Un Hueco (Theater)

Often, I feel my theater “class” is the equivalent of an artsy mafia. In 4 weeks of classes, I’ve only seen my teacher once, but tickets in my name appear at various theaters, and e-mails tell me when to make pick up.  According to the syllabus, I am making fantastic advancements on my Drama minor – learning directly from a choreographer, talking with an actor about auditioning, learning how to compose music. In fact, I’ve had one class where we were supposed to read Wikipedia if we’d brought our computers (something we were in fact, told not to do in classes), and one class where a man taught us a little of how to put together basic circuits, and also showed us gadgets constructed from toys that make an approximation of music depending how you touch them. Interesting, but irrelevant.

However, I appreciate the tickets that come at no extra charge to my tuition.

I saw  “Un Hueco” (“A Hollow”) Sunday, and while I understood fairly little of the dialogue, I think it was brilliant. It was about 3 friends, grieving, presumably over the death of one of their sisters. (In my opinion, a sister is dead; others’ theories range from girl being a chick from a club to the friends having killed someone).  

The genius of the play was that it seemed designed specifically for its location. The play took place in Buenos Aires, and the streets mentioned where ones near us. More than that, though, the play took place in the room where the play was supposed to take place. We, the audience, met in the hallway of a school and walked through a public bathroom to get to the room of the play. The room itself was the size of a classroom with a few backless benches for the audience, a large set of blue lockers, a dirty mirror on one wall, and a long bench with a curved back along the opposite wall. At times one or two of the three actors would exit and we’d hear water running – having crossed through it, we could now envision the bathroom he was washing up in. While waiting for the play to start, we’d taken free coffee from a table with coffee, a plate of ham and cheese sandwiches, a pitcher of orange juice and what looked like a bottle of alcohol. Later, one actors left and came back with the tray and alcohol. (I have no idea what they would have done if an audience member had eaten the sandwiches, because it seemed all had been offered to us). That the items used as props had been taken for ordinary elements of the world around us made play’s illusion of reality all the stronger. This was aided by the use of actual items: real sandwiches, a genuine cigarette, in place of props that were merely imitations. Admittedly, I think the alcohol was just water.

The actors were often only 4 feet away from the audience, sometimes as close as a foot. When they shoved the lockers or pushed each other, they seemed running the risk of tumbling into an audience member. The tension was palpable, and another powerful element. The actors spoke over each other, clamoring, teasing. No one politely waited for a line to be finished. A friend would playfully pinch and push at another, grab his tie, or slap his butt. There was a physical familiarity and energy between the actors that made them believable; it was obvious when the Jewish friend felt his personal space was invaded. For realism, it was fantastic and my only complaint was that one friend, Lucas, seemed oddly mobile for a man on crutches. For a play, while I liked it, I can see that it made a risky choice: the realism of everyone talking at once certainly made it hard for us to understand what was being said and what was going on.