María Luisa Algarra

María Luisa Algarra (Barcelona, 1916 – Mexico City, 1957) was a Spanish playwright who lived and wrote in exile in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

María Luisa Algarra “was educated first at local schools, then studied at the University Autonomous of Barcelona. At age Twenty she received her law degree, a rather uncommon occurrence for a woman at the time.” She emigrated to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). There she aided the resistance movement during the Second World War, an effort that resulted in her three-year internment in the Vernet concentration camp. Upon her release, she left Europe to permanently live in Mexico where she met José Reyes Mesa, the famous painter, whom she married and with whom she had two daughters, Reyes and Fernanda. She had a close friendship with a fellow playwright, the Mexican Emilio Carballido, who described Algarra as “asombrosa…atractiva…alta, altísima” (astonishing…attractive…tall, very tall). She died in 1957 at the age of 41.

Algarra was best known as a playwright, although she also wrote movie and television scripts and radio novels (arguably having most financial success in the film industry). As well as her original work, she also wrote theatre adaptations of Cervantes’ La Cueva de Salamanca and Juan Ruiz’ La verdad sospechosa. While many of her plays were produced during her lifetime, her texts were not published until after her death. Individual plays were featured in a variety of theatre publications, and a complete anthology was published by Universidad Veracruz, a Mexican Publishing House, in 2008. Her plays often feature a female protagonist and treat a variety of themes, including the situation of women in society, familial conflict, friendship, exile, and love, and Algarra treats many of these concepts from a psychological perspective. Some of her works deal with issues specific to Mexico or her own experience in exile, while others feature universally-applicable issues.

Algarra’s plays were generally well received by her contemporaries. In 1935 she received the Concursal Teatral Universitario award from the Universidad Autónoma in Barcelona for her first play, Judith, which was written in Catalan, and in 1954 she earned the “máximo reconocimento en el teatro mexicano” (the maximum recognition in Mexican theatre) when she won the award at the Concurso de Grupos Teatrales del Distrito Federal (Mexico City Theatre Conference) for her play Los años de prueba. It is of note that the aforementioned prize is awarded to a play that should be “de autor mexicano, escrita con posterioridad al año 1917, y tratar un problema mexicano” (by a Mexican author, written after 1917, and about a Mexican problem). Los años de prueba also won the INBA and Juan Ruiz de Alarcon awards, the latter for the best play of 1954.

...
Wikipedia