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written and directed by Mariano Pensotti

Grupo Marea, Luminato, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

June 19-21, 2015

“The past is a grotesque animal

And in its eyes you see

How completely wrong you can be” (Of Montreal, 2007)

Last year the Luminato Festival introduced Toronto to the fascinating work of Argentine writer and director Mariano Pensotti.  His Cineastas (2013) made my Top Ten List of that year and my review concluded: “After Cineastas you will want to see more work by Pensotti and his extraordinarily talented troupe.  Lets hope that sometime in the near future Luminato can fulfill that wish”. 

Well, Luminato has fulfilled that wish with an earlier, equally fascinating piece called El pasado es un animal grotesco (The Past is a Grotesque Animal) from 2010.  As with Cineastas, the narrative and the production design are integrally related.  Cineastas presented us with a two-storey stage with action taking place simultaneously on both stages.  In Pasado, Pensotti uses a simple revolve divided into four equal sections.  The sections are each clad in plywood and represent the different spaces mostly indoors, but sometime outdoors, that the four principal characters inhabit.  Which space belongs to whom is determined by its furniture and other set decorations.  As the narrative develops and the the characters move beyond the the spaces originally associated with them, sets are changed while a given quadrant is facing away from the audience.  In the course of the play, all quadrants are changed numerous times as the four characters leave Buenos Aires to seek their fortunes, learn more about themselves or both.

Pasado follows the lives of four Porteños between the ages of 25 and 35.    The action begins in June 1999 and ends in 2009.  The four main characters are Mario, Laura, Vicky and Pablo.  Though the narrative always moves from story to story in this precise order, it does not move forward in strict chronological order except that all the events begin in 1999 and end in 2009.  In Cineastas the five main characters were all filmmakers and thus began with something in common.  In Pasado the four main characters belong to a wide range of professions and their stories initially appear even more unrelated than those of the characters in Cineastas.  Yet, as in Cineastas, the longer the action continues the greater the parallels become among the four stories so that our minds are engaged not only in taking in new elements of a given story but in comparing and contrasting that story with the other three. 

The action begins with Mario (Santiago Goberni), an actor in television commercials, who longs to be an independent filmmaker but has no background or connections to do so.  He is addicted to the films of Jacques Demy, but the screenplays he tries to write always come out as imitations of Fassbinder or Werner Herzog.  Otherwise, he is happy having sex with his girlfriend Dana (Laura Paredes). 

We shift next to the story of Laura (Maria Ines Sancerni), who is fed up with her dull life in a sleep suburb of Buenos Aires and steals her father’s entire saving to flee to Paris with her friend Esteban (Santiago Goberni) where she hopes to live the kind of bohemian life depicted in films of the French Nouvelle Vague.

Next we meet Vicky (Laura Paredes), who works as a veterinarian.  She comes across a box full of photographs belonging to her father, who as a salesman travels frequently to the country.  The photos reveals that her father has a second family in the country, including a daughter just her age to whom he has given many of the same presents.

Finally we meet Pablo (Javier Lorenzo), a business student who dabbles in creative writing without realizing that what he writes is quite good.  Like Vicky, he also discovers a surprise in a box.  He finds a package on his doorstep when he leaves for class one day.  Inside is a severed human hand in the position of holding a pen.  He is thrown into turmoil as to what it means?  Has someone discovered he writes and has sent this grotesque message of disapproval?  Or does the hand represent some other threat against him?

Each cycle through the four stories brings new developments.  Mario takes a very circuitous path to achieving his dreams.  His biggest hit is a film made up of clips of ordinary people doing ordinary things to which he provides voiceover narration about their lives and thoughts.  Laura’s stay in Paris goes badly and she returns to Buenos Aires, where she gets a job playing Mary Magdalene in a biblical theme park called Terra Santa.  She eventually falls in love with a Palestinian actor Hasan (Santiago Goberni) hired to play Jesus.  Vicky, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with her father’s other family and spends days in the country spying on them to learn about their everyday activities.  At the same time Pablo becomes obsessed with discovering the origin of the hand and finding its owner and whether he is alive or dead.

