flung open, immediately breaking the fourth wall as a distressed young man stumbles in and sits down on my knee in floods of tears.
“Never before has there been a theatre so close, so intimate, and so open—there are no preconceptions, no limits, no censure,” says Miguel Alcantud, the inventor of micro teatro, an abbreviated form of theatre that has taken Spain and many South American countries by storm... Keep reading on American Theatre
On a rainy Thursday night in Madrid the bar of Micro Teatro Por Dinero is packed with a young crowd of theatregoers waiting to catch a short performance in one of the five tiny rooms in the venue’s basement. When our number is called, we’re led into a small dark room where the audience sits pressed up against each other sardine fashion on tiny stools. A door is flung open, immediately breaking the fourth wall as a distressed young man stumbles in and sits down on my knee in floods of tears.
“Never before has there been a theatre so close, so intimate, and so open—there are no preconceptions, no limits, no censure,” says Miguel Alcantud, the inventor of micro teatro, an abbreviated form of theatre that has taken Spain and many South American countries by storm... Keep reading on American Theatre