2024-09-21 03:01:00
The sexual fantasies of an elderly woman with cognitive impairment baffle her two daughters. And when the woman who is the object of the mother’s desire appears, family secrets and assumptions explode. Get out of here! work by Galo Ontiverothese issues are added to the misfortunes that progressive illness brings in old age, alternating humorous family scenes in which affection finally wins over ferocity. Under the direction of the author himself, the work offers the Saturdays at 6pm at Abasto Social Club (Yatay 666)with a cast consisting of Jorge Castaño, María de Cousandier, Mónica Driollet, Claudia Fieg and Gabi Giusti.
Trained at UNA, Ontivero is a playwright and director who left behind his years dedicated to acting. This is because, according to what he says in the interview with Page/12the satisfaction he gets from seeing others perform a text of their own under his guidance is greater than what he received as an interpreter. Furthermore, coming from a non-literary family, as he himself defines it, the act of writing is something that still seems like a challenge to him. I left… The play seems to have been created for the remarkable cast that plays it. However, not all of its actors had worked with Ontivero before. The task of putting together a cast is not easy, admits the director, for whom human qualities weigh as much as acting skills: “Today the ties of group solidarity have been weakened,” the director considers. “And furthermore, independent theatre is becoming like commercial theatre, full of actors who do several plays at once, with the difficulty of establishing a strong bond in the work,” he stresses.
As in his previous work 4 tremors in one hourthis playwright Born in Mendoza usually resorts to some childhood memory when structuring his stories. “My works are autofictional,” Ontivero says, “but in each one there is a different degree of documentation that comes from my own experience,” he explains. The protagonist is partly inspired by her motherIn the play, Sara is a character who had a violent relationship with the father of her daughters and who feels a great attachment to the woman who employed her for decades. Regarding the difficulty of the sisters to agree on the fate of their mother, the author and director warns: “In current times, agreement is difficult because selfishness has become deeper and this happens in all families. Here there is only one character who solves everything through affection,” he analyzes, before talking about working with his actors.
-What are rehearsals like after composing the cast?
-Rehearsals reveal what actors are like as people: as the work deepens, an intimate zone appears that develops creatively through a process that strengthens. Like a bond that is built little by little. Although the intimate is so exposed and commercialized on the networks, anxiety can appear in all creative processes.
-Your latest works deal with family conflicts…
-There is something about middle-class families that interests me a lot. Battered and without possibilities of economic advancement, the progressive discourses and those of the right originate in the middle class. My stories emerge from the intersection of ideological and emotional issues of characters who recognize themselves as belonging to that class.
-The fact that Sara speaks without a filter and generates comedy is something that helps the viewers.
-Sara’s humor is almost like a picaresque, a genre that builds laughter from the vulgar, the sordid or the obscene. In the work, she enters into a dialectic with a very deep drama and makes it possible for the spectator to see it.
-After three strokes, this character shows that he has needs that his family cannot satisfy…
-The subject of illness in old age is what shocks everyone, especially middle-aged viewers, because it makes the elderly laugh a lot, perhaps because they laugh at themselves. With all the demands of today’s capitalism, it is very difficult to care for a person who does not generate an income. It is something that cannot be planned or prevented. It is a situation without an answer and this very thing, its humanity, is what is moving.
What’s coming
Libertarian hatred
Galo Ontivero is finishing writing Hate in the bodya play that, according to him, he began to develop from two readings: Has rebellion become right-wing? by social scientist Pablo Stefanoni. and Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?by philosopher Mark Fisher. From there emerged the character of a libertarian 14-year-old teenager who has a violent discourse on gender theories and institutions, among many other topics, supported by the idea that violence is something natural and should not be regulated. The fact is that his parents, two people with progressive thinking, are summoned by the school directors because their son hit a classmate. The work develops the fight that arises between the two sets of parents.