Licker

“Do whatever you want to me, I would never think anything vulgar about you… Your hair looks wet and hot, touching it must be like putting your hand in a pot of blackberry jam.” A man in the mountains speaks to an absent woman. Always the same. Among the sounds of the animals and their words frayed by lucidity and delirium, a woman appears. Other. One who, like him, is on a journey on the verge of falling into or out of madness. They are two marginal and lonely beings who meet for a moment. Its crossing is Lamedero.

Saying that this is a version of El solicitor Vidriera does little to clarify the link that the work has with Cervantes' novel. Because here no one was bewitched or believes that it is made of glass. In fact, the characters have another name, they are in another place, at another time, experiencing something that does not happen in the original text, saying other things to each other. The relationship is less explicit, but that does not make it weak. The relationship is in his words. In the baroque excess with which they address the central themes of the novel: love and madness.

But the thematic closeness is shattered by the centuries that have made the original rupture of the enlightened madman portrayed by Cervantes today seem commonplace. For this reason, the staging seeks more to dialogue with the original, its author and its time, than to repeat them. "It was a decision not to make a judgment or a diagnosis of the lawyer, but to open the poetic universe of madness. To make the theme of delirium more complex, to make it more ambiguous and obscene, without a moral," says director Guillermo Ugalde.

The Licentiate Vidriera is one of the Exemplary Novels that Cervantes published in 1613. The playwright Roberto Contador became interested in it from a quote by the poet Leopoldo María Panero about Don Quixote, where he described it as a “filthy novel” and said that the one he liked It was Stained Glass.The 400 years since Cervantes' death pushed Contador to fulfill his desire to work from it. The result is the only Chilean text that makes up the project Exemplary Theaters, where playwrights from different countries rewrote the Exemplary Novels, and the second work of the Teatro La Península company, co-producer of the work together with the Cultural Center of Spain and GAM. 

Direction: Guillermo Ugalde
Dramaturgy: Roberto Contador
Cast: Roxana Naranjo and Guilherme Sepúlveda
Sound design: Gustavo Guzmán
Lighting design: Andrés Poirot
Set and costume design: ToRo
Costume and prop assistance: Aurora Muñoz Lacourly
Makeup and characterization: Constanza García
Image on stage: Alexis Mandujano
Photo gallery credit: Jorge Sánchez

Call 2016, GAM Coproduction.