Strindberg and the world of the living dead
By Omar Alain Rodrigo

The playwright August Strindberg seems to be heir to an ancestral pain and have a nature that gives fruition to the most terrible contradictions: light and darkness, the origin and end of all possible universes.

Strindberg (1849-1912) was a melancholy prophet who appeared at the forefront of contemporary dramaturgy, a reaper during the apocalypse of Mexican theater at a time when its center, the country's capital city, was dying of inanition and the whole country suffered its agony.

I heard about Strindberg for the first time in 1984, when I was studying in the Centro Universitario de Teatro (CUT), at that time headed by Ludwik Margules. I recall when Rosa María Bianchi was preparing our first acting test based on the dramatic art of a mad and genial author. This first approach had such a tremendous impact on me that I ended up devouring all of his theater work that was available, sharing his fears and torments. Thus, Miss Julie and The Pelican got trapped under my skin.

Strindberg is the father of modern theater and was a source of inspiration to Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. He had an inexorable influence on the existentialists and Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet. Strindberg did not always write the same sort of naturalistic play. We can find also in his drama different styles and currents that broke with the former theatrical style and helped launch the modern theater. His work encompasses everything from naturalism to the most select realism, from symbolism to the poetic delirium and expressionism. His plays are emerging from a hidden place in darkness, where the human soul lives captive and needs to be liberated.

It is not a coincidence that The Pelican is one of the most performed plays of Strindberg. In it, he condensed all the obsessions that made up his universe: the family and marriage, descent to madness, lies, abuse and misery, the psychic struggle, the imposition of the strongest, fire as a purifier and death as the only salvation. Doubtless, he was a reckless author.

My theatrical activity in Querétaro started five years ago when I started an acting workshop that also supplies actors for the plays I direct under the auspices of the company, called Espektros. We presented the play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett in the Museo de la Ciudad with the support of the Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes with the Company "La Mandrágora" from Sinaloa. 

Later, we presented Arthur Miller's Witches of Salem, and finally Strindberg's The Pelican, in which Marta Aura played the character of the mother. 

To confront Strindberg is to free our own demons and jump into a rodeo to dance with them. His genius is transcendent, and it lives on in the darkness of his own characters, who are merely waiting for the fugacious beam to take the scene.

Following a four-month tour of drama festivals in Monterrey and Baja California, we have returned to Querétaro and are currently preparing to stage Strindberg's Miss Julie. Strindberg's Creditors is currently running.

The intensely creative period from 1887 to 1889 produced the best-known chamber plays of Strindberg: The Father, Compañeros, Creditors and The Strongest. These works bring together powerful and antagonistic forces: mystic fire and pagan ardor, patron and servant, and male and female in a fierce fight to establish class, sexual and intellectual supremacy.

Currently, we are working with Creditors. It is relevant for me to recall the words of its author in regard to his own work: "It is one of my favorite plays. It requires only three actors, a table and two chairs; it does not have a sunrise." This is chamber theater in the strictest sense, in which we can find two of the most characteristic types in Strindberg's drama: the vampire or the cannibal, the being that has to devour others to survive, and the avenger, a being that seems to have been sent by fate, almost the worldly representative of the divine Nemesis.

Sean O'Casey wrote: "Strindberg, Strindberg, Strindberg, the greatest of all dramatists! He brings flames from planets full of life as off the static stars." O'Neill called him the precursor of the modern in theater. Ibsen told a foreigner: "Here is someone who is going to be bigger than me: August Strindberg."

Translated from Spanish by Miguel Loyola.

Strindberg's The Creditors
Directed by Omar Alain Rodrigo
Thursday, June 15, 8pm, Teatro Ángela Peralta, 100 pesos