2023-11-09 23:50:46
Two barefoot men on stage and a table. The situation could seem like a ‘text pass’, a rehearsal, where the actors look at a piece of writing on the table from time to time. They dress in jeans; Everything is relaxed, the texts, the bodies, the way of saying. And, little by little, a surgical text emerges that, without drama or morals, describes a way of thinking, of being in the world, that of men who talk with and about women, how they take them to bed, how they understand them, how they manipulate them. The atmosphere is becoming charged with a toxicity, comical at times, even ridiculous, but which exposes and denounces the normalized codes of language and thought of a sexist system held by men, by men that David Foster Wallace stripped naked by isolating their voices, their discourse, with no other references than language.
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In the same way, the staging will not evolve into drama or theatrical actions or proposals. Simply those two men on stage, calm, letting Wallace’s words emerge. That is the bet of Daniel Veronese, one of the great heads of Argentine theater who shook the scene in the nineties with his company Periférico de Objetos, which did so again in 2001 with his own work, Women who sounded horses, and a cast of unrepeatable actors; and that he confirmed himself as a master of adapting and directing actors with a revolutionary version of The three sisters by the Russian author Chekhov, A drowning man.
David Foster Wallace, the great American author of the late 20th century, published this collection of texts in 1999. 12 years earlier he had published The system broomthree years before his great novel, The infinite joke. Short interviews with repulsive men (1999) is one of the author’s most read books. A work without apparent structure, which contains texts dissimilar in length and style. poetic like Up high forever (text that Juan Navarro brought to the theater two seasons ago), and other very cryptic as Tri-Stan: I sold Sisse Nar to Ecko. And, between these texts, Wallace intersperses certain dated interviews with men, as if it were an anthropological study.
The interviews are presented as transcripts where only the answers are. These texts, not all, are those that Veronese has adapted and presents from Friday, November 10 to Sunday, November 12 at the Fall Festival. “She hadn’t read much Wallace. It all came about on a tour here in Spain, when I entered a bookstore and when I was climbing a staircase I saw the book displayed, I saw the title, I saw that it was by Wallace and I grabbed it,” Veronese tells this newspaper, “I was reading it during the tour and as it progressed I couldn’t stop thinking that it had to be brought to the stage.”
Veronese states that the first thing that was clear to him was the layout: two men and a table. “The texts have an implicit theatricality; It was simply necessary to adapt them, to break the monologue, to have the text said to another. That’s where the first decision came from, all the texts I chose were said to a woman, those that were between men were left out,” explains the Argentine director who, as in other productions, decides to miss the scene and that the woman who receives the texts be one of the two actors. The two actors in the play, Marcelo Subiotto (who has just received the Silver Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival for his performance in the film Madam) and Luis Dziembrowski, go from being the man who speaks to the woman who receives the speech.
Where is the irony?
Veronese, however, differs on the usual reading of Wallace’s texts. “In all the things I have read about this author, his sarcasm, the irony of his texts stand out. It doesn’t sound ironic at all to me, however. He seems to me more like a suffering being, each word put on paper seems to be put with pain, with suffering,” says the director and then points out that the irony “is carried out to empathize.” “We exaggerate reality. In an ironic text, the truth of the words has nothing to do with what is being said. On the other hand, Wallace is very honest and direct, he does not give an opinion, he simply puts before your eyes how things are, that is why he is stark and one cannot act stupid and say that it has nothing to do with him,” he concludes.
In all the things I have read about David Foster Wallace, his sarcasm and the irony of his texts stand out. It doesn’t sound ironic at all to me, however. He seems more like a suffering being to me.
Daniel Veronese — Playwright
All the texts in the work are directed to the same point: the machismo inherent in male thought, “the masculinity in this work, which was written in the nineties, has no filter. And the author wrote it in a time where these behaviors were seen as normal and were accepted. Everything has changed, in the middle of this century, at least in Argentina, a very critical view of male toxicity began to be strongly expressed. Before everything was lighter, these behaviors were forgiven, it is impressive how all this has changed. And he anticipated it”, says Veronese who, far from being triumphalist, he affirms that “although all this has happened, it is still the man who allows the woman to have power, word. The man is still the owner of the ball and I don’t know how that is going to change.”
