MIAMI.- I don’t know if living in a place like Miami where international theater unfortunately arrives in dribs and drabs, and in the media there are no programs focused on the cinema and theater that is made in the world (not even within the USA), that one as a spectator feels a little naked when seeing a work like The Wrath of Narcissustext by acclaimed Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco.
It’s not about information, but about having the opportunity to see, to dialogue. In Miami, when a director is interviewed, many answers are reduced or end in economic complaints.
Brought to Miami by the Deus Ex Machina company from Caracas, Venezuela, to be part of the 38th edition of the Miami International Theatre Festival, the play directed by Rossana Hernández has unleashed a movement of praise, exclamations and acceptance among the public that filled the three performances that were presented at the Koubek Center Theater, one of the Festival’s venues.
Blanco’s work seems like many things, but it really is a unique piece (at least for me) due to its structure, development, stage possibilities and direction. It is a text that demands a lot from the actor, who must be in very good physical condition to remain on stage for more than two hours speaking all the time.
The Wrath of Narcissus It is a captivating work, it has the spirit of Agatha Christie’s novels. It is a work that grabs you, it demands concentration from the audience that lets itself be seduced by the narrative.
And this seems to be one of the premises of Sergio Blanco’s text, to achieve theatre, intense theatre, based on a narration that is literally a first-person story, where there is clearly no stage conflict, but it is there, underlying, and explodes at the end.
In The Wrath of NarcissusA speaker travels to a conference in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and from the moment he arrives at the hotel he begins to look for a sexual encounter. He contacts Igor, a young local, through social networks and a series of intense encounters begin.
At the hotel, while reviewing his presentation for the conference on the myth of Narcissus, he finds some faint blood stains on the floor, which have been cleaned but have left some traces that he can see.
The text is a journey through sex, the stains he finds more and more, and his intervention in the event that brought him to Ljubljana. But all this is a broad summary of a story full of nuances, phrases, words that will eventually take their place in the whole work.
Everything flows as the protagonist of the one-man show, Gabriel Agüero, a very accomplished actor, speaks on the phone with his mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, rants against hypocrisy among academics, masturbates, fantasizes about Igor, dances and sings, and returns to his curiosity about the blood stains on the floor. He reflects on art: “an artist is one who immortalizes,” and also on death and time. A man attentive to details, which forces him to investigate whether something happened in room 288 where he found blood stains.
After a call to his friend Marlon, who is an expert in criminology, a change occurs in the course of the work. The protagonist, who plays himself and Sergio Blanco, the author of the text, begins to investigate what could have really happened in the room where he sleeps every night.
Gabriel Agüero’s performance on stage is magnificent, unleashing energy and control, an all-round work, seamless, in control of the audience and the entire room. His handling of multimedia, computer and projections on a large screen, make everything around him, even the stalls, part of the stage set.
I return to my own limitations as a spectator, but The Wrath of Narcissusis one of the best works I have seen in a long time.
