When I met Marcelo Pitrola as part of our Author Spotlight series last September, he mentioned he was working on a new project: a collaboration with longtime artistic partner Silvia Hilario and actress Emilse Diaz.

‘Diario de incertidumbre’, which premiered on 5th May and is excerpted in an exclusive English translation here, is an eerie tale about a woman caught in a hospital with a mysterious ailment. As she waits for a diagnosis, she re-lives and then re-evaluates her life, falling further and further away from certainty as the double examination progresses.

The play stars Emilse Diaz as the troubled woman at the center of the story, and Silvia Hilario as both doctor and nurse.

I was captivated by the idea of what is essentially a one-woman play: how would such a thing evolve onstage? How would her memories manifest? How would an actress perform under such obscured conditions? How would a stage director use an atmosphere as cold as a hospital ward to convey so many shades of emotion?

I met up with Marcelo, Silvia and Emilise to discuss the work, the collaborative process, and the creative constraints of portraying an entire life in a single clinic room.

How did you get the idea for ‘Diario’?

Marcelo: Silvia proposed the core image of the story. Afterwards, I began to sort through my own thoughts and questions regarding the different women, selecting here and there in my attempt to construct Diana and her world. I began to write the interior monologue that serves as the linchpin of the play, and the idea of a private diary immediately appeared as the ideal medium.

Silvia: The idea was based on my own experience. I’d had an accident – I was that helpless patient. I wanted to capture that feeling of stasis, of confusion.

Marcelo and I started with the central vision of the woman under diagnosis, and he gave it dramatic form. He invented the mythology of Diana’s life – the ballet teacher, the absent father – and came up with the idea of the acts. It was a very comfortable collaboration and it’s been wonderful to work with him.

Marcelo: Theatre is a collective, collaborative activity. Effective dialogue produces the best work. Silvia is a good friend and she’d already performed as the protagonist in my earlier play, ‘The Peronist Princess’. We’ve always had an excellent rapport, and we have similar ideas about what aspects of theatre are most appealing. I suppose that’s why she approached me with this idea.

And how was it, Emilse, to come into this process as an actress?

Emilse: I have to confess that it was difficult in the beginning, wondering how to convey all of this. The actress is trapped in a single room. She’s always in the bed, but she’s also always moving, changing, transitioning into different states. She’s running back over every minute of her life. It’s exhausting. But in the end, I very much enjoyed the process – the diverse possibilities. It was a game. It was gratifying.

Marcelo, you’ve written many works about women and womanhood – what was it like to develop this specific female protagonist?

Marcelo: I do seem to have more of an interest in female characters than in male ones. That may be because I have questions about the feminine sphere, and I write in order to answer them.

In this work, as well as in ‘The Peronist Princess’, I wasn’t really sure where the process would lead – I just had a series of questions, and they were pushing me to write more and more. That’s basically how it was all conceived.

And as women, how did you two, Emilse and Silvia, develop this female thematic?

Emilse: There is, well, an excess of women!

Silvia: Yes, but there’s an important theme about the relationship between femininity and fertility – what you can make out of yourself. The character of the nurse: she became a mother at 16. She didn’t question it; it wasn’t an existential dilemma. The doctor is another alternative: she has a different attitude. And Diana’s mother, too, represents a different set of obligations – a kind of pressure for Diana to define herself against. And then there’s Diana’s friend, yet another version of womanhood. She’s made different choices too – she has different impulses. Altogether, they form a kind of synthesis.

The synthesis that Diana doesn’t contain within herself?

Emilse: I think she feels profoundly alone. In this place, in the hospital, you feel isolated. Naked.

Can you tell me a little bit more about what it was like to bring this concept to the stage?

Marcelo: I’d say, first of all, it was difficult to convey something as private as a diary in a theatrical medium. It occurred to me that different interlocutors could appear during this internal monologue, to allow it to become more theatrical, more externalized. Piece by piece, the work was transformed into what you could call “mono-dialogues”. The subjectivity – Diana’s universe – came to life.

Emilse: Yes, and for me, the problem was performing such an internal transformation. How do you act that out? I was also working with a character who doesn’t have a sense of herself. She is what other people call her – she speaks a great deal about what they say about her. And of course, as a patient, she is what the doctor and nurse say she is. All of her traits have this feeling of externality – as thought she exists as a reflection. Her role as a performer is in keeping with all of this. She takes on other roles, and speaks lines written by other people.

