Brief encounters with repulsive men
Author: David Foster Wallace
Version and direction: Daniel Veronese
Performers: Jorge Bosch and Gustavo Salmerón
Off Niemeyer, October 25, Avilés
I don’t know Wallace’s book Short interviews with repulsive men –almost eponymously titled– that Veronese turns into scenic, “dramatic” dialogues. This is the fourth time it has done so after the experience of Argentina, Chile and Italy. Interpersonal relationships are always power relationships: economic, physical, intellectual, emotional, sexual power… That the forces are balanced and on equal terms so that they complement each other in the best possible way is the objective for which the left and feminism for at least the last thirty years. The text by Foster Wallace and the show by Veronese, Jorge Bosch and Gustavo Salmerón emphasize some of the most frequent alibis used in the man-woman dialectical combat, within the relationship or marriage and through a tour de force that It does not avoid moral reproaches, emotional blackmail, twists or Machiavellian retreats with reversible folds. To do this, Veronese presents eight independent stage paintings that begin and close with the sound of a bell, in a white space with two tables, two chairs and two barefoot actors, dressed in black and jeans. The fact that men embody women acts as an important distancing element within a highly intense naturalistic interpretive approach, sotto voce, managing to “dedramatize” and displace conventional roles so that the focus of attention falls on male consciousness. . And it seems like a success to me. In the discussion after the performance, the director expressed his interest in showing “how men process feminism and their relationship with women.” And hence his choice.
Eight paintings, eight hidden confrontations, sometimes explicit, are the protagonist element of this intimate and whispered work that moves, bothers, unsettles and at times produces rejection and repulsion. The cancellation of the other that is established within a couple is here scrutinized with irony, heartbreak and a desire to provoke. Veronese’s success consists in not overloading the inks and playing the trick of sensationalism, but instead opting for a tenuous and delicate exposition, stripped of histrionics. Just two actors and the miseries of the characters confronted with the spectators. The female role passes from one performer to another alternately and without any type of affectation or characterization. The fragility and humanity with which Jorge Bosch embodies the woman in the first painting, “Paternal,” is astonishing, where a manipulative and cynical being attacks his partner who wants to separate. With only her body posture and just a few monosyllables she manages to convey the feelings of that subjugated woman. In the following scene, with a cruelty typical of black humor and a lot of perversion, it shows a deformed individual who exploits the feeling of guilt in the women with whom he interacts. Behavior that unfortunately is still common. In “The Perfect Lover” Gustavo Salmerón questions with grace, skeptical irony and a lot of sarcasm, all the models of the male lover and in “Radical”, a brutal and very powerful scene, Bosch tells in a calm tone, almost inaudible (perhaps too much so). , a rape with torture.
Seduction as a game, desire, animal men versus sensitive men, violence, complaints of harassment or The man in search of meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, the best-selling book in the US cited here as a metaphor and theory of resistance, are some of the themes of these Brief encounters with repulsive menalways presented in an exquisite way by a Salmerón who moves us with his prototypes of a cynical manipulator, demagogue and sophist, and a no less excellent Bosch who alternates that of a fragile woman and a twisted abuser. Some profiles of psychopaths and sociopaths in power relations that suffocate and oppress any type of hope.
#Toxic #relationships #Norths #Focused #periphery
