This weekend began the new edition of Estación Alta, the great Catalan autumn theater festival which will offer more than a hundred shows until December. A weekend that gained heat with the presentation of Argentine director Guillermo Cacace who arrived on the peninsula for the first time. He did it with a theater production disabled from Buenos Aires, a free version of Anton Chekhov’s classic The seagull (1896). The audience, around a table, was able to see, side by side, five great actresses undertaking a free and stripped-down version, of great emotional density. Pure Buenos Aires theater and a theatrical experience that’s hard to forget.
The history of Cacace is long and prolix. In 2014, he created a play by a young Croatian author, Ivor Martinić, My son walks just a little slower. He did it in the space available to the director in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires, the Estudio Apacheta, a ground floor where the performances took place on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Unknown and foreign author, minimal diffusion of an independent space and matinee performances. Despite this, the work ended up becoming a phenomenon. The production lasted ten years, and last April it had its last ten performances for which the grand Teatro Presidente Alvear opened its doors on Corrientes Avenue. A production which already constitutes one of the milestones of independent theater in the great world capital of Spanish theater.
Four of the actresses from this impressive play performed in this play. Seagull: Clarisa Korovsky (Masha), Muriel Sao (Kostia), Romina Padoan (Nina) and Paula Fernández Mbarak (Arkádina). To complete the cast, the well-known actress and screenwriter Marcela Guerty joined, forming one of Boris Alekseevic Trigorin, that successful writer and predator of women whom Chekhov drew with the greatest distance, the most heartless that we have ever seen.
After this success and projects in larger theaters with figures like Luis Machín or Julieta Venegas, Cacace wanted to return with Seagull to a production without any support and built on the commitment of the team. In between, the pandemic would arrive. But after a long process, the work was created in February 2023 in Cacace’s small studio.
A quadrangle for ritual and interpretation
Around a table, even with a few spectators seated, the audience is seated less than a meter from the actors. Before starting the function, the More than anything by Jorge Ben, but in a version by Sergio Mendes and the group Black Eyed Peas; Everything is done to welcome and bring together an audience who does not yet know the emotional drift they will go through.
The seagull by Chekhov begins with the premiere in the garden of Arkádina’s country house of his son’s new play, Kostia, a premiere featuring a new actress with whom his son is in love, Nina. Cacace, in search of ritual and proximity, plays to involve the audience in the plot and invites them to drink wine and some refreshments while Masha, the servant, repeats, as in Chekhov’s work, “the show will start soon. “It’s about to start.” Everything is now ready for the ritual.
So begins a journey where you will penetrate the essence of the emotional and existential universe of Chekhov’s characters. The free and happily gratuitous version, by Juan Ignacio Fernández, focuses on the different dramas of the main characters, which are in reality only one: the misfortune and failure of love between men. To do this, the first thing this version does is reduce the work of twelve characters to five, even central characters like Sorin and Medvedenko disappear. The second thing it does is eliminate all digressions from the work. This version focuses on the dialogues in which this unhappiness, this desire for the other which ends in frustration, circulates between the characters.
A circulation of great emotional density with which Cacace works with the actresses face to face at this table which becomes a quadrilateral, a minimal space where they look at each other, communicate with the imprisoned gesture of the person seated and look at the audience trying to communicate what is in the room when any social convention is over. The spectator thus becomes the mirror of the soul of the actress, the character and the human being who watches and scrutinizes them, which creates an atmosphere of overwhelming intimacy. If you go to see the play and you’re lucky or lucky enough to have Romina Padoan, Irina, look you in the eye, hold on to the chair.
Cacace’s acting work is intense, deeply rooted in the Argentinian current where energy overflows and absolute physicality. A record where excess enters, which is not a farce but an outcropping of the subtexts of the Russian’s work. The scene of Koltia’s mother, a major and successful actress in Moscow, disdaining her son’s new play is shockingly uncomfortable. Paula Fernández Mbarak is able to show with austere ferocity the face of a mother determined to murder her beloved son.
In addition, the version is structured with great intelligence so that there is no setting, place of action, nor prolegomena or interludes which concentrate the dramatic conflict. It is a pure word spoken from actor to actor, only Masha, a wonderfully sober Clarisa Korovsky, will play the role of a distanced narrator who allows the play to move forward.
The proposition is influenced by the music which affects the emotional shift. Damien Rica, the great Lhasa de Sela or Ginamaría Armando, among others, will ring. Something risky, bordering on sensationalism, but once immersed and subjugated by the proposition, it does not work against it and allows the emotional density to be raised. In the last part, when the air of The pearl fishermen by Bizet, I think I hear againand finally the love between Nina and Kostia is interrupted forever. The level of dramatic tension was such that many people in the audience ended up crying uncontrollably.
We could also say that certain forms of interpretation of great dramatic intensity, or the upset ending of Chekhov’s play, seek ease towards emotion, but one cannot be at mass and ring the bell. And in this function, the fragility and loneliness of human souls are constantly repeated.
Some well-known speeches from a vexed Nina used by Boris are blurred in the proposition, but we are not in a theater that seeks theatrical archeology. There is no need to seek fidelity in this work, the bet is different. There is a profound rewriting of each text. If you want to see a more canonical proposal, with a respectful repertoire, you can attend the production which opened the season at the Teatre Lliure, The Gavinadirected by the new director of the theater, Julio Manrique. The National Drama Center will also present another production of the same play on October 9 with a cast of blind and visually impaired actors.
The deletion of the determinant in the title of this work is significant, Seagull. He clarifies his desire to get to the essential and, on the other hand, ceases to designate this Nina who, abandoned, in a romantic gesture now a little outdated, signs letters with this pseudonym. Seagull It is an experience of pure theater and acting that will soon pass through the Auditorium of Tenerife (from October 11 to 13), the Teatros del Canal in Madrid (October 15 and 16), the Ibero-American Festival of Cádiz (October 18 and 19) and by Kulturkrik, the Vitoria Festival (October 24). An excellent opportunity to witness the power and capacity of Argentine theater produced on the periphery of the market and the cultural industry.
A curious note to end on. Guillermo Cacace created in Buenos Aires in 2009 the first visible work in the South American cone of Angélica Liddell, a text unknown to the Spanish that Liddell gave him. All it does is wind.
