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Cineastas by Mariano Pensotti
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Grupo Marea (Buenos Aires) at REDCAT
Through Feb. 21
RECOMMENDED:
Argentinian theater auteur Mariano Pensotti returns to REDCAT three years after his remarkable The Past is a Grotesque Animal with an even more intricately woven tapestry of tales. Cineastas, which closes this weekend, is incontrovertibly one of the essential stage productions of 2015.
Movie stories about filmmaking are commonplace, plays less so, but invariably the creative spirits are sketched from the outside in, inescapably redolent of caricature. What Pensotti accomplishes here is the rather astounding feat of making artists and their imaginative existences totemic representatives of Everyman (or must we now say Everyperson, hang the medieval connection?), embodiments of all lives imperfectly examined, however compulsively.
Think Fellini and 8-1/2, not squared, nor even cubed, but to the fourth power. Or film director Alejandro González Iñárritu and his simultaneous separate narratives enriching one another. Pensotti posits four disparate, aspiring filmmakers at differing points in their careers, each embarking on new projects with severe uncertainties about their creative directions and its significance in their own tumultuously conflicted existences.
Where his previous show used a rotating carousel of repeating set locations, here the writer-director deploys a split-level design (by Grupo Marea collaborator Mariana Tirantte), presenting two tiers of horizontal action, one above the other. His quintet of actors — each a quicksilver acrobat of characterization — rotate between Cineastas‘s multiple narrators, protagonists and incidental roles at an antic pace. The narrators’s logorrheic cascade of declamation propels nearly all the action with a third-person detachment that unexpectedly compels a stronger identification than any impersonation might.
An established filmmaker with a new second family may be prematurely dying, as he increasingly appropriates his final picture as an autobiographical last resort to create a memory of himself for his toddler daughter, even grooming its lead Mexican actor to play his successor in real life. Another filmmaker , whose personally poetic work with a radical sensibility won festival recognition and became a popular hit, takes on an outside follow-up project supplied by the French financiers that melodramatizes the desparecidos (of whom her father was one) despite its tone-deaf tone of foreigners’ condescension.
A third director of desperate prospects toils resentfully at a MacDonald’s, stealing cash register money to pay for his first micro-budget indie to expose the corporate hypocrisy of class oppression, only to find himself successively moving up the management ladder. And the adoptive daughter of Russian émigré parents, who labors on an experimental documentary about late Soviet musicals and the collapse of communism, seeks out her Russian roots in a quest to fulfill her assumed identity.
While describing the conflicts and quandaries of each of these filmmakers, we often watch simultaneously (or alternatingly), their ideas about themselves play out as fantasies in the films they are creating, often tweaked with rebellion, revenge or revisionism, which keeps both levels of the stage a cornucopia of dramatization.
This may sound unduly complicated, but Pensotti’s signal achievement is that everything dashes forward with such uninterrupted fluidity that the complex strands emerge with unerring clarity. Like pool balls caroming after the break, they accumulate energy from banking off the sides and into one another. Most of the rat-a-tat observations aren’t particularly deep, but they are exhaustive and precise, and the accreting density builds up enormous masses of meaning without needing to penetrate keenly.
The irony that these terrifically sensitive, reflective people continually assess themselves wrong-headedly, should be chastening and bracing for all, especially as we watch them learn some — though far from all — of the lessons that their experience gradually reveals to them. Pensotti consciously manipulates types, albeit dimensionally conceived types, with incredible insight into the relationship between imaginative projection and self-deception. When Steven Soderbergh in his most memorable of Oscar acceptance speeches enjoined everyone, no matter what they did, to do something creative every day, he touched upon the innate universality of these perhaps exotic people who ultimately do little else.
Particularly impressive is that while Pensotti dazzles with an array of movie-mimicking narrative techniques, his show is unthinkable as anything other than a live presentation — his “cinematic” stagecraft makes maximum use of those qualities unique to live performance. His text lives solely through its theatrical realization, and vice versa. In its sublime integration of elements, Cineastas demonstrates an ideal balance unachievable by its hapless votaries devoted to self-expression.
Text and Direction: Mariano Pensotti.
Cast: Horacio Acosta, Javier Lorenzo, Vanesa [only one “s”] Maja, Juliana Muras, Marcelo Subiotto.
Set and Costume Design: Mariana Tirantte. Music and Sound Design: Diego Vainer. Lighting Design: Alejandro Le Roux.
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatre, Walt Disney Hall, 631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, redcat.org, 213.237.2800, February 18-21 8:30pm
