Anton Chekhovich Chekhov’s ‘Two’ Sisters at Microteatro

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Mourning the dead and having them constantly in our memories is what makes us, among other things, different to animals. But when that peculiar human custom is just an excuse to not fully live your own life, it becomes a serious problem. That’s what Chekhov intelligently shows in his plays and what witty José Ignacio Tofé, playwright of Microteatro’s piece Las dos hermanas, parodied. We have two sisters, whose father disappeared in a snow storm months before and plan to keep the mourning until the body is found. The younger sister wants to marry, but the elder one, guardian of the archaic and atavistic practice, tries to slow down her plans forever and ever in a vicarious masochistic fashion. Because of the absurd of the plot and the hyperbolic performances, this is a comedy, and quite a funny one. Actress and scene director Silvia de Pé playing the sexually repressed and mystically sanctimonious sister, and fresh and full-of-life Ana Villa as the younger one, refer to each other with their complete unpronounceable patronymic-included names and keep a hilarious tension until the end, a foreseeable but liberating turn of the screw, exactly the opposite of the genius Russian playwright, who most times leaves the audience with a bitter emotional aftertaste, stripping characters of their concealing frustrated masks.

The “in-love” inside the Red Room at Microteatro por dinero

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Beware, teachers, of the Red Room, and of resented former students who decide to blame you for their failing lives and take revenge torturing you under a red bulb, as the Nazis used to do.

In Tokyo, in 2008, I heard from a colleague of a drop-out student who, after several years of low-income temporary jobs, went back to the Japanese university to stab to death in the restroom one of his former professors, the “guilty” of all his misery. At the University of Arkansas, a few years before I started my MA, a Ph.D candidate in the Comparative Literature department, after seeing his dissertation being turned down for the second and last time, locked himself at his thesis’ director’s office, shot this one three times and committed suicide afterwards.

Los enamorados, the couple in love.

First date: nervous faces and spasms, neutral and insipid conversations, the broke young man sweating at the sight of the prices on the menu.

First anniversary: fluid love story, passionate and romantic attitude, oath for eternal love.

Tenth anniversary: Tedious routine at its height, children as a motive for an argument, professional envy, likely infidelities.

Twentieth anniversary: Sour character, physical decay, companion love. Shall we dance?

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