GEMELOS: CRÍTICA PUBLICADA EN EL NEW YORK TIMES

La obra "Gemelos" se presentó el año 2007, en el Lincoln Center Festival, en Estados Unidos. En el diario norteamericano, The New York Times, se publicó la siguiente crítica realizada por Charles Isherwood.

IN A BRUTAL LANDSCAPE, BRUTALIZED BY GRANDMA.

The New York Times.
Theater Review: Gemelos.
By Charles Isherwood.
July 12, 2007.

Nestled within this year’s Lincoln Center Festival is a celebration of Spanish-language theater that features productions from Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Spain. The first entry in this festival within a festival is “Gemelos,” a haunting, theatrically novel story of endurance in the face of want and neglect, from the Chilean troupe Compañía Teatro Cinema.

Kitra Cahana/The New York Times

From left, Diego Fontecilla, Juan Carlos Zagal and Laura Pizarro in "Gemelos."

Kitra Cahana/The New York Times

A scene from "Gemelos," which is based on Agota Kristof's novel "The Notebook."

The show, which plays through Saturday at the Pope Auditorium at Fordham University, is performed by a trio of actors on a miniature stage that resembles an unusually grand puppet theater made of carved wood, with a plush red curtain. The company’s name suggests its desire to fuse a solid bond between techniques used in theater and in film. The smaller dimensions of the stage in “Gemelos” (the title means “twins”) help smooth the way for the blending of effects from both mediums.

Miniature sets and props are easily manipulated to create changes in perspective, so that a character seen in a sort of long shot, profiled against the horizon, reappears in close-up almost instantly. Or an iris effect that recalls silent movies is used to whisk us briskly between scenes.

The narrative of “Gemelos,” which follows the hard fortunes of twin boys growing up in an unnamed country in war-torn Europe, would require a huge (or minimalist) production if it were staged full scale. The reduced size allows the designers to retain atmosphere without compromising narrative complexity. The boys can catch fish, work in the fields, blackmail a pedophile priest and give succor to an army deserter without major scenery changes.

But the shrunken dimensions of the production are apt too for a tale told largely from the point of view of two boys caught up in the brutalizing march of history. The well-known horrors of World War II blend with disarming ease into the other gothic nightmares the twins must survive in “Gemelos,” which manages the unusual feat of allowing us to experience familiar sorrows from a distinctive, slightly disorienting new perspective.

First performed in 1999, “Gemelos” was adapted by Laura Pizarro, Juan Carlos Zagal and Jaime Lorca (founders of the precursor to Compañía Teatro Cinema) from the 1986 novel “The Notebook” by the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof. Ms. Pizarro and Mr. Zagal direct the current production and appear in it with Diego Fontecilla. Mr. Zagal has also composed the melancholy, highly effective musical score.

For all the inventiveness of the staging, it is really the actors’ precise, stylized performances that capture and hold the attention. They wear half-masks that recall commedia dell’arte, and move in an angular, mechanized style that makes them resemble eerily ambulatory marionettes who have somehow escaped their string-pulling masters. Mr. Fontecilla and Mr. Zagal, as the twins, speak in contrasting voices, often in unison, to suggest their deeply entrenched emotional interdependence.

When the boys’ father goes off to war, their mother, unable to support them, takes them to live with their bitter, cruel grandmother in the countryside. Played with mesmerizing witchiness by Ms. Pizarro, her voice a shrill snarl, this crone starves and beats the boys. They react against her abuse by conducting their own course of self-discipline, re-educating their hearts and minds to ignore physical hardship and remain staunchly indifferent to the ridicule and abuse they receive from the locals. As the ugly truths of the war slowly impinge on their lives, however, the boys gradually worm their way into their grandmother’s heart, eventually learning to manipulate and even dominate her.

At nearly two hours without an intermission, “Gemelos” would probably be more effective if it were a good 20 minutes shorter. The grueling nature of the story eventually wears you down. Moments of redemption or simple pastoral beauty — a lovely sequence in which the boys learn to catch fish, for example — are relatively few. But the production’s sheer theatrical charm goes some way toward softening the harshness of its story. Memorable too is its depiction of neglected children whose instinctive love for each other allows them to retain their resilience and innate wisdom and to acquire a measure of moral maturity that their elders have somehow lost.

GEMELOS

Based on the novel “The Notebook” by Agota Kristof; performed in Spanish, with English supertitles; adapted by Laura Pizarro, Juan Carlos Zagal and Jaime Lorca; directed by Ms. Pizarro and Mr. Zagal; original music by Mr. Zagal; lighting by Juan Cristóbal Castillo; sets, artifacts and props by Rodrigo Bazaes, Eduardo Jiménez, Ms. Pizarro, Mr. Zagal and Mr. Lorca; costumes and masks by Mr. Bazaes, Mr. Jiménez, Ms. Pizarro, Mr. Zagal and Mr. Lorca. Presented by the Compañía Teatro Cinema, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival 2007, Nigel Reddin, director. At the Pope Auditorium, Fordham University, West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue.

WITH: Laura Pizarro (Grandmother/Mother/Harelip), Juan Carlos Zagal (Twin 1/Priest/Shoe Merchant/Mailman) and Diego Fontecilla (Twin 2/Police Officer/Father).