Daniel Veronese (Buenos Aires, 1955) was browsing in a Madrid bookstore when he came across a title that caught his attention: ‘Brief interviews with repulsive men’. Its author, David Foster Wallace. Right there he immersed himself in its pages and began to imagine the stories he told brought to the stage. The result was ‘Brief Encounters with Repulsive Men’, a production that premiered in Buenos Aires and visited the Madrid Autumn Festival last year. Now he puts it back on his feet, with Jorge Bosch and Gustavo Salmeron as interpreters; The show premieres today in Avilés, and will be on display on Mondays, starting on the 28th, at the Teatro Bellas Artes in Madrid.
The work is divided into eight scenes. “Foster actually writes monologues, and I have intervened in them with small interventions from a woman,” explains the director. But he didn’t want a man and a woman to play him; I didn’t want many actors either, so I thought about two actors, and that in each monologue one would play the woman’s part. The only thing they have that is women is how they are addressed, they don’t have to act feminine at all.
The title of the function is sufficiently explanatory. It presents eight men in situations that Veronese defines as “toxic and normalizedwhich only in recent years have been questioned by society. The director wanted to create repulsive characters, but not so repulsive that the viewer rejects them from the beginning. There are no situations of violence, nor do they raise the tone of their often conciliatory voice. “They are different types of patriarchal situations where the man is exercising power with total normality.”
When Jorge Bosch received the text he had to think about it; «It is very beast; “I told Daniel that I didn’t know if I wanted to go home with that backpack every day.” Gustavo Salmerón, who has been away from the stage for many years, nods. «It is a difficult text to learn, because in some way it reminds you of things that you have not necessarily done, but that you have seen; others that you have been able to do in your youth… There is a latent machismo that colors the entire text, micromachismos very difficult to detect, they are totally impregnated in society, and you have to be very alert to be able to capture them. It is very difficult to analyze or judge a couple from the outside, because they sometimes have codes that make something that may seem sexist simply a game for them. But it is a game that may be poisoned… Anyway, when I read the text I thought I didn’t know if I wanted to do it; But it is a challenge to not judge the characters, to ensure that they do not dislike each other, to humanize them as much as possible.
The men drawn by David Foster Wallace and profiled by Veronese are manipulative, cynical, vain, dark, sibylline… The Argentine director says that he would love to do some shows only for women and others only for men to see the different reactions to this mirror that he places in front of the audience, and that shows “something that is ultimately a social problem. I don’t know if the work has a feminist component; “It has a component of denunciation of patriarchy of which we are part.” And although he appears hopeful and is aware that things have changed, Veronese thinks that “man still has the power. That’s why I say that I would very much like the work to function as a mirror.
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