gaming society

Tragicomedy as a manifestation of reality. That’s the compass Players, a play that shows a barber, a gravedigger, an actor and a mathematics teacher, all of them elderly, without job opportunities and prone to playing board games. How is this distressing interval understood? The Peruvian director Mateo Chiarella offers us a manual with his staging from this Thursday the 18th at the Ricardo Blume Theater (Jesús María), where the protagonists will be the actors Ricardo Velásquez, Américo Zúñiga, Alfonso Santistevan and Alberto Ísola.

• As the director of ‘Players’, can you share the creative vision that inspired you to bring this story to the stage?

What attracted me to the plot were two specific aspects. One that was a story about old people when really life, like a bow, leads you towards the fall. What happens to these people when they stop working. And the second is that he faces it from humor, from black comedy.

• Given the emotional complexity of ‘Players’, what were the biggest challenges you faced directing this work and how did you overcome them?

The work captures very well the spirits, fears, and anxieties of older people. Like any process there are doubts, but apart from the intelligence and sensitivity of the actors, it has been very ductile, very easy to grasp the characters. Proposals were collected, it was refined, but it is basically the actors who, from their experience, have managed the story.

• In depicting deep themes like addiction and gambling, how did you guide the cast to explore these dimensions authentically?

It’s just that addiction and gambling are the results of something, right? And that feeling of not winning, of being put aside, can lead to addiction, gambling, and frustration. In truth, addiction and gambling are a mechanism. In this case, the card game.

• Is there a specific reaction you’d like to evoke?

I think that the impact that is expected of the audience is that they let themselves go, that they surrender to the story, that they have fun, that they see in the characters not necessarily a personal identification but with some close character from their world, that they become sensitive to old people.

• If you could give one piece of advice to emerging directors who aspire to tackle deep themes in theatre, what would it be?

You have to be sincere with what you want to do. Sometimes we believe that our sincerity has to do with breaking the mold and being rebellious. And the question is if there is a specific reason for that or if what I want is simply to be the person who makes the change. It is better that you tell a good story and that you tell that story the way it comes out of your mind than that you are thinking about revolutionizing theater. Be sincere, do what you want, but do it seriously and deeply. Don’t play theater.

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