But for a work about so many “other people”, it’s very restrained, very narrow. For much of the play, Diana is totally alone.

Silvia: Yes, there’s a restraint in the design that places it firmly in liminal territory: it lacks detail. There’s also a projector that serves as a kind of magic lantern. At first, it’s used to project the radiography slides of the patient’s anarchic body, but then it becomes more complicated than that – less strictly medical.

The stage, the physical dimensions of the theatre, crudeness, unadorned blankness – it’s all very much a part of the design. The cramped little bathroom to one side of the hospital bed is a part of the production space, and the blocking incorporates it into the play. The bed is also ambiguous, deceptively simple, un-identified. It can be seen as a multiplicity of beds. Where you dream, where you wake, where you make love, where you die.

Emilse: In the context of childhood, the bed becomes a place of ‘play’. But then, it’s a sickbed, too: immobility, pain and sickness.

How was sickness given meaning in the play?

Marcelo: Diana’s character is in the clinic because she had an accident. She’s desperate, in extremis. But then, during this period of enforced stillness, she starts thinking about her childhood, her career, her art. She’s been many different kinds of artist: a ballerina, an actress, a choreographer. And now she’s suffering from this disorder. She’s trying to control her body but soon she starts trying to control her life: to regulate her past, define it and all of its components, keep it from destroying her. When she enters the past, it’s as though she enters another space – a kind of limbo.

Silvia: And as she endeavors to find herself, to undertake this journey, she’s interrupted by the nurse and the doctor. The nurse’s realm is quotidian: she’s trying to impose a rhythm, a routine, something more normal than the emerging consciousness of the intractable patient. Meanwhile, the doctor uses scientific discourse, trying to translate all of these feelings and impulses into symptoms. In this way, the three women have little connection with each other.

They seem to be total opposites. Yet the doctor and nurse are both portrayed by the same actress. Why?

Silvia: Well, for one, because of the clear overlap in the roles. They both represent realism. The nurse is pragmatic, bodily. The doctor maintains distance. She is prone to discussing everything in medical terms of either a sickness or a cure. She has an answer for everything, as it were.

Emilse: These three women are all looking for the truth. The doctor is obsessed with concrete, specific objectives – because the alternative is too alarming. The nurse also represents certainty and uncomplicated things. This play is all about complication. The three women aren’t really antagonistic. They’re like facets of one another.

And what becomes of Diana’s relationship to herself, and to the doctor and nurse, at the end of the play?

Silvia: She never solves the problem. She only asks more and more questions. We decided that the material led us there, and that there’s no way to tie things up neatly. She exchanges the firm ground of a decision for ambiguity.

Emilse: We don’t know what she’ll do, but the sensation at the end is that after all of this, this great production, this investigation…she’s finally ready to ask these questions honestly. Who am I? What am I? We don’t get to find out.

Rarely left out of anthologies of Argentine writing or directories of modern female poets of South America, the next author in our Beyond Borges series is a writer who also finds herself among the stranger-sounding titles ‘Argentine people of Swiss descent’ and ‘Suicides of Argentina’.

A widely-known poet, lesser-known playwrite and unfaltering feminist, Alfonsina Storni was one of few women to move in the male dominated arenas of literature and theatre, and as such, developed a unique and valuable voice that holds particular relevance in Latin American women’s poetry.

Talk to me about Alfonsina Storni

Perhaps better known among the current generation for the way she chose to end her life than for her literature; her supposedly serene suicide, by walking out to sea at Mar del Plata, has rendered her an almost mythical figure.

The author of poetry that is at once painful, disturbing, and rewarding, her razor-sharp writing has been described as “poetry of fatal beauty that leads to an unavoidable death”. But to appreciate the significance of her work, she must be looked at in the context of early 20th century Argentina.

Portrait of Alfonsina Storni

The daughter of an amateur actress and a beer industrialist, she was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland, in 1892, and moved to Argentina when she was only four years old. After living for some time in San Juan, her family settled in Santa Fe, where her life unravelled a course of constant obstacles that would inevitably become themes in her literature.

Having toured for little under a year with an amateur dramatics company, she returned to Rosario to graduate as a teacher in 1910. Sustaining herself with teaching and newspaper journalism, she moved to Buenos Aires in 1913 where the social and economical difficulties faced by Argentina’s growing middle classes were inspiring an emerging body of women’s rights activists.

