Photo Courtesy of Monte Madre
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Even through adversity, love manages to bloom.
And our project this week hopes to promote one Argentine story of how this is true.
La Legendaria Theatre Club is getting set for ‘Monte Madre’, a play that tells the true story of how a young couple of militants managed to evade the dictatorship’s clutches, living in nature and bringing two children into the world.
Alan Robinson said he was moved when he first read the story of the couple, Remo Venica and Irmina Kleiner.
“I liked it a lot,” he said. “I read it in one night, entirely, in one night on the bus from Entre Ríos to Buenos Aires.”
La Legendaria Theatre Club is a group of seven people, and each one has a role as actor and producer. This is the second play for the group.
“We want to start to make theatre jobs professions,” he said. “So that actors in theatre can live as actors, and they don’t have to do commercials, television or movies.”
This play takes place between 1974 and 1978 in Argentina. The lovers hid in the forest and survived by nature before and during the last dicatorship.
During the first few years, they were hunted by the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA).
“Everyone who was politically affiliated with social work, all the people who were socialists of some sort, who were with socialism looking for a better world – they were persecuted by the AAA,” Robinson said.
When the dictatorship began in 1976 the pair, Venica and Kleiner, had to hide from the military and others.
“It wasn’t just a military coup d’etat,” he said. “There were also support from private capitalists or support from certain sectors of society, the church, among others.”
Robinson said there are four important themes, the first of which is love.
“We are going to tell the story of love during a dictatorship,” he said. “We are going to talk about love, in the first place. This is our central theme.”
Photo Courtesy of Monte Madre
Survival is the next important theme.
“How to live in the natural world,” he said.
Spirituality is another theme the cast will be focusing on.
“We are working with spiritual conflicts,” he noted.
Lastly, Robinson said identity plays an important role in Monte Madre.
“It’s a very present theme, and it’s an actual theme – like the identity of the children of the disappeared,” he said. “In this play, the couple was not disappeared, but exiled. But we’re going to work on the theme of the identity of the generation that is between 25 and 35 who are people – the children of the people who were disappeared.”
He also said it is good to get a different discourse on the last dictatorship, that it does not happen again.
“That we don’t have discourses that take us back to living this terrible experience,” he said.
Love is a way to help repair his parents’ generations wounds, he said, noting that they will be using magical realism.
“It’s a very Latin American genre,” he noted. “It’s natural.”
As one would guess from the theme of survival, things end happily for the couple. Today, Venica and Kleiner are spreading their love for nature by working on the organic farm “Naturaleza Viva,” educating people and producing food based on ideas of respecting the earth and all its beings.
Monte Madre will first come to stage in the form of two previews for friends, producers and reporters in November 2012. The play will be open to the public from the 24th March, 2013.
