I first saw La violación de una actriz de teatro in Santiago in 2021, at Matucana 100. We were still in the pandemic: reduced capacity, temperature checks at the door, seats one metre apart. Theatre was finding its way back into the room, and we were learning how to sit near other bodies again.
 

The production was directed by Javier Casanga, a friend and a director whose vision has changed the work of many of us: visually striking, formally bold and devastating, with a way of holding beauty, humour and violence inside the same image. In this production, his direction made the pandemic context feel like part of the wound. The screen, the distance, the impossibility of contact, the theatrical machinery around Bernice. All of it became a crack in the room, a pressure point where performance, memory and survival began to split open.

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Carla Zúñiga wrote the play in 2020, during lockdown, in response to a sexual abuse case at the theatre school where she and I had trained. A denunciation had opened a door. More compañeras began to speak. The play asks what happens inside a woman when an experience of violence is stored as something else: a dream, a misunderstanding, a strange private place where life can continue. It centres less on the abuser than on the machinery of not-knowing.

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What struck me most that night was the audience. The held breath. The people who could barely look at the stage, the ones who could hardly look away. Carla's work moves between the grotesque and the intimate, the expressionist and the forensic, and this play understands how violence can live in the body, in language, in silence, and in the roles people keep performing in order to survive.

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Translating it asks me to stay very close to its precision: the pauses, the misdirections, the humour, the language that keeps almost arriving before it retreats.

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Bernice cracks open in front of us with savage humour, terror, vanity, rage and life.