¡DIGNIDAD! -- Repertorio Español’s education initiative to develop students’ understanding and appreciation for live theatre.
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Through our EDUCATIONAL RESIDENCY PROGRAM, Repertorio believes that students can be introduced to careers in the arts such as acting, playwrights, designers, technicians, and administrators.
In-School Residencies in New Jersey
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CUBA TEATRO: Abelardo Estorino |
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Abelardo Estorino: A Profile
He is slender and slightly grey, a soft-spoken and gentle man who has lived through historic moments and personally difficult ones. At 73, Abelardo Estorino is Cuba's foremost living playwright. In 1997 he was awarded the coveted Guggenheim Fellowship. That brought him to New York, to the warmth of old friends and colleagues.
He was born in 1925 in Unión de Reyes, Matanzas province, which is located just east of Havana, a few miles southwest of the famed Varadero Resort. He remembers clearly the traveling circus that performed every year in his hometown, and which always brought with it a small theater troupe. Once gone, he would re-stage versions of the productions with his neighborhood friends. It was with Eloísa Alvarez Guedes' amateur theater group that Mr. Estorino first performed as a teenager in Unión de Reyes.
"I got used to the circus visiting our town, the exotic animals, the acrobats, the fire-eaters, and the unforgettable vaudeville act with its hot mulata, the cheating negrito, and the humiliated gallego, always tricked by his friend into paying the bill. That was my first experience of theater. Later I would come to know the works of Jacinto Benavente and other authors who were regularly staged by the town's aficionados. The rest has been incessant reading, and keeping memories in hidden drawers, so as not to have to make up stories, but simply to re-live and transform them: my family's move to an uncle's house because father had lost his job; my cousins' womanizing with virgins and whores; a relative committing suicide for reasons I couldn't understand back then..."
The family moved to the City of Matanzas, the birthplace of poets José Jacinto Milanés and Plácido, the adopted hometown of Domingo del Monte, where Estorino first saw the ocean. "My father took me and my brothers to see the harbor, which a century earlier had been immortalized in the verses of the mad poet (Milanés)". In Matanzas, Estorino finished high school and, as he put it, learnt to walk on the cobblestones of Cuba's history.
In Havana, he studied dentistry, one of several professions guaranteed to provide financial stability and social standing - a universal expectation among Cuba's rising middle class, of which his family was no exception. But his early love for theater would win in the end. Most of his friends came from the university's theater group, Teatro Universitario. He frequented every theater in Havana, where he met the most prominent teatristas of the moment, among them Rolando Ferrer, who became his first real mentor.
"Rolando passed down to me everything he knew. He gave me books to read, the essential theater manuals; he shared the secrets of the trade with me, and handed me every page he wrote, hot out of his Underwood, to read."
In Havana he also met painter Raúl Martínez, founder of Grupo de los Once, the Group of Eleven (abstract expressionists) that revolutionized Havana's galleries in the 1950's. Their association would last a lifetime, until Martínez's death in 1995.
"It was Raúl who found me sitting at the typewriter one afternoon. I was writing Hay un muerto en la calle a piece that has never been staged. Raúl was like a Muse to me. The intensity with which he painted motivated me to write with the same passion. It's the reason I have written so much."
That was in the fifties. Things would change after 1959. The plays written in the early years of the Cuban Revolution confronted new values and old attitudes. In 1960, his play El peine y el espejo debuted in Havana, and the next year his El robo del cochino received the National Prize for Drama awarded by Cuba's Casa de las Américas. It was "Move over, señor dentista, the playwright has arrived at last". In 1962 his Las vacas gordas and Las impuras were premiered, and in 1964 he received an honorable mention from Casa de las Américas for La casa vieja.
In the years that followed, he would write as well as direct, sometimes his own plays, sometimes the works of other playwrights. He wrote Los mangos de Cain (1965); El tiempo de la plaga and La dama de las camelias (1968); La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de José Jacinto Milanés (1973); Ni un sí, ni un no (1980); Pachencho vivo o muerto (1982); Morir del cuento (1983), which received the Cau Ferrat Award at the Sitges Festival in Spain in 1985; Que el diablo te acompañe (1987); Las penas saben nadar (1989) Vagos rumores (1992) and Parece blanca (1994).
Estorino's later works have adopted the more traditional structures of narrative and representation, drawing from history and from memories. Many of his plays, as well as their productions, have won awards in Cuba and abroad, where they have also been staged. But no distinction has been so meaningful as the 1992 Cuban National Prize for Literature, an honor seldom bestowed to a dramatist. Estorino commented on this in a 1995 interview:
"To the Cuban literati, literature is narrative and poetry. They consider theater as something else, something that has to do with entertainment, something apart from literature. This is amusing, for these same people speak of Calderón [de la Barca] and quote La vida es sueño; they mention Shakespeare and think of Hamlet. We had to fight it out with the Union of Writers because they wanted to exclude playwrights from membership. I have always advocated for theater as literature, and I labor over my texts as much as poets do over theirs."
That discipline enabled him to endure the years of censorship - what he calls "los años jodidos", the hard years — during which he was listed among forbidden authors, in the company of such greats as Ionesco, Pinter, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Vargas Llosa and Sontag. It also has been crucial in allowing Estorino to search for the authenticity of ideas that causes human beings to act a certain way, and to portray the essence of conflict and contradiction, that audiences may recognize their own predicaments acted out in front of them. This is true of Parece Blanca and Vagos Rumores, where the struggle for human dignity and freedom in 19th Century Cuba finds its way back from the past. Instead of thinking about retirement, Estorino thinks about going into production. We are so very lucky, for when Piñera, Ariza, and Leal summon his presence for a heavenly café con leche, Estorino will leave Cubans — and mankind — a rich literary legacy groomed to the last minute by his expert hand. But relax, that isn't happening any time soon. Abelardo Estorino is staying with us for a long time.
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