Villa Luro. Seventies. Alejandro Tantanian is an only child, a lonely boy and alien to sports, to the bullfights and the beatings that seem to amuse the other boys so much. His company is books, the only ones that take away a little of that anguish that haunts him for not feeling part of others. Until he discovered theater, at the age of thirteen.
“The theater allowed me to start living another life,” he says today, at fifty-eight, already converted into one of the references of the Buenos Aires scene. He started as an actor, within a year he was already an assistant in a play and soon his first texts as a playwright arrived. There she also met her first boyfriends. And his first girlfriends, who he used as a facade. A double life from which the theater also saved him.
Since then, Alejandro Tantanian acted, directed and wrote. He won awards, premiered works in Argentina and the world, and even became director of the Cervantes National Theater. Now, you have just presented your Eduardo II in the legendary Martín Coronado room of the General San Martín Theater. He also enjoys the café concert that he created together with a group of friends. And, if that were not enough, a book of his about three greats of dramaturgy –Shakesperare, Bretch y Williams– tour of bookstores.
Imagination, curiosity and love for art remain from that shy child, but Today he is a loquacious man who talks and reflects at the table of a bar in Belgrano, a reference of this turbulent time. where the old ghosts threaten again, and where theater appears as a response as creative as it is forceful.
Anything you do in theater has to be entertaining.
-Why represent Edward II today, this classic by Christopher Marlowe from 1592?
-The idea of doing this show was presented in 2022 -he says under the sun of a not so hot afternoon and among the aroma of coffee-. It was another country. The text of Eduardo II then still had the validity linked to hate crimes, but the work was released now and clearly assumes another type of commitment regarding the degree of virulence that exists in national policies against the LGBTIQ+ collective.. It is not a militant work in itself, but at its core it speaks of a king who instead of calling his favorites “favorite,” as they were called, calls them “groom” or “love.” It makes something public that should be private and that is what leads to an enormous number of violent situations.
-The adaptation is located in a time that could be any time.
-We wanted to generate a certain timelessness. It doesn’t happen in the 1300s, which is when he ruled Eduardo II in England, but there is a mixture of temporalities. There is a kind of fantasy around the idea that this persistence of this homophobic hegemonic model comes from the dawn of time until today.
-The setting also takes something from Derek Jarman’s 1992 film.
-Jarman works from the same text as Marlowe, but crystallizes a meaning that is in the piece and that in general the English tradition (which is usually quite homophobic) had not shown. The play was always performed showing a weak king, who neglects his public affairs because he is bedridden with his lover. What Jarman does in the era of Margaret Thatcher (and as an anti about thatcher) is to put at the center the homosexual relationship and the homophobia reigning in the concentrated groups of power: the Church, political power, military power… That is in Marlowe, but it never had the importance that was given to it in the film.
-Marlowe is sometimes spoken of as “the other Shakespeare.”
-Marlowe was the creator of blank verse, which is the founding rhythmic verse of the sound of English theater. Later, Shakespeare and many others developed it. He had the misfortune of living at the same time as Shakespeare, but above all of dying very young, because he was murdered in a suspicious brawl in a tavern. He was very irascible, at the same time he was an atheist and a confessed homosexual. He supposedly worked as a spy for the queen, but was also said to be a double spy. He was a moving target that had to be deactivated, at twenty-nine years old.
-Exact. It’s much less verbose than Shakespeare, wilder. His works are somewhat deformed, the material has to be worked a lot. I didn’t write them to publish, but to represent. He is a more violent and anarcho author. Edward II places, for the first time explicitly in Western drama, a homosexual relationship at the center of the scene. And it ends in a very violent way, murdered with a hot iron inserted into the anus. Why does Marlowe choose that story? Obviously, there is a statement. It is a work against everything institutional. In principle, against the family. The same with political power and military power.
-A work that you have the luxury of presenting in an emblematic space like the Martín Coronado room of the San Martín Theater.
-I had done things in other theater rooms, but I wanted to do something in the Martín Coronado. It had to be something that had a bit of an epic, an opera, because it is a space for a thousand people. and I thought of Eduardo II, It was always in my head to do that work. I read it again, I thought so, I took it and Gabriela Ricardes, who at that time was the director of the theater (now she is the minister of culture of the city of Buenos Aires), scheduled it for 2024.
There has been no political humor for a long time. Perhaps the last one was Enrique Pinti.
-A couple of years passed, but the context changed a lot.
