• Overview
• Staging information
• Translations
• Sample translations
• Production history

Scene

Usted también podrá disfrutar de ella has a complex chronological and spatial structure.

Before act 1 begins, an advertisement for the perfume ‘She’ is shown to the public.

Throughout both acts, different time periods and geographical places exist on stage simultaneously.

Act 1

Act 1 is made up of 17 short scenes. The action in this act can be divided up into five different time periods, each containing a strand of the whole narrative. These narrative strands are interwoven so that the characters’ stories are conveyed to the audience in a fragmented fashion:

Strand 1

Strand 1 is made up of background scenes that depict how the magazine interview between Javier and Fanny first came about. These scenes take place in the newspaper office. Here, Manolo, Celia, Javier and the magazine editor Martinez discuss the possibility of Javier securing an interview with Fanny.

Strand 2

Strand 2 is made up of the various conversations that take place while Javier is stuck in the elevator cage below the hall outside Fanny’s apartment. These conversations feature Fanny, Manolo and Javier. In addition, arguments and discussions with the Apartment Super and the Neighbour take place within this narrative strand.

Strand 3

Strand 3 is made up of exchanges between Celia and Javier in the home they share. These take place a week after Javier has already met Fanny and has spent time with her in her apartment. By this point the relationship between Javier and Celia is ending. Celia reads the article Javier has just written after his time with Fanny and learns that he has left the young model alone to gas herself in her apartment. Celia then rushes to save Fanny.

Strand 4

Chronologically, the conversations in strand 4 take place much later than anything that occurs in the other narrative strands. This strand features exchanges between the Coroner and Manolo about ‘the incident’. The Coroner is investigating a death. During his appearances, we suspect that he is investigating Fanny’s suicide. He is, we finally learn, investigating the suicide of Javier.

Strand 5

The beginning of this strand comes at the end of act 1, when Fanny and Javier meet face-to-face for the first time. This narrative strand develops in act 2, when Javier and Fanny take up a week-long residence in her apartment.

Act 2

In act 2, made up of nine scenes, the intercalation of narrative strand 1, and narrative strands 3 to 5 as outlined above continues. There is also a ‘prequel’ scene between Fanny and the Agent who encouraged her to take on the advertising contract.

The main action in this act follows narrative strand 5, focusing on the conversations that take place inside Fanny’s apartment. She and Javier have spent a week together alone. After deciding that he cannot spend his life with Fanny, Javier leaves the apartment. Fanny decides to gas herself. Later, waking up alive despite the gas, Fanny also leaves the flat to go after Javier. She gets stuck in the elevator. In the meantime, Celia goes to prevent Fanny from killing herself (strand 3).

Two episodes from act 1 are repeated in act 2. They come from narrative strand 3 (Javier/Celia). These are:

a)    The episode in which Javier receives a telephone call from work while at his desk in the home he shares with Celia. This incident originally took place at the beginning of act 1.

b)   The episode in which Celia discovers Javier has left Fanny to gas herself. This incident originally took place near the end of act 1.

Staging

Apart from those staging elements deemed necessary – such as the advertisement in the prologue, and the elevator in which Javier and then Fanny get stuck – the stage directions stipulate that the play’s scenography be kept to a minimum. In fact, the New York 1987-88 production of the play directed by Joanne Pottlitzer did not even feature an actual elevator on stage, preferring to leave it to the audiences to imagine its presence (Zatlin 1995: 129).

The prologue scene of the play is an advertisement for the perfume ‘She’. On the closed stage curtain a multimedia display projects the image of a naked girl being showered with rose petals. When the curtain is slowly opened, the television advertisement for ‘She’ is projected on a screen. It features the nearly nude model running toward the camera over a bed of roses.

During act 1 and act 2 the elevator cage that Javier and then Fanny get stuck in rests on a slightly different level below the door that leads from the apartment block stairwell/elevator to the inside of Fanny’s apartment.

The telephone used by Javier at the beginning of act 1 should ideally also be that also used at different points by Fanny and by the Coroner.

• Zatlin, Phyllis. 1995. ‘El teatro de Ana Diosdado. ¿Conformista?’. In Teatro español contemporàneo: autores y tendendcias, eds. Alfonso de Toro and Wilfried Floeck, pp. 125-46. Kassel, Reichenberger (in Spanish)

Music

The music during the advertisement at the beginning of the play can be any classical piece except Mozart.

Fanny’s record player plays Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (Andante). Javier also plays this at the end.

Cast number

Minimum	Maximum
3 males	3 males
2 females	2 females
5 (total)	5 (total)

Cast information

One male character performs the roles of Martinez, the Coroner, the Neighbour, the Super, and the Agent.

Characters

• FANNY, A young model about 20 years old
• JAVIER, 38-year-old journalist
• CELIA, Pretty 25-year-old lover of JAVIER
• MANOLO, About 26 years old, charming and outgoing photographer
• THE ‘MAN IN THE STREET’ (Martinez, Coroner, Neighbour, Super, Agent, all played by this same actor)

Entry written by Gwynneth Dowling. Last updated on 14 February 2011.

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