YOU’RE INVITED to our one-night-only reading of Maruxa Vilalta’s rarely performed play
🗓 December 8 @ 7:00pm
📍Brooklyn Public Library for Arts & Culture
🎟 RSVP for FREE
(Library Membership not required)
Conversations on Revolution, Activism, Ethical Tourism & More!
A Happy Country (Un País Feliz) follows the recently impoverished Jiménez family in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country as complex conversations are brought to the foreground by the arrival of a tourist staying in their home. How do you balance your activism with your desire to just live? Do you fight for your family, or your country? And how do you be an ethical tourist in a culture that is not your own?
About the Playwright:
Maruxa Vilalta (1932-2014) is a highly acclaimed Catalan-born, Mexican playwright, novelist, and director. She was born to two lawyer parents in Barcelona – where her mother was the first woman to graduate from the law school. They moved to Mexico at the beginning of the Spanish Civil war. She wrote numerous novels and plays, and won Mexico’s national prize for Arts and Sciences in 2010.
Team Spotlight: How Do We Expand the Canon?
Natalie Kane, Research Team Coordinator & Dramaturg
Since initially getting involved as a reading committee member, my collaboration with ETC has become a core component of my artistic practice and values.
I now facilitate a team of researchers based around the country (and in Canada!) scouring bibliographies for a more extensive database of writers and plays, locating full texts in libraries and archives, and creating dramaturgical resources for plays already featured on the ETC Lists.
Women and artists of all genders have always been writing and creating, and their perspectives and reflections captured in their work across history are powerful and resonant and magnificently theatrical. In other words, these plays have everything we look for when we turn to classical theatre, but have all too often been forgotten or deliberately erased by histories that did not value them. There is so much to learn from and so much to celebrate in these texts, and it is thrilling to see actors and audiences embracing them upon hearing or reading these writers for the first time.
Natalie (pictured second from the right) & ETC Team Members at our March 2025 Literary Salon
We have so many exciting initiatives in the works — from championing our featured plays to a wider audience, to publishing a book of great classic monologues by women and underrepresented genders — and it is your support at all levels that makes these projects possible.
~ Natalie Kane
Take Action Today
By Donating Today, your gift isn’t just funding a project.
It’s fueling a movement — one that ensures these artists are remembered, celebrated, read and produced for generations to come.