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Teatro Abierto
From Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationality. Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997.
During the “Dirty War” (1976-83) in Argentina, “during which the military dictatorship policed and
targeted cultural production, a group of Argentine theatre people came together to challenge political
repression. The Teatro abierto event is generally considered by Latin American theatre practitioners to
best exemplify theatre's liberating and contestatory power. Teatro abierto (Open Theatre) was a cycle of
21 one-act plays conceived originally by Osvaldo Dragún in conjunction with other major Argentine
playwrights to resist the dictatorship's attack on theatre and its practitioners. Everyone donated their
talents--21 playwrights, 21 directors, 150 actors, numerous composers, musicians, costume designers,
stage and lighting designers. Even the owners of the 340 seat theatre, Teatro Picadero, where the cycle
was first held, offered their space for free. The idea was that if a whole group of black-listed people
worked together, the dictatorship would not be able to clamp down on them all. The staging of the cycle
was, in itself, an act of defiance. The artists would no longer be silenced and made invisible, though the
media gave them no coverage. The media focused all its attention and resources on Frank Sinatra, who had
come at the invitation of the Junta and was offered presidential treatment. While Argentina's best theatre
artists were working for nothing, Sinatra was paid 1,600, 000 dollars, a sum that would have paid one
thousand Argentine actors for a year. Nonetheless, the excitement and collaborative effort that went into
Teatro Abierto once again gave theatre people a sense of community and shared purpose.
The initial success of Teatro Abierto surprised everyone. Though the general population was
terrified during the Dirty War, and though the show began at the unusually early hour of 6:30 P.M., tickets
sold out for every performance. The population, attracted by the renewed cultural vitality and by the
affordable prices, overcame their fear. For it too, Teatro Abierto also implied an act of defiance. As
audience members lined up for blocks to buy tickets, they too formed part of the spectacle of resistance. In
the middle of the night that Sinatra sang at Luna Park, one week after Teatro Abierto had opened on July
28th, the Picadero was burned to the ground (PHOTO: Courtesy of Julie Weisz).
The military, of course, denied involvement in the destruction of the theatre. If the Armed Forces
assumed that by destroying the theatre they would dampen the wide-spread interest in the theatrical
phenomenon, they underestimated the resolve of all those participating in the Teatro Abierto project. After
the burning of the Picadero a news commentator declared: "too bad, an illusion was burned." But Dragún,
speaking for Teatro Abierto said, "Nothing has been burned." A few hours after the decimation of the
Picadero, nineteen theatre owners offered their space to host the cycle. The designers agreed to re-create
the sets and costumes, albeit on a more modest scale. After considerable discussion, which I will return to,
the group voted to continue their work in the Teatro Tabarís, a cabaret-type locality with 600 seats right on
Corrientes--the theatre strip.
After the burning of the Picadero, the public showed massive support for the event which became
transformed instantly into a symbol of freedom. 25,000 spectators attended Teatro Abierto during its twomonth run in 1981. In their introduction, 'Teatro Abierto: Fenomeno Socio-Teatral Argentino,' the editors
of 7 dramaturgos argentinos call the event the "most important Argentine theatre movement of all times"
(7). Surprisingly, the introduction fails to note that the event was staged during the Dirty War, that most of
the participants were black-listed, and that everyone but the military acknowledges that the destruction of
the Picadero was politically motivated.
All the plays for Teatro Abierto were written specifically for the occasion and they covered a wide
range of topics. Several of them dealt with an aspect of Argentine history. Aida Bortnik, one of the three
female playwrights and author of the script for the film The Offical Story, wrote Papá Querido (Dear
Father). In this play, four adult children of a recently deceased father (very much a Perón figure) meet for
the first time at his funeral only to discover that they know very little about their father, nothing about each
other, and had all received different messages from this looming, but absent, figure. Much like the widely
disparate groups of peronists found after the death of Perón, the only thing that united them was a great
man who gave them very conflicting messages. Ricardo Monti's La cortina de abalorios, which I will
discuss in some detail, is about Argentina's long history of colonialism. Ricardo Halac's Lejana tierra
prometida (The Distant Promised Land) expresses a painful loss of illusion, suggesting that Argentina
itself was once that promised land. Some of plays are more immediately about the experiences brought
about by the Dirty War: exile (Cossa), silencing (Goroztiza), acquiescence (Gambaro, Raznovich),
survival through negation (Drago), militaristic thinking (Pavlovsky). Dragún's play, Mi obelisco y yo (Me
and my obelisk), asks the audience to view this monument of argentine-ness from a new perspective, to
examine how a symbol of liberation becomes part of a wider system of tyranny and oppression. Soto's
Trabajo pesado (Heavy Work), depicts a post-proceso wasteland in which people have nothing, remember
nothing, and end up participating in the violence. Esteve's For Export, is about fear and "otherness";
O'Donell's Lobo... ¿estás? (Wolf, Are You There?) is about fear and political violence; Carlos Pais's Juego
de la oca shows characters trapped in a snakes-and-ladders kind of game, going backward, forward, falling
down stairs, paying fines. (Photo, JulieWeisz). Then there were seemingly random plays such as
Pronzato's Ciau rubia, that depicts a generation of men coming of age around adoration of Marylin
Monroe. While tangential to the obvious political issues of the Dirty War, the play reproduces the
paradigm I have noted throughout in which men define themselves specifically in relation to the idealized
female other. The participants of Teatro Abierto--like the characters in the plays-- seemed to be doing the
impossible. As Goroztiza put it, "everything was impossible, we were a bunch of crazies who wanted to
sing what couldn't be sung... a crazy possibility."i
1 See the video
of Teatro Abierto, País cerrado.