A Strange Adventure

Oral history as theater–the theater of memory, trauma, and torture.

Multivocal and anonymous, A Strange Adventure is oral-history-as-theater–the theater of memory, trauma, and torture. A play with neither named characters nor stage directions, it is a reckoning with the immediate past: a group of women recount ten days of torture, in 1974, just after the Spanish state rounded up Basque nationalists and other activists it could conveniently incarcerate. This stuttering yet lucid text–written by Eva Forest, who was held in Yeserías Prison in Madrid from 1974 to 1977 without charge or trial–is as urgent today as ever, transcending its context of Basque struggle and Francoist fascism. Emerging from a space and time that many prefer to forget, A Strange Adventure is testimony to the resilience, humility, and power of a group of women who refuse repression, who find life in collectivity, who speak in echoes, silences, and screams.