Abstract
Teatro Abierto (‘Open Theatre’) was launched in Argentina in 1981. It was the idea of a number of playwrights, directors and actors, many of whom had spent all or many of the years following the 1976 coup in exile abroad. They were determined to demonstrate that theatre was still a living art in Argentina in spite of repeated government censorship and outright repression by means of bannings, threats and blacklists. ‘We reckoned that if we all appeared together, they couldn't possibly silence the whole thing,’ one of the founding group commented. Their idea was to put on 21 short plays at the rate of three a day over a week, with repetitions of the plays over a month. However, halfway through the first week, just after the performance of a play which contained references to the thousands of ‘disappeared’ in Argentina (see Box), the theatre staging the plays was burnt out. Several people, never subsequently identified, broke into it and spread phosphorus bombs throughout the auditorium. The theatre was gutted, and since it was not insured, has remained empty ever since. The outcry against such a blatant attack on freedom of expression was so great that the season of plays was quickly offered a home in a larger theatre, where the remaining works were performed, arousing enormous public interest.
Teatro Abierto 1981 was an important psychological turning point for cultural life in Argentina under the military. The fact that a group of artists had stood together and refused to allow any interference with their work greatly encouraged others. Their initiative was soon followed by similar events in dance, cinema and photography, all of them demonstrating the vitality of Argentine cultural expression despite six years of official censorship and neglect.
The play which follows, Odd Man In, was one of the works presented in the 1981 series of Teatro Abierto. Its author, Eduardo Pavlovsky, returned recently to Argentina after spending several years in exile in Spain. He has described his escape from Argentina in the following fashion: ‘In my play Telarañas (‘Cobwebs’) there is a scene in which two gas board officials force their way into a home. In fact, they are not from the gas board at all, but are torturers. Cobwebs was written in 1976 and put on at the Teatro Payró in 1977. It lasted two days. I received a letter from the Secretary of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires asking me to withdraw it. Possibly because I wasn't fully aware of the kind of situation we were really in, I took no notice, and forced them to issue a formal banning decree. Three months later, two ‘gas board officials’ came to my place asking for me. Luckily my secretary realised what was going on, and phoned to me upstairs. By this time, another eight ‘gasmen’ had appeared. If I'm here to tell the story, it's because by then I had climbed out of my window and escaped across the roofs.’