This
play is a "wide translation" experience.
The
group of actors that brought it to the stage in Buenos Aires in 1996, under Luis
Herrera's direction had been working for some time on the idea of staging a sort
of adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
When I was asked to colaborate with the adaptation, neither they nor I knew
how far away from the original this experience was to lead us.
In
my version, the basic idea consisted of supposing that the play should begin
right there where Bradbury's novel ends. Since it has been agreed that all books
must be burnt (and paradoxically it is the firemen who take over this
police-like function) as it has been discovered that sadness which prevents
mankind from being happy emanates from them, a few dissidents have decided to
preserve the great masterpieces of universal literature by means of an
apparently undefeatable mechanism: memorization. Thus, whereas the novel ends by
opening the heroical door of a fistful of men given to memorization of a
necessary world, I simply propose the plain hypothesis that memory's matter is
more combustible than paper. And something even worse: more corruptible. The
memory that doesn't recognize itself lost from beforehand is even more pathetic
than active amnesia.
The
last memorizers that are left (Kafka's, Dostoievski's, José Hernández's, and a
sole woman who has devoted herself to memorizing literary critics without
a plan) dwell in a secret cellar and agonizingly maintain the posture of
resistance. A betrayed, cannibalistic resistance.
The
indoctrination, the doubt, Argentina, the birthday party, and the extintion of
what is human are the ghosts that walk through this play.