"I think we amount to a kind of exorcism of military juntas
whenever we do Bolivar. Every time
we perform the play in a country having a military dictatorship,
they have elections there before the year is out." Pilar Romero
Caracas, Venezuela's Grupo Rajatabla and Teatro Irrumpe of Santiago de Cuba brought Bolivar and María Antonia, respectively,
to Montreal's recent Festival de Theatre des Amériques (May 1985). Written by José Antonio Rial, Bolivar puts loose-fitting historical trappings on a
reenactment of the South American liberator's final days as staged by inmates in a
present-day concentration camp. Although the verbiage is at times as thick as the
incense, the broken treatment of history achieves its desired effect. Simón
Bolívar, as
leading actress Pilar Romero points out in this interview, "walks
back and forth through time" until the centuries converge. Eugenio Hernández Espinosa's María Antonia travels chronologically backwards as
well, but remains set in pre-revolutionary Havana as a full-blown, Afro-Cuban
period piece. Under Roberto Blanco's direction, this folklorically colored
exploration has served to show Cuban audiences both the distinctions and the blurs between what Cuba once was and what it seeks to become.
Both plays were performed in Spanish for four nights and to full houses. They were among the highlights of a festival that brought more than 20 groups and companies from both American continents to receptive
audiences in largely French-speaking Montreal.
INTERVIEW WITH PILAR ROMERO
With its play-within-a-play premise and its progress towards a kind of
exploded climax, Bolivar resembles Marat/Sade.
Everything Carlos Giménez directs has a sui generis esthetics to
it. When we bring Bolivar to New York, or perhaps The Good Woman of
Setzuan, we expect these resemblances to show, though only to the advantage of the play.
A little more on that special esthetics, please.
Well, consider the Marat/Sade trappings—inmates, guards, drama
under the gun, nudism, lunacy—but set up for an exclusively domestic, meaning Venezuelan,
audience. So much of the historical background is taken for granted. Simón Bolívar, his lover Manuela Saenz, his plan for a united
South America—these are things that Venezuelans know so automatically that perhaps they don't really know them at all. The Marat/Sade drapings
serve to jar all the assumptions about Bolivar, so that the bust-in-the-park
image can be reassessed.
Do you think costuming and set alone achieve that?
No, it has to be in the fabric of the play, too. In this case it is
there. The concentration camp prisoners choose the last five days of Bolivar's life
because they are fraught with misery, conspiracy, anguish, betrayal. Bolivar
himself doesn't believe in the acclamation he gets from Manuela and others, nor
in the possibility of his being remembered other than as a great but more
or less empty public figure. The interaction of history and actuality changes
all this, as you saw. For instance, at one point the concentration camp overseer
jumps into the play he has forced the inmates to perform and breaks into a
ringing speech on the inspiration that Bolivar's name still brings to Latin
American military officialdom.
Yes, I remember the music nearly drowned him out.
We use the "vanitas, vanitas" choral score obtrusively because
we wish to break the spell of compliance, the conspiracy between music and the
audience which we feel sterilizes a work's potential for memorability. So you
have a classical military peroration forced to compete with this strident
choral music.
Isn 't that a bit preachy?
I don't think so, not when played against the other angles from which
Bolivar is viewed. For instance, Bolivar himself—and here you have what I mean
by Carlos Giménez's esthetics strengthening the play—tends to oscillate
between his role as concentration camp inmate and his classical incarnation of
the 19thcentury hero. When it's the former, he's denouncing 20th-century
militarism right and left, half inmate, half Bolivar. When he is fully the
historical Simón Bolívar, he interacts with his own early 19th century: its high society criollas, called the mantuanas, his half-crazy lover, Manuela, the generals
who betrayed him. And this pulls the staging right along with him and you are in the
period piece until you are forced out of it again. It's always back and forth
like that.
How has the play done outside of Venezuela?
I think we amount to a kind of exorcism of military juntas whenever we
do Bolivar. Every time we perform the play in
a country having a military dictatorship, they have elections there before the year is out.
In what countries, for instance?
In Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Aside from those miracles, how has the play been received?
It has done very well, but let me tell you something that happened in Montevideo when we played Bolivar. You saw the concentration camp
military police in uniform placed in the audience at the beginning of the play.
Well, the Uruguayans were so accustomed to this kind of vigilance that when the
guards grabbed me, that is, Manuela, at the beginning of the play as part of
the play's action, the people in the theatre thought that they were real military
police and pulled me down into the rows of seats in order to protect me. I had
to break character to tell them it was part of the play. So imagine what it
means to those people to see characters like the guards in a work like Bolivar,
to see them challenged, placed in a context they do not entirely control.
Surely the reaction has been different in Montreal.
Yes, and in one very special way. I'm not so Stanislavskian that I am subsumed in my role, meaning I often watch the audience out of the
corner of my eye when the part I 'm playing allows it. And in Montreal, Manuela
Sáenz had a remarkably strong and supportive public. There was a real
partiality to the woman's role here, a real sympathy. I hadn't ever experienced it. It
came out in the press, in the applauding, and in the attention I could feel
as I performed the part.
(…)
©Mark McCaffrey
Middlebury, Vermont
Latin American Theatre Review
Kansas University
Spring1986