Herself an unmarried mother, Storni turned to poetry to boldly confront the repression and denial she recognised, employing paradoxical verse that was rich in eroticism and passion while harbouring strongly feminist notes.

A Voice of Modern Feminism

Winner of the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize for her book ‘Languidez’, Storni wrote in several phases: the first from 1916-1920, a second from 1925-1926 and a third from 1934 until her death in 1938.

Belonging neither to modernism or the avant-garde, her writing did not align itself with either movement until they’d each begun to fade. Criticised for not slotting in to a style typical of the time, she comes bundled under the ill-defined label of postmodernism, whereas in truth she simply stood alone.

Writing on humanist thoughts and her responses to nature, as well as on the alienation of urban life and the pervasive presence of death, her poems return again and again to themes of family, sorrow and women’s issues, occasionally overshadowed by the spectre of violence.

Her first book of poetry, ‘La inquietud del rosal’, was published three years after her move to Buenos Aires and introduced the themes of love and feminism that although in their infancy, would come to dominate much of her work.

Developed along openly erotic lines, two further books were each divided in to two parts. At first amorous and passionate, then bitter and tempestuous, they showcased well Storni’s increasing preoccupation with the collective concerns of women. One of her most talked about poems, ‘Tú me quieres blanca’, famously denounced double standards and served as a literary indictment against male macho character.

By 1919 she seemed an unstoppable voice – authoring six short stories, two short novels, and a series of essays in a year of remarkable productivity. But with the publication of ‘Languidez’ the following year, she effectively closed the door on one creative period and opened a new one.

The arrival of ‘Ocre’, five years later, essentially heralded in a new phase without making much of a departure from the form and content of her earlier work. Described as a transitional text, it shifted in tone and ushered in the irony that would characterise her work from then on.

Whilst her early poetry might have been the most striking, it was marred with immaturity and the signs of a beginner. The ardent feminism and eroticism of her work at one time opened her up to accusations of publically ‘undressing’ herself, but as time passed she learned to temper her voice, which for critics, meant her writing matured.

After a book of love poems that slipped away unspoken of, and an almost eight-year absence from poetry, Storni returned with two books that together mark the height of her poetic maturity.

‘Mundo de siete pozos’, written in 1934 at a time when cancer had taken hold of her, and ‘Mascarill y trebol’, written in the year of her suicide, represented the most definite diversion from where she’d begun. In 52 unrhymed and sometimes obscure sonnets, Storni finally proved herself a ‘poetess’ as good as any poet of her time.

A Lone Woman in Theatre

Far from stepping down; during her apparent eight-year absence, Storni actually stepped up to the literary stage.

More human and restless in her writing than her contemporaries, what distinguished her from other female and even feminist authors in Chile and Uruguay was her foray in to theatre.

In four plays for adults and several more for children, her writing demonstrated the obvious yearning she felt for an alternative outlet of expression, and verged on dramatic poetry in terms of intensity and rhythm.

The Cervantes Theatre, where 'El amo del mundo' opened briefly in 1927 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Following much the same path as her poetry, her plays progressed from the confessional autobiographical to the more experimental, but despite combining political clarity with social subtlety, most never saw a stage.

Inspired by her encounters with Spain’s post-war artistic movements, ‘Dos farsas pirotécnicas’, brought together the genres of tragedy and farce in two plays that were especially acute in revealing the conflict between women’s public and private lives. Focusing squarely on the same themes of class and gender tensions as modern drama elsewhere, they contrasted sharply with the traditional repertoire of Argentine theatre at that time.

Straddling the breakthrough aesthetics of the avant-garde and the early activism for women’s rights, Storni stood as one of the most radical playwrights of the period, and had the absence of women playwrites and an unfavourable climate not sided against her, she would surely have developed in to one of the most important.

Honoured during her lifetime as Argentina’s foremost female poet and one of the three most prominent in South America, she is credited with authoring work that was not only of great value and originality, but which established the foundations of feminist discourse in Latin American literature.

For the latest edition of BA lives, The Argentina Independent spoke with Benjamin Kunkel. Originally from Colorado, the 37-year-old Harvard and Columbia graduate previously lived and worked in New York. It was there that he wrote for a number of publications, including ‘Dissent’ and ‘The New Yorker’,  and published his successful first novel ‘Indecision’ in 2006. In addition to co-founding the magazine ‘N+1′ in 2004, Benjamin has written a play, and is now in the process of writing his second novel.

How did you come to live Buenos Aires?

