2023-10-22 04:55:58
David Amitín is a crucial name in our theater: a teacher of actors and playwright of international renown, he continues with the staging of “London, 1930” at the Payró theater, a play that is a version of a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. What does it mean for someone like Amitín to reprocess a work by Hawthorne? Amitín: “The first news I had regarding this meeting was in a conference by Jorge Luis Borges many years ago, where he mentioned this story, as a paradigmatic story. I read it, he was very young. A few years ago, living in Madrid, it occurred to me that he might make a theatrical version. I had to work a lot because the story is very synthetic. There are no dialogues, it is very brief. I had to invent dialogue, a narrator, things that didn’t exist in the original. I was always interested in the mysterious behavior of this character, who leaves his house for no reason and spends his time spying on his wife. Just as he left, he comes back for no reason. It is a material that emphasizes something elusive in human behavior. This applies to what is happening today.” And he continues: “He is linked in his own way with everything that modern communication, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence means: everything is moving, we are in a new perspective. It adds mystery to human behaviors. Also to the idea of civilization. Since the protagonist of this story is such a special individual, it is clear that Hawthorne belonged to a very peculiar generation (Thoreau, Emmerson, Allan Poe, New England) that had a vision, pardon the redundancy, peculiar to human behavior.
—Why does the specific peculiarity of this character catch your attention?
—I made a version of Bartleby in 2000, that is, the route of these special individuals began to be traveled earlier. And much earlier, in 1984, I premiered a version of “Memories from Underground,” Dostoevsky’s short novel, which talks regarding an individual isolated from society who lives with a servant and who has a terrible relationship. This man spends the day drinking tea, and remembering the adventures of his youth, full of arrogance and indignation. Apparently something attracts me to these characters. You should think regarding it a little.
—What have you discovered regarding the art of counting by working on it?
—This is a very substantial and very strong story. Why would a man mortgage twenty years of his life and that of his wife for almost nothing? When I had to work on this, I considered writing a new work. Now that I say this, well, it’s kind of plagiarism if you will. But the great playwrights have always plagiarized, from Shakespeare to Calderón, they have taken stories that already existed and given them an extraordinary twist, and the skeleton of the original story remains, the rest is very different. Something like this happened to me with this story, when you see the final text, it seems very far away and at the same time very close. Everything that happens is another matter.
—What do you feel there is in you that generates the desire to tell stories in different formats, such as opera or theater?
—We all have some themes, some obsessions, that guide us and push us all the time. For some reason we become a little repetitive on some topics. Even great themes like Tennessee Williams, like a South of the United States that was full and now is in decline. The same in Chekhov, the force that the past has. Why does one reiterate characters and stories? Creation is quite mysterious, it has common things that are inevitable. What I can tell you is that I am a frustrated musician, I had a musical training and I left it. But in recent years, doing opera both here and in Germany and other places, a great common point appeared.
Opera as a passion
—What do you remember regarding your time creating different forms of stories for opera and in different cities around the world?
—It was an enrichment for me, because although I regret it for theater people, there is something in opera when a moment of musical and dramatic explosion occurs that is unattainable. Opera has a unique force, it leads you to certain pathos. There was a little book that Barenboim and Patricio Kohon wrote regarding a staging they did at La Scala of “Tristan und Isolde”, they analyze the opera from the place of staging. It is something extraordinary. Opera is a material that is one of the great inventions of the human race: that instead of speaking they sing, that there is an orchestra, that there is an unusual drama. When one thinks that there are complete writings of Mozart almost crossed out, and one cannot help but think, how is it possible?
—What does being able to do shows in Argentina mean for you who have lived in another country for several years and even have an acting school in Madrid?
—I feel like an inhabitant of Buenos Aires. I have trained here in the city, I have studied here. I belong here. I remember Buenos Aires in the 60s, the 70s. In the 60s, the literary magazines, there were seven complete orchestras. It was a luxury. They were complete symphony orchestras functioning. Today I am shocked to see the begging that exists in the streets of Buenos Aires today. I really like working in it, there is something regarding the language that allows me to communicate with the world of Buenos Aires.
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