A Spanish theater company brought its app-driven exploration of teenage pressure and generational conflict to Tucson, asking audiences to put down their differences and pick up their phones.

"A Teen Odyssey," an immersive theater experience by Mallorca-based La Mecanica Productions, made its Tucson debut at the TENWEST Festival, blending live performance and smartphone technology to explore teenage pressure and the generational divides that surround it.

La Mecanica is committed to creating and supporting the highest quality work for the greatest community impact. Founder Jenny Vila has been involved in theater since she was 15, starting in improv. She studied drama for a year in the United States before moving to Mallorca, where she attended drama school on afternoons and weekends.

Feeling that acting may not have been her calling, Vila traveled to London at 17 to volunteer for the London International Festival of Theatre, later earning a degree in Stage Management and Technical Theatre from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

"From there, it just kicked off," Vila said.

After graduating, she toured as a theater technician in the United Kingdom, worked as a technical director for a film festival in Singapore and later joined New York's Fringe Festival, where she eventually taught a film course at New York University.

Vila knew early on that she wanted to run her own production company.

Seeking a creative home base between international tours, Vila founded La Mecanica Productions and developed "A Teen Odyssey," an immersive theater experience that has since toured internationally.

The inspiration for "A Teen Odyssey" came during the pandemic.

(The production team) "had kids who were becoming teens or were teens during the lockdown," Vila said. "We realized how difficult that was for that age group, and we thought we want to do something for teenagers and with teenagers, that for us was a crucial part of the puzzle for 'A Teen Odyssey.'"

Named one of the Guardian's "20 Theatre Shows to See This Summer" at the Edinburgh Festival, "A Teen Odyssey" blends live performance with digital technology to explore belonging, intergenerational connection and individual identity.

The show unfolds in stages, each guided by the app. Before entering the performance space, audience members gather in generational groups and download the Kalliópê app, developed by Barcelona's La Fura dels Baus, which guides them through the experience.

As the performance begins, phones flash with lightning before prompting audience members to answer a series of questions about themselves.

Questions about personality prompt audience members to self-identify before being sorted into groups, each gathered on a different colored shape on the carpet. The performance then opens with a definition flashing across every screen: "Pressure. 1. The burden of physical or mental distress. 2. The constraint of circumstance: the weight of social or economic imposition."

A 360-degree video follows several adults scrutinizing, nagging and yelling at the audience before cutting to the protagonist, who enters the stage dancing freely with headphones in, inviting audience members to join her.

The mood shifts when her father figure enters and the two begin pushing against each other — arms, backs, bodies — in a wordless struggle that ends with the protagonist carrying him on her back.

"The line of work that we do at Mecanica is nonverbal, physical theater," Vila said. "The body is always how we communicate, not through text, like with a teen."

The protagonist eventually flees, and the app prompts audience members to regroup by generation.

"We wanted to kind of shine a light to other people's realities and what they've gone through, and to first divide everyone by their generation and kind of identify themselves with a group of people," Vila said.

Each generational group watches a different video on their phones, showing icons and figures from their era, while other groups watch a video about their own generation simultaneously.

Vila said the videos are designed not just to help each generation recognize itself, but to build empathy and understanding across generational lines.

The protagonist and her father reunite on stage in a tense, physical exchange — he reaches for her, she slips away — before phones flash the message,"Resist the pressure."

Then a quote appears:

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age."

The app reveals it was written by Aristotle, underscoring that every generation has complained about the next.

The app then sorts audience members back into groups based on their earlier answers, though some individuals are left out entirely.

Vila said the exclusion was originally a technical glitch: when audience members left the app, the system lost their responses and left them out of groups. The production team decided to lean into it artistically, using the experience of being left out as part of the performance itself.

Groups are prompted to laugh at inside jokes or act like animals while those left out can only watch, making the exclusion visceral rather than abstract.

The performance then shifts to Gen Z, with stories of teenagers navigating expectation playing through the app: a girl forced to study what she should rather than what she wanted, a boy who cried alone because he thought boys shouldn't cry. Gen Z audience members are invited to draw with their phone flashlights on a luminescent tarp, literally writing their own future.

The show closes with the protagonist playing ukulele, free from expectation, as her father watches in admiration.

For Vila, the most rewarding part is the impact the show has on the teenagers it features.

"We work with local teens wherever we go, and we've had some incredible moments of teens (saying), 'You changed my life,'" Vila said. "To see that the piece is so powerful, and the whole process of working with us and collaborating with us has opened up different possibilities for their lives."

La Mecanica will return to the United States for another "A Teen Odyssey" tour in March 2027.

Topacio “Topaz” Servellon is a reporter with Tucson Spotlight. Contact them at topacioserve@gmail.com.

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