Federico Liss and Jorge Eiro are two of the creators of “In the best way”a play that talks about the tensions that break out between two brothers after the death of their father and that offers performances at the emblematic Rodney bar in the Chacarita neighborhood of Buenos Aires on Saturdays and Sundays at 7:30 p.m.
Performed by Liss and David Rubinstein and written and directed by Liss, Rubinstein and Eiro, “In the best way” has the particularity of not accepting the limits of the theater but of being performed exclusively in bars.
The first draft of the play became known in 2018 when, as a work in progress, it had its first performances at the Santa Paula bar by Vicente López within the framework of the Theater Festival in Unexpected Spaces.
“The work had a long process from when we began to imagine it to the final form that it took in October 2021 when we premiered it at the Rodney,” Liss and Eiro tell Télam about the origin of one of the “must-sees” of the current billboard of the independent theater.
“The first thing that appeared was the idea ‘outside-night: some guys get out of a truck shouting’, and that was the premise to start investigating a universe that gradually revealed itself,” says Liss to mark the origin of a drama that was written in the bodies of the actors from a series of inquiries in relation to the meeting between two brothers on the day of their father’s death in the bar that he managed.
“That ‘outside-night’ -says Eiro- gave us a bit of a kick to put the theatrical and cinematographic language in tension without the work losing theatricality”.
– In fact, until the strong plot of the conflict between these two brothers begins to develop, the viewer attends above all a tension and a climate, certainly very similar to the cinema, with very little information about what is happening.
– Federico Liss: One of the ideas was that the information was arriving in a very dosed way and that what was interesting and captured was something else: a temperature of action, the link between them, that intensity that is played and transmitted, that latency that Anything can happen even if you don’t know what is in the background.
-Jorge Eiro: There is a theater that interests us in which the performance generates a tension all the time of something that happens below and you don’t finish finding out. Something that is worked on in terms of omission, of tension, of things that traffic an expressiveness that is not in the written text, a mystery that crosses the textuality and breaks it.
– Did these mechanisms appear in the construction process of the work?
– FL: Because of the way we had to build the information, the information was reaching us little by little, because we got together and began to act without a previous text; there was a premise there, that it takes place in a bar, that they are from a community as if they were gypsies, that they are brothers and that the father died and from there we began to improvise and then what appeared in the body acting was very different than it would have appeared if we had sat down to write. There is something about the looks, the energies, the silences that it would have been impossible to name in a text, things that happened on stage in improvisation and that we recognized as interesting and appropriated them at a time when we still did not know what the plot was. that supported the story.
– JE: In fact, when we showed the work for the first time in 2018 at Vicente López’s Santa Paula bar, where they asked us for a work in progress and not a finished work, we still did not have the outcome but we already knew that the world we had built was attractive; the meeting of these two brothers was attractive even though in terms of plot it was not yet defined; that’s where Nancy’s name appeared, that made us think of “The Intruder” by Borges, we read the story, the tension between brothers and we looked for something more biblical, in the sense of something mythical that was not traversed by the morality of the time but rather more of the symbolic order: two brothers, a dispute, a father and from there it was like we went back to cooking the stew that we were already cooking but in a different way, like something to stir down, and that was very stimulating.
– This first embryonic presentation was in 2018 and then they premiered in final form in October 2021.
– JE: The pademeia was good for us to do winter quarters and rethink some things. Something interesting happened, because it is common for actresses and actors to appear in search processes to find answers to what is opening up and these two guys had a very calm attitude, “let’s not run, let’s keep looking, laboratory, let’s keep going.” sharpening the pencil of the expression, of the tone of this”, they said and that, somehow, for the one who directs and is creating the work is a happiness in which you want to stay and live.
– FL: It happened that we did that working progress in 2018 at Vicente López, then we did some performances at El Banderín (Billinghurst and Guardia Vieja), we were able to test the progress we were making in rehearsals with the public, the material was growing, it was having new moments and something always came back that was very stimulating.
– It is a work that could not be staged in a room.
– JE: The appropriation they make of the space, the dramaturgy of Rodney’s sound, the door that does not open and screams, some of all those stimuli that occur in that specific place end up putting together the story.
– FL:: It is not a work for a room. It becomes very stimulating to have all that reality available to one as if it were a perfect set. It is also very adrenaline to be living with the public space, the street, the accidental. During the performance, a person can pass by and want to go into the bar or they talk to you or stop the police because there is a van on the sidewalk, that generates a lot of adrenaline because all the time while the play is taking place you live with the tension that you can leave control at any time.
– The viewer is also in a particular place attending a theatrical performance.
– JE: Yes, the spectator is alert or attentive to what can happen outside, a less passive spectator is generated, who is alert to something unexpected that can happen, is a little more at risk and adheres to the place, the moment and your chances. Another thing in relation to space are the silences that may exist in the play between the two actors that allow you as a spectator to escape from them and look at something outside or in the same bar, you can lose yourself while these two are silent or in tension and that is where this type of spatiality proposes another type of theatricality that has nothing to do with the theatricality of the room.
