Pedro Muñoz Seca was a Spanish comic playwright. He was one of the most successful playwrights of his era. He wrote approximately 300 dramatic works, both sainetes and longer plays, often in collaboration with Pedro Pérez Fernández or Enrique García Álvarez. His most ambitious and best known play is La venganza de Don Mendo ; other major works include La barba de Carrillo and Pepe Conde.
Early life and career
Muñoz Seca was born into a large family in El Puerto de Santa María, Cadiz, Spain, on February 20, 1879. Muñoz Seca attended primary school at the Jesuit school of San Luis Gonzaga in El Puerto de Santa María. He then moved to Seville to study philosophy and law; he graduated in 1901. While Muñoz Seca was still a student, his first plays premiered in El Puerto de Santa María and in Seville. After his graduation, Muñoz Seca moved to Madrid. There, he taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and later would work as a lawyer. He often attended literary society meetings, and there met Sebastian Alonso. The two collaborated on the playEl Contrabando, which premiered in 1904. Muñoz Seca entered public service in 1908, taking a post in the Ministry of Public Works and Transport. Soon thereafter, he married María Asunción Ariza Díez de Bulnes; they would have nine children.
Career as playwright and death
His work often employed "slang, puns, plays on words, caricature, parody, and dramatic tricks". He was the inventor of a new genre of comic theatre, the astracanada, the most celebrated example of which is La venganza de Don Mendo, a satire of the romances popular in Spain at the turn of the century. Muñoz Seca's popularity grew after the premiere of La venganza de Don Mendo. Many of his later plays were very successful, including La pluma verde, Los chatos, La tela, and Los extremeños se tocan . These works shifted away from costumbrismo toward Muñoz Seca's trademark astracanada. After the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, Muñoz Seca was at the height of his career, though his dramatic output slowed. Major works during this period include La voz de su amo, Anacleto se divorcia, La EME, and La plasmatoria. Muñoz Seca was a royalist and friend of Alfonso XIII, and his plays La oca and Jabalí sharply criticized the Second Republic. In July 1936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested in Barcelona; he was later transported to Madrid. On November 28, 1936, he was executed by a Spanish Republican Army firing squad in the Paracuellos massacre. A humorist to the end, he said to the firing squad, "You can take my hacienda, my land, my wealth, even--as you are going to do--my life. But there is one thing that you cannot take from me--the fear that I have!"
Legacy
The Pedro Muñoz Seca Municipal Theater in El Puerto de Santa María and the Muñoz Seca Theater in Madrid are named in Muñoz Seca's honor. In 1995, the Pedro Muñoz Seca Foundation was established; it is sponsored by descendants of the author and by the government of El Puerto de Santa Maria. The foundation maintains a small museum devoted to the author in his former family home in El Puerto de Santa Maria. Muñoz Seca is the grandfather of Spanish writer and journalist Alfonso Ussía.
