Beatriz and Martín, her husband, will meet face to face with Ricardo and Amelia, the parents of the boy who killed their son. The boy entered the school armed, was involved in a shootout and then committed suicide. The four adults want, must understand and somehow recover the will to live. This is the starting point of Violencethe show that will debut next Friday at the María Guerrero theater in Madrid, directed by the actor and musician Diego Garrido Sanz. It is a stage adaptation of the film massthe directorial debut of American actor Fran Kranz, set against the backdrop of the trauma of school shootings in the United States. According to statistics, in the last decade, one occurs approximately every 65 days.
The problem is not so common in Europe, but in 2024 a 21-year-old young man killed nine students and a teacher at a high school in the Austrian city of Graz. In Spain, a couple of years ago, a third-year ESO student attacked several classmates and three teachers at his school in Jerez de la Frontera with a knife.
In this context, violence and adolescence often go hand in hand in contemporary cultural representations of this crucial stage of life. At the beginning of 2025 the pairing gained global relevance thanks to the miniseries Adolescenceco-written by and starring Stephen Graham, which chronicles the moment a family is blown up when 13-year-old Jamie is arrested and accused of killing a classmate. In Pubertythe series created and starring Leticia Dolera, also released this year, is an entire community (one castella glue of a Catalan town) which enters into crisis after a report of sexual violence on social networks in which three teenagers may be involved.
While the English series aims for a punitive solution, the Spanish one chooses to talk about restorative justice. And in the case of ViolenceAs the director points out, his protagonists prefer not to go through criminal justice but instead opt for dialogue and forgiveness. “If Hannah Arendt could forgive Heidegger, everything is possible. And this is a solution to take into account even for a country like Spain. We must open all the graves, this is the first and most urgent thing, that justice be done and the pain repaired, but we must also forgive, because otherwise how can we move forward as a society? It is clear that this is not very common, to see someone with so much anger, justified moreover, who suddenly says: no, wait, to move forward I have to forgive you and in some “We both freed ourselves” way.
Violence It is not a work designed and created specifically for teenagers, but, as happened to Diego Garrido himself, it manages to make them empathize with their parents. Because understanding adolescence also means understanding how adults relate to it. This is the goal of Infinite adolescenceby the Valencian company El Pont Flotant, which debuted at the Centro Escalante (a theater project for children and young people of the Valencia Provincial Council which produced the work in its entirety) in November 2024, and is touring Spain. According to one of its directors, Jesús Muñoz, “it was important to talk about adolescence to the adult audience, but during the process of creating the work, even if we worked with groups of boys, girls and beans to share their experiences, their tastes, their fears and needs, we realized that it was better for them not to be directly on stage and that the work we ultimately do with the mannequins and their recorded voices was more powerful.”
On stage, adolescents are and are not, reflecting their lives in relation to adults. They have grown up, but they have not stopped being children. “They want to distance themselves, but they still need care and love, so what we do is relive our adolescence, the lights and shadows of that important moment that marks us very deeply, giving it the importance it deserves, no more and no less,” says Jesús Muñoz. It is the logical artistic realization of a company, El Pont Flotant, which in a previous work already dealt with childhood and education, The child I want to have. They socialize their personal problems, work with the community and synthesize experiences into theater pieces that focus on tenderness and the gentle handling of conflicts.
Theater has always tried to reach the youngest because it is precisely in adolescence that they are captured or lost forever as an audience. Without going any further, the current edition of the Madrid Autumn Festival is scheduled Offering for the monsterby the Uruguayan creator Tamara Cubas, for which she had a group of young people between 18 and 25 years old recruited in Madrid. As part of the same festival, a show will be held next Friday and Saturday Odysseysof La Mecànica, a “theatrical party designed specifically for teenagers aged 12 and over and for adults who were once teenagers”, according to the company itself, and which, far from prohibiting the use of cell phones in the theatre, imposes it.
For its part, the National Center of Dramatic Art launched this year the Young Dramatics mediation program, promoted by the Grumelot company, for the training of 14 participants aged between 16 and 25 as spectators. Direct work with girls, like what Miguel Oyarzun and Juan Ayala have done in the last years in the cycle youth trilogy (Selfies, Capital AND Collapse) from his collective Once in a Lifetime, a community theater project that brings young people between 11 and 19 years old on stage to talk about the entertainment society, the economy, the job market or the ecological crisis.
Theater of, with, about, by and for teenagers. Theater based on the impact that their actions cause in a complex adult society full of contradictions. In February 2026 it will arrive at the Spanish Theater in Madrid The Gordian knotby American author Johnna Adams, directed by Israel Elejalde. Set in a small community rocked by a school tragedy, the comedy pits a mother (María Morales) against the teacher of her son (Eva Rufo), an 11-year-old boy who has just died.
It is an enigma about education and conflict resolution, but also about how we as a society deal with that twisted knot that forms in the years in which we stop being children to become one more, the process of formation of the subject that cries out to be well accompanied so as not to fall into the hands of dark interests. “I saw how people around me,” says Diego Garrido, “were connected to neo-fascist movements when we were little. There is a need to listen and belong that many people are solving in these types of networks through the Internet.” ViolenceAS The Gordian knothe is committed to dialogue, even if it is a painful path. “They tell us that we are utopians,” concludes Garrido. “But what is utopian is to think that this overflowing capitalism and this unbridled hatred will bring us to a positive conclusion. That is really idealistic.”
