It is difficult to speak about Runnals XXX. Before going to the first performance on November 21st in the building that hosted and gives name to the play, I was really curious to see how all the huge visual, audio and literary materials could be put together in just a single production. To be honest, given these abundant sources I had been expecting the play to offer a different scene for each of the three days. Illogical as my assumption was, it is anyway unusual to literally participate in a play split in three separated sequences whose common thread is censorship.
The entire audience starts at one classical stage which is one independent act and then broke out in two groups with different destinations. The spectators are then exposed to two different parts of the show, separated from the first one. Here is an entertaining challenge to the classical Aristotelian unities of action, place and time! This has nothing to do with a single unified drama though, nor is the tone itself prevailingly dramatic, this is rather a postmodern mixture of more than two thousand years of banned texts.
Starting with Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, the good performers reveal the true story of a wife confined in her house who murders her husband, the victim being just one of the representatives of a society which fails to comprehend women and mocks their role. Depending on the different itineraries assigned to the audience, the play either follows with Banned!–A Mash-up, or with American Dreams. The former is intended to be as a mish-mash of very short sketches of plays whose history of censorship is made clear by a projected text that introduce them. From Oedipus Rex to Angels in America, passing through Hamlet, The Marriage of Figaro, Salome and many other stories, we are reminded how censorship has obscured the following realities: homosexuality, class inequalities, anti-clericalism, prostitution, more broadly sexuality, anti-authoritarianism – and less courageously clear but present in the evocative plays – euthanasia, incest, suicidal depression, and racism. The latter aspect is more developed in American Dreams which put on stage songs, pictures, videos and references to American history.
A band accompanies the singing and performances of the actors. One of them both invites and distances the audience from the appeals of the American dream through the use of a parodied commercial language. The reality of the Middle Passage and the perfectly deconstructed scene of the Kennedy assassination – the play was performed during the days we commemorated the 50th anniversary of his still-unresolved death – are the most powerful moments of this section. They may have been more appreciated if they would have focused on themes such as the roots of America’s history of genocide, on the conformity of its society, or its leading role in shaping international politics and culture rather than on bawdy language and other themes already mentioned in the previous section.
Throughout this excess of materials, the audience is constantly made to feel part of the history of censorship. The most delicate and experimental sections are those in which the spectators seem not only to interact with actors but to turn themselves into actors. One of the discussions which took place after the play, specifically in the last day of its presentation, was particularly useful to know how intentional and sometimes disappointing were the attempts of the actors to meet the audience. 
The central character of Oedipus, emblematic since he represents the spectator in the quest for truth, tries to establish and keep eye-contact with each individual member of the audience, turning his expression from arrogant gaze to awe. This is not the only occasion in which a connection between actor and spectator is assured. Besides eye-contact, touching, and constant invitations to participate in games, dances, applauses, and laughs call the audience to action. Nor does the first most classical and separated performance exclude the participation of the audience at all. That is why people are encouraged to jump on the stage at the very beginning of the play in order to look curiously around, to experience and discover. Nevertheless, the resulting effect is more one of amusement and voyeuristic entertainment rather than a more appropriate unveiling act of discovering the truth. The break of the proscenium attempts to cancel any distance between reality and fiction even if it risks being counterproductive. Although the audience is part of the exhibition, it fails to be actually active.
Sure as it must be, a play on censorship has to provoke in order to create debate on what has been hidden and silenced. Perhaps, what is most worth discovering is not the object that is behind the veil, not even whom is the author of such 
obscurantism, but why we all failed and still are failing to notice the veil in the first place. On the one hand, there exists an institutional censorship, one applied by an authority in a despotic way and which is destined not to last because it causes indignation and general resentment. That is the one for whom the spectators will laugh. On the other hand, there is a more subtle form of censorship and repression, one self-inflicted, more democratic and even comforting. Unveiling this kind of censorship should be a dangerous and courageous operation, one for which the spectator will be feel unfamiliar with and pushed to think about.
Altogether, Runnals XXX risks being a smooth serial production of materials that were originally intended to deal with taboos. Most of the time spectators feel at ease to explore and to choose from this dispersive exposition that prevents them to think about censorship, the only frame which encompass the sketches. Also, the museum arrangement of the play put the sources behind the glass as if in a distant past, although every single unveiled theme – from the role of the women in global society, to racism – is still an accomplished fact of our life.
I think spectators are meant to follow Oedipus destiny, protecting themselves from truth. The problem is that they seem to follow the wrong way. Their expressions turn from awe to an entertained and detached gaze.
At the exit from Runnals, when spectators were asked whether they liked or not the play, almost all responses were positive.