El Loco y la Triste (review)

Juan Radrigán wrote El loco y la triste in 1985 in Chile during the twelfth year of General Pinochet's seventeen-year dictatorship. Under Pinochet, the poor were considered dissidents because they benefited from and relied on the economic restructuring attempted by Socialist President Salvador Allende, whom he deposed. While the military regime pursued free-market economic policies that shrank wages and eliminated many jobs to make the poor less visible, it also began eradication programs to raze shantytowns, pushing the already-marginalized even farther from the center of the capital city. Such is the universe in which the prostitute and the drunk at the center of Radrigán's play find themselves.

However, director Abel López gave short shrift to this universe in his otherwise compelling Spanish-language production, which featured an English translation by Laura Van Druff, available on headphones. Emblematic of López's apolitical directorial concept was the rendering of the literal Spanish title The Crazy Man and the Sad Woman, as Soulmates of the Fringe, as if the two main characters had chosen a carefree bohemian lifestyle. Yet, to his credit, López did not make penury and alcoholism seem like fun. On the contrary, he allowed two masterful actors, Silvia Marín and Hugo Medrano, to depict the horrors of having to sell your body (her) and of losing it to cirrhosis (him) with great emotional impact. Performance rhythm and blocking beautifully exploited the contrast between her passionate, frenetic energy and his slower, more aloof manner.

Marín and Medrano managed to convey a struggle for human dignity and a desperate desire to love and be loved even when separated from their audience of less than fifty by an elevated proscenium stage more suited to a Broadway chorus line than an intimate chamber piece. Spectators crowded the first few rows of the cavernous theater, which seats about five hundred; the performers worked only in the front and center of a two-thirds empty stage. Towering over them was a vertical structure, designed by Milagros de León, which recalled a totem pole and suggested fences by means of a patchwork quilt of barbed wire and dark wooden slats reaching toward the sky. A small door and window helped create a sense of entrapment. The theatre itself, appropriately enough, is a dark, old, dilapidated building with peeling paint and cracked plaster. And the run-down [Begin Page 719] African American neighborhood surrounding the theater seemed a fitting location for a play about the struggle to survive against adverse circumstances. While admiring the production for what it was—a competently staged love story and a tale of redemption—the directorial decision to accentuate the positive and downplay the adverse political backdrop of the play led me to reflect on what can be lost when a work is restaged outside of its original historic and cultural context.

There was not even a mention of dictatorship in the "about the playwright" section of the program, a startling omission given that Radrigán and Marín, his longtime companion, founded the theater company El Telón in order to tour his plays in poor urban neighborhoods as a statement of resistance to the Pinochet government. Born in 1937, Rad-rigán's formal education was limited, yet he read widely and wrote poetry and short stories for years until he stunned a Santiago theater scene long dominated by university-educated dramatists with his first play Testimony to the Deaths of Sabina (Testimonio de las muertes de Sabina, 1979). Fueled by his opposition to Pinochet, he soon wrote twelve more works and became the most frequently staged playwright of the 1980s in Santiago. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, advertising in newspapers or other media was out of the question because of fear of reprisals. Instead, to gather an audience, the cast, director, and playwright would go around...