Mariano Pensotti El pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal)

“Pensotti has a fine facility with irony, with the fine balance between comedy and tragedy and, most of all, with the ability to capture an epic psychosis in an unpretentious nutshell.”—British Theatre Guide

One of the leading playwrights and directors to emerge from Argentina’s vibrant theater scene, Mariano Pensotti brings El pasado es un animal grotesco (The past is a grotesque animal) to the Wex. This play tells the stories of four characters in their twenties in Buenos Aires who leave behind youth’s illusions during the years 1999 to 2009, a time of social and economic upheaval in Argentina. The actors perform on a stage that rotates like a turntable through four sections divided by walls. Each scene recalls a snapshot, and each actor portrays multiple figures in many different situations, as Pensotti spins his artfully fragmented chronicle of everyday happenings, fantastical imaginings, and orbiting subplots. An ever-unfolding, smartly constructed meta-fiction told with a satisfying economy of means, El pasado es un animal grotesco uses its fascinating stagecraft to draw you into interlocking stories that combine in a cinematic look at a generation coping with universal struggles in this specific place and time.

Here’s Pensotti’s own description of his underlying concept:
Ten years ago I began to collect damaged photographs that a developing shop near my home threw away every month. I don’t know why. A while ago the place closed, because hardly anyone now gets photos developed, and I went back to have a look at the boxes full of damaged images, blurred and discarded fragments of unknown lives. A lot of them seemed to be people of my generation, a flawed record of a decade. I remembered a phrase from Balzac that talked about his art as the attempt to “photograph the soul of people and their times.” I decided to take some of the photos and try to revive the ambitious nature of those 19th-century tales, to tell the story of the lives of four people from my generation over a ten-year period, using the fragmented images as the original source material. “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” is the title of a song by the band Of Montreal. I listened to it a lot while I was writing the text. Its excessive duration and ambitious narrative made me feel it was close to what I was developing. I decided to use the name and include the lyrics in the play when the stories reach their end.



Please note: This show will be performed in Spanish with English surtitles. It is intended for mature audiences.