JARDIN DE PULPOS
The actors in Taller del Sotano understand the importance of mastering the fundamentals. The exquisite physical control these artists display is restricted in America to the best professional sports teams. The cast spent two months, all day, every day, just developing a physical language for Jardin de pulpos (“Octopus Garden”), given its American premiere at this year’s International Theatre Festival. And all this work was done without the benefit of pay. In fact, one of the cast members told me that Taller’s appearance at Chicago’s festival marks the first time the company have been paid for their work, even though they’ve appeared in half a dozen other festivals in Latin and South America.
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The cast’s extraordinary dedication is evident from the moment Jardin begins. Ghostlike figures appear across the back of the stage, faces distorted into grotesque masks and bodies bent into highly stylized positions. While the action of the play begins downstage, these figures hold their positions for perhaps 15 minutes, occasionally raising an arm or turning a head in excruciating slow motion. Even doing “nothing,” these actors are riveting. Most remarkable of all is that the actors’ physical feats, here and throughout the play, seem to require no effort. This is the mark of master artists: developing a technique to a level so virtuosic that it’s second nature and can be applied to the project at hand.
Vargas’s indebtedness to certain European innovators is clear. The grotesque comedy of the great Polish director Tadeusz Kantor is in evidence, as are the sad and violent sexual couplings of German dance-theater artist Pina Bausch. But Jardin also has a Latin sensibility reminiscent of the work of Chile’s Pablo Neruda, Spain’s Fernando Arrabal, and Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez. All these writers share with Vargas the ability to bring together the profane and the sacred, the vile and the pure, the real and the magical–to transcend what English-speaking cultures tend to think of as opposites. For example, Jose’s grandmother mourns her dead husband with an undying love. Her heart is so full of love, she tells us, that she must expel some every day so as not to be overwhelmed. In the same breath, however, she rails against her dead husband for his lifelong habit of eating pork and passing gas. Somehow love and flatulence become two sides of a single emotional experience, each heightening the reality and intensity of the other.
Near the end of the play Antonia laments that without young people–most of whom, we discover, were massacred in the plaza–ideas no longer float into the air. Taller del Sotano, only four years in existence, has burst onto the international scene as if to fill that void, working with maturity and confidence, sending out not just ideas but truths. Theirs is the kind of theater that can rejuvenate the novice and seasoned viewer alike.
