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ARGENTINE FESTIVAL III/IV
July 8-10, Reynolds Theater
GABRIELA PRADO & EUGENIA ESTÉVEZ:
Llueve (It Rains)
EDGARDO MERCADO:
Plano Difuso (Diffuse Plane)
SUSANA TAMBUTTI:
The Stab
On the night of a summer thunderstorm, two women and a man stay up late, moving through the implications of their shared relationships as they move through the ramshackle rooms of their time together.
Llueve (It Rains), Prado and Estévez' hour-long play, conveys one of the strongest senses of place in all the works we previewed. It also contains moments that shock, in a pensive work that may raise some of the summer's most pointed questions about relationships—provided its many pauses don't get too pregnant.
In the second, separately ticketed concert, Mercado plays in the digital sandbox in Plano Difuso (Diffuse Plane), amusing himself and us as he explores the relationship between performer and digitized setting—sometimes not dissimilarly to Amy Yoes and Mark Haim's technochoreographic fusion last summer, Guide to Southern Trees. After that, Grupo Krapp's Luciana Acuña restages Susana Tambutti's The Stab. This campy, comic burlesque of gender roles on film recalls the Patti Smith quote “Every woman/ is evasive”—that is, when it isn't apparently taking notes from a lower-brow ditty by Robyn Hitchcock. The Stab's manic physical energy, penchant for quick-change and mileage on props alone recalls—of all things—Jim Carrey in The Mask.