2024-03-31 03:01:00
In Juana wove ita work written, directed and starring Ignacio Sánchez Master, the San Juan landscape appears: four characters are played by actors from San Juan (María Pilar Mestre, Juan Francisco López Bubica, Federico Buso and the author) then you hear that accent, you detect typical catchphrases and you feel a cadence quite different from the Buenos Aires anxiety. “When the project began to take shape, I had just become a dad in the middle of the pandemic – my first child was born on March 29, 2020 – so we were locked up and I really wanted to be in San Juan. At that time I was accumulating material and I spoke with my cousin, Pilar Mestre, to start making some logs,” says the author in dialogue with Page 12.
His cousin had moved in with her 85-year-old grandmother and he had just become a father, so the day-to-day life of living with an older adult and a baby appeared. “We put together that record and the world of adults and that of babies began to appear, but also San Juan: because of missing the province and because of my cousin who lives there, memories and characters from San Juan emerged. When I put together the cast I didn’t feel like explaining what what it means to be from San Juan. There was something of that identity and that way of understanding time that the actors already had to have,” he says.
El Negro (Sánchez Mestre) and El Cabezón (López Bubica) have just lost their mother and must decide what to do with the inherited house but it is not easy, each one has their ideas. Then Gringa (Mestre) arrives, a cousin from San Juan who now lives in Buenos Aires. She travels to help them with grief and the succession, but she is pregnant and is not even able to tell her mother, so it is not clear who should help whom. In addition to the protagonists, other important characters appear: a friend of her mother (Maitina De Marco), a real estate agent from Córdoba (Paula Trucchi) and an older master builder from the town (Federico Buso).
When she was looking for an actress from Córdoba, someone wrote to her on Instagram: “You have to meet Paula Trucchi.” They met in a cafe, hit it off and he called her for her role. About De Marco, he says: “Maitina is an actress that I really like, I always wanted to work with her so I proposed it directly to her. It was very funny because she just read the scenes in which she acted and said: ‘I love it’. After “On the first pass, he confessed: ‘I didn’t know it was that long.’ A little bit he regretted it and a little bit he wanted to do it, so that energy made his character start to get more into the play.”
–What value do you give to humor? Here it is mixed with the tragedy of a duel.
-I love it. It’s very healthy to laugh, even in those situations. At wakes, humor appears a lot and in some way decompresses. The main objective is not to make people laugh all the time but rather so that the audience can get involved in what we are telling. When I choose actors I also think about that. She had seen Maitina in other works and she knew that she could bring something of that to the character because she already brings it to the stage.
–In some sense this work is more personal than others. Is it more difficult to write, act and direct from that intimacy?
–When you write, the personal always creeps in. Here it is more mixed because I had to be in all three roles. I think something that has to do with emotions leaks into acting, but that makes acting work more interesting (at least for me). There are very intimate issues like the audios, which were recorded by my family: listening to those voices already puts me in a particular place. There is an aunt who died recently and in the audio she talks about another death. It’s intimate, but there are also a lot of fictionalized memories. My mother didn’t die, I didn’t go through that, but my grandmother’s name was Juana and she knitted. It is put at the service of a fiction that touches on themes that we all go through: the loss of a loved one, the arrival of someone.
In the work, memories appear in the theme but also in the structure. “I wanted the work to operate with the same mechanism that memories operate in us, which are sometimes one way and sometimes another. You tell yourself a story because it suits you, even if it is not so real; they are almost fictions because “There is no longer a way to access the supposed truth. It is very fragile to represent them, but in the revival I felt that the pieces of the blanket were better arranged.”
–The play plays with metatheatricality and is fun. ¿How did this appear?
–I think it was a way to take charge of the three roles. I am the Black, I have to act, but I am also the author and the director. The setting asked for it and we began to discover it in rehearsals. Laura Copertino (set designer) proposed setting up the “little theater of the Negro”, a place where he would stage memories of him with these characters that enter and leave the scene. When I heard that, something more solid was configured for the set. At times the director is there looking at what was put together, he enters, he leaves, he checks things in the notebook as if the keys to the work were there.
The collective is part of the genesis. The artist names some colleagues who helped him – his partner Pilar Gamboa, Martín Flores Cárdenas, Lorena Vega –, actors who watched from the outside a scene in which they did not participate, his assistant director (Nina Horowitz) or the costume designer (Lara Sol Gaudini) and set designer, who proposed asking for 20×20 cm squares from family, friends and acquaintances who knew how to knit. “The blanket is an expression of the collective, it is made by everyone and is a symbol of the work,” says the playwright who is a member of Paraíso, a performing arts club created by a community of artists that offer premieres, dismantlings, workshops and meetings. under the subscription modality. When asked about that experience, he says: “In this context there is no choice but to trust in the collective. Paraíso was born in a pandemic because our activity was paralyzed. Cynthia Edul called us together and this idea resonated with all of us because we were looking for new forms of production. Last year, in addition to Paraíso’s help, we were able to access others. This year no. As artists we must resist, insist, create and defend these spaces. The outlook is hopeless because they are destroying everything in all areas; It is a time to be together and think about how to resist intelligently.. “You have to be careful because they want you to go out on a collision course, everything they do today is for Twitter.”
*Juana wove it It can be seen on Fridays at 9 p.m. on Timbre 4 (México 3554) and tickets are available through Alternativa Teatral.