Summer evening

*Summer Evening* takes as its starting point the painting of the same name by American artist Edward Hopper, in which a man and a woman chat on a summer evening on the porch of a villa. From this painting—which we must constantly keep in mind and “where nothing happens”— Javier Vicedo Alós draws nine stories, imagining what these enigmatic figures—protagonists of lives marked by solitude, nostalgia, and missed encounters that fall apart for one reason or another—might say to and about one another. Each one contains an infinity of worlds—a mixture of helplessness and happiness, rage and hunger—irrevocably subject to the whims of life. The dramaturgy here draws as much from the poetic and pictorial realms as from the dramatic. It takes on the nature and technique of ekphrasis—a precise and detailed, hypnotic description of a painting. The characters dream of happiness, of rising up, of walking onto the canvas, of touching one another. “We exist only in Hopper’s mind; we are merely a pretext,” one of them protests, but “the painter has no control over his characters, and in the end, no matter what Hopper intended, the stories emerge on their own, following their own paths off the canvas.” It is indeed true that madness lurks in our stillness.