Theater from the streets

Backtracking a day, I went to a play on Saturday night. I'd been sick since Thursday night, presumably from something I ate. Fever, nausea, vomiting, the whole works. By Saturday morning I felt mostly recovered so I invited Current Something #2 to accompany me. My friend Ulises was directing the play and I'd promised I would attend.

His theater group is something hard for me to explain because I still don't understand it fully. Apparently the government here permits neighborhood groups to form and utilize certain assets for the benefit of the community. In this case, it was an abandoned bank building. The theater group appropriated one floor, brought in some chairs, created a rudimentary set, and it became a space for their production, "Cuando las almas se hacen presentes" (when the souls become present).

My Spanish isn't good enough to follow all of the dialog but I found the production quite interesting nonetheless. My condensed version of the story is a young woman is living with her mother, who is not quite in her right mind. Her husband died 17 years earlier but every night she still sets a plate of food at his place at the table and denies that he is dead. The daughter seems desperate, trapped with a half-crazed mother, unable to go out to work or to meet new friends, hopeless about future possibilities in her life. Eventually the husband appears to his wife as a phantom and talks with her, but I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be a genuine apparition or only a representation for us of what was happening in her mind. At the end, the mother has also died and the daughter is left alone, setting the table for three every night.

Current Something #2 told me that the play was full of cultural and historical references related to current politics, but all of that went right over my head due to language difficulties as well as ignorance of all of the above. I hope in time to remedy that and understand much more about who these people of Argentina are, what they think about their past, and where they want to go in the future.