The work is framed within the cycle put together by the director, Experiences, where this text, a text by the author Marcus Lindeen, and another text from the same book by Foster Wallace were performed with the same staging, The depressed person, a very harsh story about this illness and its suicidal tendencies, played by the recently deceased María Onetto. The three appeared at the theater Timbre 4 from Buenos Aires. “When I read The depressed person The same thing happened to me, I saw that it had to be done in theater and that Onetto had to do it, she was the only Argentine actress who could do it,” recalls Veronese, who does not want to talk much about the death caused by depression of this great actress and the absence that has left. “Every time two or three actors get together, we end up talking about her; It is impossible not to miss her – she says – to the festival in Madrid we were going to come with both pieces and between shows we were going to give choripanes [típico bocatín argentino]a very Buenos Aires Foster Wallace, but it couldn’t be.”
Another frustrated project is the assembly that Veronese was going to carry out of this work in Spain. “I was talking to the Teatro de la Abadía, with the former director, Carlos Aladro, but the management changed and the project was cut,” says Veronese about this theater that Juan Mayorga now directs. “We were going to do a version with actors and another with actresses, and that the public could choose the one that most appealed to them. I imagine a production with actresses, I think that with women I would dare more to ridicule the man, imagine Susi Sánchez there on stage,” the director fantasizes. Veronese has already made three stagings of the work, the Argentine one that can be seen at the Festival and two other productions in Chile and Italy.
The strength of this production lies, apart from the word of the American author, in a purely theatrical adaptation, “the code of theater is very different from that of literature, and I know what that code is, I know what does not belong in the theater, what does not enter the stage, and I know it intuitively,” says Veronese, “I write as a director, if I put a word I have to take charge of it, every second on the stage has to be justified. The objective is to be able to reproduce the wonder of that literary writing, but in dramatic writing you have to produce a sequence that makes the viewer grab his nose and carry him along until the end of the work,” he concludes. he.
The acting
The other leg of the strength of the production lies in two of the best actors in Argentina dedicated to a direction they already know. Subioto and Dziembrowski have been working with Veronese for years, they understand him and they dedicate themselves to the game. There is an acting code that is unique to this director, a code that he exploited in A drowning mana version of Chekhov’s play in which the audience came to a wing of the Buenos Aires theater Camerin of the Muses and sat down. Among the spectators, with their same clothes, someone began to say, it seemed at first that it was not the play, but yes, that was pure Chekhov brought to the present. The same magic that Louis Malle brought to the film Vania, on 42nd Street (1994), Veronese knew how to bring it to the theater.
I look for that in acting that they are honest and simple. That and not coming from home with the text and the learned way of saying. When we start a process, I don’t know what play it is going to be, we have to discover it by rehearsing with the actors.
Daniel Veronese — Playwright
And that magic is in the work that he now presents in Madrid. A theater where the actor reigns, a slow way of saying, without dramatic fuss, naturalistic without being so, realistic without being so. To explain it, Veronese recalls that 2004 production: “One day, in the rehearsals of that play, I told the actors: ‘Look at how they are dressed, with jeans, with a jacket, nothing to do with Chekhov and yet when I see them acting, yes it is.’ I asked them to come dressed like this, to mingle with the audience and that’s how the play began. That puts the incredible actor in a place of power. I remember how they got to the theater, by bus, by taxi. They came and did. I remember two actors, Claudio Tolcachir and Marta Lubos, they arrived with the play almost started, they had another performance before. They would get there having a wine and some cheese, they would come in and start saying, it was wonderful,” Veronese recalls.
“It’s not that it’s easy, it’s not; It’s about being honest and simple, I look for that in acting. That and not coming from home with the text and the learned way of saying. When we start a process, I don’t know what play it’s going to be, we have to discover it by rehearsing, with the actors,” the director says about the performance. “Oh, and one thing I can’t stand or forgive is an actor who works for someone else who isn’t listening, who doesn’t react to what the other person is telling him, even if it’s the 1,500th show, that has to happen,” he concludes. .
When asked why the actors go barefoot, the Argentine director is sincere: “I wanted them to be naked, I couldn’t achieve it neither in Argentina, nor in Chile, nor in Italy, I wanted to say ‘women of the world, look how pathetic we are, I don’t care.’ throw stones, that’s how we men are,’ but they didn’t want to and at least only the feet were left.”
Veronese has just been in Madrid with a Pinter montage, Return homewill premiere his own work with Malena Alterio and David Llorente in Las Naves de Matadero in May 2024, Their friends. He is one of the most prolific directors in Spain and Argentina. He doesn’t stop riding. It doesn’t always turn out well. His movement between the most commercial theater and independent theater sometimes causes him to stumble. But this montage, although small, is pure Veronese. A theater centered on the actor and a text that, on this occasion, brings out all the stark, sad and furious force of David Foster Wallace.
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