from its dawntheater always fed on historical facts and figures to create your plots. However, unlike a specialized book, it is not required to exhibit those facts as they were or to flaunt neutrality. A text for the scene can illuminate aspects that suit your action and cover up those that hinder it. But it has, yes, the commitment to show a story in a seductive, exciting, dramatic way; In a word, entertaining. That is the main commandment of the world scene, because everything else is altered if this axiom is forgotten.
The pen of the inescapable William Shakespeare allowed to know the intricacies, adventures and intrigues of the English crown through emblematic dramas such as “Richard III” either “Henry IV”, among others, based on chronicles by the historian Raphael Holinshed, a benchmark in Elizabethan theater dramaturgy. It is that the facts show that no matter how far or distant the central characterviewers find a kind of fraternal echo when it comes to identifying with the circumstances that the protagonists are going through.
local works
The billboard of Buenos Aires had an infinity of assemblies that can serve as an example. To cite more recent decades and true milestones; the premiere, in 1982, of “The Bad Blood”written by Griselda Gambaro, which exposed the repression in times of Juan Manuel de Rosas in a metaphorical way. The legendary presentation in 1984, and at the San Martin Theater, of the great Darío Fo with “Mystery Buffo”, where he emphasized the amorality of some members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which provoked tear gas attacks by an ultra-Catholic group. In the same year and place, it was mounted Galileo Galilei by Bertolt Brecht, starring Walter Santa Ana, centered on the life of the Italian scientist. The original piece from 1939 was criticized for being far from the real facts, since the German author intended to criticize contemporary authorities.
The list, endless and impossible to detail in these lines, includes, for example, the multiple views on Eva Perón, in all genres. More recently, they also add “I, Encarnacion Ezcurra” with dramaturgy by Cristina Escofet and performance by Lorena Vega, as Rosas’s wife, architect in the shadows of the Restauradores Revolution and a figure mistreated by official history. Also “Happyland”a music hall satire written by Gonzalo Demaría, which focused on María Estela Martínez de Perón (or, simply, Isabelita) played by Alejandra Radano and Josefina Scaglione, respectively, and deals with the ex-president’s seclusion after the overthrow, to his past, in a Panamanian cabaret, before meeting the General.
The historian and writer Mario “Pacho” O’Donnell, a true man of Argentine culture, is the one who has dedicated himself the most to this type of dramaturgy, wisely combining his two passions. Pieces like “Vincent and the Crows”, where the protagonist is Vincent Van Gogh; “the saber”, a profound reflection on power in the figure of Rosas; “The meeting of Guayaquil”, in which he refers to the moment in which San Martín and Simón Bolívar discussed the struggles for independence; Y “The decision”currently in the El Tinglado room, in which a meeting between the ghost of Leandro Alem and Lisandro de la Torre is conjectured.
“The historical gives the texture of the play. Use the powerful past to talk about the present. Or of the eternal; jealousy, death, hope, hatred, virtue. Also of the future, because the mistakes of the future are the consequence of a present that failed to learn from the past. Although it is not its intention, who can deny the pedagogical effect of historical theater? O’Donnell reflects. The risk is to serve as an ‘escape’ from dramatic tensions. The least appreciable comment is ‘I learned a lot of history today’ or ‘I found out everything I don’t know about history’. In ‘The decision’ the shot that put an end to Lisandro de la Torre’s life did not come from his revolver but from Leandro Alem’s. ‘That was not like that’, some connoisseur may say, but it is plausible if it is understood that he is the specter of the creator of radicalism in whose desperation and suicidal decision he mirrors the Tower. What better than appealing to these two characters to bring to the theater the rejection of political corruption, of the unsupportive impunity of the ‘red circle’?”, he concludes.
The artists
The voice of the artists is also essential to try to fully understand why this type of expression seduces the public so much. the talented actress louis kuliok plays Juana Azurduy in “Joan lives!, based on a text by Andrés Lizarraga, a show currently on tour. “Her gesture of her immeasurable for the creation of a free and sovereign homeland, but also in times of darkness, towards the feminine being subjected to the secular patriarchal culture. I played heroic women in the theater and on TV, but I had never been inspired by a woman who had existed in truth, in mystery and in the real violence of life”, she confesses about her attraction to the heroine.
For his part, the young actor, director and author Ariel Núñez Di Croce, took the risk of adapting the book “The idealist of violenceof Osvaldo Bayer and brought to the stageA dangerous man”where the life of the Italian anarchist is told Severino DiGiovanni. The remarkable and excellent independent theater experience is offered in the room “Follow the moth” of Boedo. There, fourteen performers and only thirty spectators get involved by joining a montage that requires their active participation to the point of blending in with the actors during some of the scenes.
“Utopias have enamored me since I was little. Upon discovering anarchy and feeling it as my own, I needed to do a work to bring its meaning closer to the public. I wanted to spread the idea by using a ‘show’ as a disguise, as a vehicle. But who would be the driver of that vehicle? I needed a hero, a ‘Robin Hood’, a character who would empathize with the public. Thanks to Bayer’s book, I met Di Giovanni and immediately knew it was him. His courage, his rebelliousness, his ideas and actions, his reflections and decisions, in short, his entire life as a novel trapped me and never let me go again”, he says.
In short, the theater is a reflection of the great feelings and passions of each generation. It brings us together to give form to the formless, to give voice to silence, to make the inhuman human, to show what cannot be said.
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