UTR Festival Day Two: Teatro Anonimo’s Espiritu

I love to read my TV. I absolutely love it.

I started watching TV with subtitles because of Game of Thrones. If you watched that show without subtitles, congratulations, you have masterful ears, because I don’t know how I would have gotten anything out of that show without being able to read along with the actors. Between the myriad of accents (from both real and fictional places), a tendency towards mumblecore, and one thousand characters with hard to remember names, there was no way I was going to be able to follow the plot without ensuring that I was receiving information both aurally and visually.

The second show that made me fall in love with subtitles was Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy known for, among other things, being really fast-paced. Without subtitles, I would have missed so many of the zippy one-liners that make the show so funny.

Now I watch virtually everything with subtitles (one notable exception being anything live, it’s too annoying), and one of the huge benefits of this has been that it has made me more open-minded to watching films, TV shows, and theatre in translation, such as the topic of today’s blog post, Espiritu.

Adapted from Trinidad Gonzalez’s play of the same name, Espiritu, presented by Chile’s Teatro Anonimo as part of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, is a series of scenes that take place in the middle of the night in an anonymous city. While the scenes range in terms of content from intimate arguments between partners to street harassment and altercations between strangers, a thematic continuity binds them together.

Many of the scenes and monologues feature either over or under currents of violence, specifically evoking imagery of blood. There is nothing graphic or gory, either visually or in description, but moments of tension remind the audience that it’s never far from possibility, always bubbling underneath the surface. Significantly, these violent impulses are often brought into contrast with art, poetry, and music. Although never overtly stated, the message that comes to mind is that the anecdote to a violent society, overwrought with corruption, hyper-consumerism, and a never ending need for accumulation of power and property, is the drive to create for creations sake. Characters throughout the piece include writers, poets, and musicians, and they are often brought into contrast with characters whose views differ from their own, either in an extreme and political context, or just in smaller, albeit still significant, practical ways.

One of my favorite elements of this production is the recurring line, “It’s 4 o’clock in the morning.” I feel like this motif captured the feeling of tension that was present through out the show. Four o’clock in the morning is, in a way, a liminal space. While 3 o’clock is solidly very late at night and 5 o’clock is definitively very early in the morning, 4 o’clock is kind of neither. It’s too late for most reasonable people to stay awake and too early to wake up. Most of the world is asleep. However, the characters in Espiritu live in the tension of their conversations, and this is further embodied by the hour in which the play takes place. Also, as I noticed that this line would appear throughout the play, it felt like a secret between me and the playwright. The characters don’t know about all the other scenes happening before and after theirs, but I know. I love things like that.

More so than Capsule, Espiritu gave me the feeling of actually being at Under the Radar. For one, it’s international, and I don’t know if I would have ever engaged with work from Chile, nonetheless the work of these specific artists, if it weren’t for their selection as part of the festival. It also was adapted from a play and based on appearances looks like it was filmed in an actual theatre. It was edited of course, the transitions between the scenes were not shown, the sets would just suddenly be different and the actors would arrive in different costumes and as different characters mere moments after their prior scenes ended, but there were no crazy visual effects or anything that couldn’t have reasonably been generated in a live theatrical experience.

While it felt more comfortably within the world of theatre, it also made me miss it more. This is very much an idea piece, and I wished I had seen it sitting in the dark, next to a friend, with plans to head to a bar afterword and discuss what we though. Which scenes resonated with you? Did you notice the reoccurring imagery of a glass of wine being poured? What were the characters talking about when the discussed the impending destruction of the world? Was it real, or a metaphor? Can the metaphor also be real?

Although I feel the emptiness where a post-theatre going discussion should be, I’m glad I watched Espiritu. It reminded me that I really should work harder to learn Spanish, and to continue to expose myself to works in translation. The theatrical world in some ways feels very tiny, but it’s also so wide, and I have so many artists to get to know.