About El tiempo todo entero
The brother, in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, remembers. His sister manipulates fragile objects, little glass animals: her glass zoo. She makes them live the life she must give up. She is disabled. The mother, a ladino woman, responds to her son. And a man is invited to the house. To seduce and take charge of the young woman.
Today, the author and director Romina Paula takes the figures from The Zoo and projects them here and now in the sister's memory. The world changed. The mother is now independent, progressive. The daughter reveals herself to be the owner of her choices, her words, her movements. But like Melville's character Bartleby, she would “prefer not to.” Now it is she, Antonia, who remembers. Far from the archetypes of Williams's tragedy, everyone is free, and yet they remain locked up, as if held back.
A room. A white, almost permanent light. It is a relaxed time of a fiery present: “a hatchery light,” says the director. “Where the absence of blackouts during setting gives the sensation of unreality, of eternal day and night and the alteration of the perception of time…”. And The Zoo becomes El tiempo todo entero. Because time imposes itself as decoration and protagonist. The present, “enormous time”, long and deep silence, perhaps what Tennesse Williams felt when his sister lost her mind. A feeling that led him to write The Zoo, his most personal, autobiographical work.
ARTISTIC SHEET
Dramaturgy and Direction: Romina Paula
Interpreters: Esteban Bigliardi, Pilar Gamboa, Esteban Lamothe, Susana Pampín
Lighting: Matías Sendón
Space design: Alicia Leloutre, Matías Sendón
General assistance: Leandro Orellano
Press: Pintos Gamboa
Production: Sebastián Arpesella
DURATION: 80 minutes
*Born in Buenos Aires in 1979, graduated from the EMAD School of Dramaturgy, Romina Paula founded El Silencio Company in 2006, together with the actors Pilar Gamboa, Esteban Bigliardi and Esteban Lamothe and the lighting and set designer Matías Sendón.
*El tiempo todo entero premiered in Buenos Aires in 2009.