I happened to be asked a number of years ago to write a travel article about the city, and it was right when this novel I wrote was published, which meant that I was finally in a position to leave New York which was something I had been wanting to do for years. And so the first place I saw, in a sense, after I had become free, was Buenos Aires. There are lots of other foreign cities that I liked but I thought this one seemed more interesting and more dynamic than a place like Paris or Barcelona which I think have become museums in a sense, museums of themselves.

And how do you find being in Argentina?

I think it’s an interesting country if you’re an American because in some respects they’re very similar countries, in the sense of being societies of immigrants, these kind of promised lands, quite big and isolated. And yet, of course, they’re totally different.

One of the things I noticed is that there are extremely similar statues of Columbus in Columbus Circle in New York and outside the Casa Rosada here. Our Columbus in New York looks west, its as though he’s just arrived in this ‘New World’ and he’s looking forward. But Columbus here looks east, it’s as though he’s arrived in the Americas and is immediately looking back to where he’s come from.

And can you tell me about your magazine, N+1?

Anyone who reads the Argentina Independent should subscribe to N+1. It’s a great publication.

How did it come about?

There was a group of us who’d gone to school together and we didn’t know each other particularly well as graduates. We found that it was relatively easy to publish book reviews, but we wanted to write essays; we wanted to write crazy polemics; stories that were unpublishable because they were too essay-ish; we wanted to do all these things and there was no way to do these things without getting our own publication where we could publish what we ourselves wanted to write. We didn’t want to be merely political, or merely literary, or merely critical. [In N+1] there’s a mixture of politics, and more theoretical writing, fiction, a mixture of all that stuff that I think is relatively unique. Although to say it’s relatively unique is probably a contradiction in terms.

Who are the contributors to the magazine?

People we invite, people who solicit us, and the editors themselves. A pretty good mix. To a great extent we’ve been poached: we find great writers and people like The New Yorker poach them. Which is fine. Like the farm teams in major league baseball, we have located and developed a lot of the talent. We just don’t have the money to pay anybody, so we find these great writers, and then we publish them and then the people who can pay steal them. Which is okay because it means that everybody is happy in a way, they don’t write for us any more so we have to find new young writers. Meanwhile these people are being paid a decent amount.

Could you tell me a bit about your play?

It’s a play with a somewhat heavy, existentialist sounding premise which is namely that these people live in an apartment infested by flies. It takes place on the day after the exterminator has come. It’s got all this hopefully light physical comedy to it because they are swatting at flies all the time. It’s like a tragical farse: it ought to be really funny and really dreadful if it succeeds.

How was the transition from fiction to theatre?

The transition didn’t feel too hard, and in some senses was quite nice. One of the things you can’t do in theatre is to give access to the minds of the characters, they can only act and say things. And for me one of the difficulties of writing fiction is that it’s hard to stop talking about what’s going on in people’s heads. I think there’s just a lot more pressure on a play to be absolutely efficient, and not have any part of it be dead space. Most great novels have longeurs:  they’ve got problems, passages that are not so great, and the theatre is less tolerant of that.

What were the themes you were hoping to incorporate?

Certainly among other things it’s a play about global warming, a play about feeling like you’re in the midst of a declining, perhaps falling, civilisation. As I say, it’s not meant to be very heavy, it’s meant to be heavy and light at the same time: the unbearable lightness of civilisational collapse.

As a writer, how do you see the literary world in Argentina?

To tell you the truth I don’t have the clearest notion of the literary world in Argentina…I think it’s a country that I think has distinguished itself in literary terms  more than any of the other arts. If you think of really imposing, excellent Argentine writers, that’s a pretty long list.

If you look at the history of Argentine writing a lot of great writers after the Second World War ended up dying abroad, expatriating themselves for long periods. I think that’s not happening nearly so much now because the political condition of the country has improved so much, writers don’t need to be abroad in the same way. Some of the great writers, even Borges, who spent most of his life here, even he went abroad to die, partly for political reasons I think. Someone like César Aira, who I admire enormously, he’s sticking around, and I think there’s no reason not to.

One of the things that’s interesting that’s happened to Argentina since the crisis is that it has become a more inward looking country, which with a lot of countries might not be a good thing but for this country I think probably has been a pretty good thing. I think once upon a time Argentines who had a certain level of education looked abroad culturally too much, and wanted to live abroad. I think the problems with the exchange rate have meant that Argentines have had to come to know their own country better.