SODOMA

A world premiere at this year's Festival de Otoño of Lobato & Rojas’s fourth performance piece consolidates this theatre company’s reputation. Starting out in 2014 as a platform to support the production of incipient playwrights, such as María Velasco, Sergio Martínez Vila, and Lola Blasco, and then as creators of their own shows since 2017, has found a path and a style of their own. This has a lot to do with the anxious personalities of the company’s two souls: Aarón Lobato and Julio Rojas. From the beginning, they rejected the classics and going for issues such as otherness, identity, gender, bodily expressiveness and transdisciplinarity. They brought them to the contemporary stage in a non-classical style.

After the showcase at SURGE MADRID of J ulieta y ofelia: suicidas de toda la vida (2018), Wände_Wunde sponsored by Conde Duque, Abadía y RESAD (2019) and Martirio(2021), Sodomahas arrived at the stage. As is customary of the duo, the performance’s playwright is Rojas and the director is Lobato. Sodoma develops on two parallel planes: on the one hand, emulating the biblical story, two fallen angels arrive in Sodom announcing the imminent destruction of a city bred with vice and sin. Divine punishment will only be avoided if they find a righteous man. There is a character called The Author who shows his creative and existential block: he has many things to tell, but he also has a lot of modesty. Will he be the man whom the angels are looking for? Born at the end of the 20th century, he identifies as a homosexual man but does not seem to have suffered excessively from identifying as such. What does Sodom mean for him? There begins the siege, not of the sinful city, but of himself. “What story can I tell? Who am I?” Questions that come from the inner catapult of maturity.

Julio Rojas comments: “As an author and a homosexual, it is not possible to talk about homosexuality before looking at myself. But modesty besieges, shame besieges, memory besieges. The commitment to LGBTQI+ representation. What does Sodom mean for the collective? Am I representative of something? Trying to free myself from this siege, I imagine an alter ego called HIM ('he/him' are also the pronouns for playwright, demiurge, homosexual, sodomite, young man, child, and adult). This character struggles against his creative block and against the insecurity and feeling of inferiority of a thirty-something gay man who has grown up in a system that is still patriarchal". Sodoma is a LGBTQI+ story sewn with pagan and queer icons that add to the Peter Pan complex, the story of a boy who refuses to grow up. This a story halfway between a confessional work and fantasy with biblical undertones.

In an identity story of a child born in the time when some thinkers were certain about the coming of the end of History, he looks at his present self as a millennial in a world that swings from crisis to crisis: economic, political, health, and environmental. In a world which seems doomed to some kind of apocalypse. That boy, now a sodomite, had a record of what he wanted and that is why this coming-of-age story is based on the universal theme of returning home. A map of desires, conflicts and affections of a thirty-something playwright who has lived and lives with the beautiful and the terrible, raising Sodom and tearing it down again and again and again, in an endless loop.