He has just finished the performances of “Desnudos” after four years with a full room. Wait for the arrival on Netflix of “Elena knows”, the film directed by Anahí Berneri based on the novel by Claudia Piñeyro, where she shares the cast with Érica Rivas and her mother, Mercedes Morán. She is a voracious theatergoer opposite Andy Kusnetzoff in “Bruth Dogs.” These days she is directing “Marvelous Things” at the Teatro Comafi, the play that was a hit with Peter Lanzani, while she faces the challenge of making it her own and changing the lead every eight weeks.
It started with Lali González, it will continue with Franco Masini, it will try to break down with charm, feeling and closeness a list of things that are worth living for. She will achieve it in this talk with NEWS. This is the year of Mey Scapola and we are only in May.
News: “Wonderful Things” is a global success and comes off a season starring Peter Lanzani that broke it. How did you face the challenge of directing it in this new production with Lali González?
Mey Scapola: I tried to be without fear, because that clearly paralyzes you. When the production called me, it gave me the chance to do whatever I wanted, a duo curatorship with directors and actors as is done in “Teatro x la Identidad”, for example, but it seemed to me that part of the challenge was to let go of what had been made. So I decided to get involved in a new set.
News: And in another room. Does the place affect what you want to tell?
Scapola: Absolutely, there is an audience and a stage, but I also want to put chairs on the stage and break that, it’s all part of the proposal. As an actress I learned that places also count and in this case Lali moves around the entire theater without making the viewer uncomfortable. I, as a spectator, want the seat to be soft, to be able to look, listen, see well, for the actress to be perceived as beautiful according to what she tells. Because also as a director it seems to me that aesthetics is part of the theatrical event, from the moment the curtain is ironed until the text is well said. I am nourished by each actor who is going to star in the play, it is very generous of them and I realize that as a director I have an unbearable obsession (she laughs).
News: Is the change what costs the most because there is always the risk of comparison?
Scapola: Look, I’m only thinking about it now, but I just finished a play like “Nudes”, in which I performed for four years and which underwent many changes. Of place, of space, of actors… and there is something that I always said and it is: “You can never compare it.” In this case, each person is different and for me, the big challenge was to change the actor or actress every eight weeks. Now I’m working with three actors who will star in “Wonderful Things” at the same time, Lali González, Franco Masini and someone else I still can’t count. It is a very particular monologue because the public is part of the experience without being participatory theater, a concept that I hate…
News: Is there anything worse than the so-called participatory theater? It’s head to head with those parent meetings where they force you to do crafts…
Scapola: (laughs) I really hate it, as a theatrical spectator that I am I don’t like it at all, but in this case I think that the public does something else and that is to finish completing the work because the narrator tells the story with the public. So as a director I tried at one point to fall out of love with everything I saw, to take the text from scratch again and follow the way of telling each interpreter. In the case of Lali, I cannot go against the nature of her accent, her instrument, her brilliance, but rather the opposite, take advantage of the beauty that she has to offer. She has humor, depth, and enormous truth.
News: Plus she’s a woman. While the play was written by two men, Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, does the story change as told by an actress?
Scapola: Yes, it necessarily changes, plus Lali is very funny and I like it when the most difficult things are told with humor, it works as an antidote in the worst moments. Her character feels like a genius when she starts the list of wonderful things while her mother is in the hospital. Without falling into the commonplace, in solemnity, painful topics are discussed in a very hopeful way. There is something of that rise and fall that the narrator tells that her mother suffers, something of that pulse that is reflected in the work, life is like that, with her dark moments and other brighter ones. When a tragedy happens to you the next day you wake up, your son kisses you and the world has already changed.
News: Is it different to work on the relationship between mother and daughter than that of mother and son?
Scapola: I think that relationships with mothers are always very special. Both the production and I wanted to cast a woman from the outset because we needed to show that she was not a replacement but a new cast. It does not substantially change the text, but the relationship between a mother and her daughter is something else. That daughter with a mother with mental health problems who, despite that, had a childhood with beautiful moments, a spectacular father and a teacher who changed her life thanks to his love for literature, is seen in a different way. love story beyond gender, but that in each person finds other identifications and nuances.
News: Now there is talk of mental health, something that has always been silenced. But on the one hand sometimes it feels like a discomfort in the way of communicating and on the other a certain lightness. How did you approach the subject?
Scapola: Just avoiding those two places. When one goes through creative processes, if you are attentive, you are close to these things, you can see them more sensitively. My sister is a therapist, in the summer something happened with someone close to her and she told me: “When mental health issues start to interfere in your life, they are already a problem”, you feel that you can handle them to a certain extent. Understanding that all these issues are closer than one wants to admit and that they can be your own, a child, a relative or a partner is essential.
News: Does directing a play like this lead to rethinking your own questions?
Scapola: Yes, because you can’t direct something like “Marvelous Things” without empathy, you need love, closeness, lack of prejudice. When you find out that something is wrong with a colleague or had an outbreak, you realize that many people are suffering from this. You have to live with that and not be afraid of it. Because that’s not why life is shit, you have to take charge and recognize that mental problems are also part of us. Precisely in the work there is a phrase that says: “If you lived a long life and did not get depressed once properly, it is that you did not pay too much attention.”