One element that links all the stories is that all four discover doubles of themselves that call their own identity into question.  When Mario meets a famous filmmaker (Javier Lorenzo), he thinks he has found the person in the world he would like to be.  When Mario makes his own life into a film acted by a Japanese cast, he can’t identify with what he sees.  In Paris, Laura meets Lora (Laura Paredes), the ideal of what she would like to be, only to be betrayed by her.  In Terra Santa, Laura’s fictional role as Mary Magdalene becomes real when she and the man who plays Jesus fall in love. 

When Vicky’s mother dies and she sees that her father (Javier Lorenzo) has placed an ad in the paper for someone to write to, she takes on that role, pretending to be someone like her mother.  Pablo becomes a success in business in Brazil, but once he returns to Buenos Aires finds that he has the urge to write again when he uses the dead hand to hold his pen. 

For the first part of the action, an actor from one scene will take on the role as the narrator of the following scene so that Laura Paredes, who has played Mario’s girlfriend Dana, picks up the microphone and narrates the following scene about Maria Ines Sancerni as Laura, followed by Sancerni narrating the next scene about Paredes as Vicky.  The play begins with actors providing miked voiceover narration of scenes played by other actors.  Later, narrators speak over unmiked dialogue and eventually unmiked dialogue as well as miked narration move the action forward.  Sometimes an actor like Goberni will take the mic to narrate his character’s thoughts in a scene as when Mario meets the famous filmmaker.  The filmmaker rattles on (unmiked) but all we are Mario’s (miked) thoughts. 

What is so remarkable about the cast is how easily they shift from character to character, each playing at least five roles, and how they shift from character to narrator, instantly dropping the high emotion they had as a character to assume the wry tone of a narrator. 

During the action realities turn into fictions and fictions into realities.  Two characters, Mario and Laura, find they have changed so much they no longer recognize their past selves.  The other two, Vicky and Pablo, finds that through creating fiction the come to know better who they are.  What makes understanding oneself so difficult for all four characters is that they are never given pause to reflect because they are all caught up in the motion of time as symbolized by the stage which begins revolving clockwise when the play starts and does not stop until it ends.

Pensotti has taken his title from a song from 2007 by the American alt-rock group Of Montreal, which itself discusses the changes wrought by the passage of time.  In the mythology that Of Montreal lead singer Kevin Barnes creates for himself, the song is meant to represent his transition from himself to his stage alter ego.  While the first lines of the song (see the epigraph) present one way of looking at the play, a better insight comes from a line that Pensotti gives the confused Mario: “Life is a mixture of who we are and who we would like to be, but are not”. 

While Pensotti thinks the play shows how we continually fictionalize the past, Mario’s insight comes closer to what we actually see in the play.  All the characters meet doubles of themselves, but at the same time all the characters create mental doubles of themselves who are the ideal of what they would like to be.  Despite all the metafictions in the piece, Pasado remains grounded in human experience by depicting with both humour and compassion how four people strive and sometimes fail to become this ideal person.  Their success and their failure come about because the medium of time in which we live is always in motion, making it difficult to build anything permanent in an inherently transient world.

Theatrically and intellectually, Pasado is a great play that confirms Pensotti’s reputation as one of the most important figures in theatre today as well as that of his troupe, Grupo Marea, as one of the finest acting ensembles one could ever hope to see.  His mingling of multiple stories and his view of fiction and reality as mirrors of each other is very much like the work of Robert Lepage, but Pensotti accomplishes more with simpler means.  The brilliance of a piece like Pasado lies in its acting and storytelling, not in high tech effects.  I can’t wait till Luminato brings us the next work by Pensotti.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: Pilar Gamboa, Santiago Goberni, Javier Lorenzo and Maria Ines Sancerni; Javier Lorenzo as Pablo, ©2012 Marias Senton; Pilar Gamboa, Maria Ines Sancerni, Santiago Goberni and Javier Lorenzo, ©2012 Dalton Valério.

For tickets, visit http://luminatofestival.com.