-As of December 2023, the invisibilization of the LGBTIQ+ community became a State agenda. There is a half-criminal will to defund public health policies, for example regarding HIV and the non-delivery of retroviral medications. And not to mention the content in cultural terms: it is clear that the national government cannot mention these issues. It is an open secret where it is known that in no cultural agency of the Nation can work be done that puts these issues forward, which is an act of censorship. It is also a good lesson to understand that those things that one thought were tied were not so tied. It is up to us to defend our places, to reaffirm ourselves in “I am what I am.”
The return of another classic
The spring breeze stirs the leaves of the plane trees on Olazábal Street. Some neighbor walks his dog. A mother drags her son, infatuated with not crossing the street. At our table, the coffee is long gone, but the conversation continues. Tantanian has a lot to say, especially because he did and does a lot.
-In addition to Edward II, you have just released Like never… again!this café concert that is also a classic, in another way.
-It has to do with recovering a genre that is closely linked to the Buenos Aires tradition, to people like Jorge de la Vega, Jorge Schussheim, Gasalla, Perciavalle, Niní Marshall… With this group of friends who are Franco Torchia, Liliana Viola and Juampi Mirabelli We get together in these complicated times to think about what to do. They had done As never before in 2017, which was a kind of cabaret where the first male vedette in Argentina, which is Juampi, performed. It seemed to us that it was time to unite and work together to create a community. And then we started laughing among ourselves about politics, when it was kind of difficult. Now it’s starting to happen a little more: people are starting to laugh at these people who govern us. At first no one knew how to react. We made a first short version that we presented at Casa Brandon and we saw how people laughed at Adorni, at Milei… There is something that is released. You feel that you can, not that they can, but that you can. Laughing is very liberating and necessary when going through this nightmare in which we are immersed.
The café concert “Like never before.” -What difference do you find between the café concert and a cult classic?
-I like those very contrasting experiences. Putting on a show with twenty-one actors in the Martín Coronado room is almost nothing like working with two people and a pianist. They are very different challenges. At the same time, we must ensure that the café concert is fun and that the classic is not boring, but that it entertains from its depth. Anything you do in the theater has to be entertaining, but not in a superficial sense, but in the sense of “having something between”, that the work captivates you.. The viewer pays and also gives you two hours of their life so that you can do whatever you want with it. It’s a lot, so you have to rise to that challenge.
-It is the return of the café concert but also of political humor.
–There has been no political humor for a long time. Perhaps the last one was Enrique Pinti. What happened is that people were already fed up with the rift, with hearing that no one was right, that everything was done wrong… It was difficult even for him to continue doing what he was doing. Because it also happened that at the same time he could not get out of the crack, because he always spoke badly about one person or another, and he was required to take a position on one side of that crack. Now everything is so on one side and there are so many of us on the other…
-There is a reconfiguration of the crack.
-Absolutely. I’m not telling you that it’s easy to make political humor now, but you enter with much more claritybecause there is a common opponent and laughing at him is liberating. Liliana Viola is the author of the texts and wrote some brilliant and super political songs. The idea is not that the show is a downer, but quite the opposite: that we can laugh at what happens to us. Of course: without losing depth, displaying the frieze of horror but trying to add humor and not tragedy.
Tantanian’s new book, on Shakespeare, Brecht and Tennessee Williams. -Laughter is also the first antidote to this verbal violence that emanates from the president, which seems to be a fundamental pillar of his proposal.
-They don’t have anything else. The people who are in the government understood very well the pulse of these times. How they wait for each anniversary to generate provocation. That on October 16 Victoria Villarruel appears in a photo with Isabel… We must admit that they are great at that. They are improvised in many things, but when you look a little closer you realize that there are things that are very well thought out, like when on March 8, International Women’s Day, they announced that the Women’s Salon was going to be renamed “Hall of the heroes”. Or that Billiken magazine-style short that they made for October 12, with the skulls of Columbus arriving to “discover” America and all that speech that we thought was left behind. There is an involution in thinking.
-What place does Argentine theater occupy today?
-There is a shortage of resources; The money that circulates is not even one percent of what circulates in a European country… But the power of creativity it has is impressive. We have a theater that the whole world admires. And not to mention independent theater, which shows that there is a very strong vocation in many people. And there is also feedback between the commercial, the independent and the official. In Eduardo II there are twenty-one actors who give everything, they are hungry to do theater. There is something of that mystique that has to do with doing things in precarious situations, for the love of art. Here you can spend a year rehearsing, because you have three jobs and you can’t dedicate more time to that, to do a work that lasts six performances and where you are not going to earn a peso and maybe even have to put in money. That does not exist in any country. And I clarify: it is not ideal either, It is not good to live self-exploited, but the positive side of that is that energy, that drive to do something that is typically Argentine and distinguishes us all over the world.
