“There are materials that are difficult to surface, while others are simply waiting for you to open the door. In this case, it came pouring out ”, offers Gilda Bona, playwright and director of New York Animal World, which opens this Sunday at the Teatro del Pueblo (Lavalle 3636, its new headquarters). In this promising one-man show, one of the most auspicious of the Buenos Aires billboard, Yanina Gruden – an actress of uncommon ductility, capable of virtuously playing many interpretive strings – is “the girl”: a character who, following a genuine desire for freedom, flies away New York, where other cages will suffocate her, will have to go through other bars … The origin of this work can be traced back to 2018, in the cycle The suitcase that weighs the most del Sportivo Teatral, in which authors such as Susana Torres Molina, Susana Gutiérrez Posse, Adriana Tursi, Lucía Laragione, Víctor Winer participated. The guiding axis was migration, the suitcase, the trip, and Bona then presented a brief monologue in which a young woman decides to leave her parents’ house and is ready to do anything to give her wish. In New York Animal World, that scene acts as a prologue for things to come: the girl at a gas station in Jackson Heights, Queens; The taxi that drives 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, awaits her there …
“In the first part of the piece, my character confronts his family: he wants to leave his house with a man 15 years older,” describes Yanina Gruden: “And although there is some enchantment, what drives her is not love: it is a desperate search for freedom. It is not only about breaking with parents but also about breaking with this very unequal world in which we live. She frankly shuns him to the place of submission and never puts herself in a victim position. For me she is a heroine who goes out to fight, who seeks and seeks. He has an animal locked up in his chest and the urgent need to make it come out, despite the obstacles that are presented to him, which are always greater for women, even more so when they are young, even more so as taxi drivers. In that sense, I would say that it is an existentialist work; that motivation – to be free – is universal, common to all human beings. The beauty of the work is that, beyond giving certainties, it raises questions. From the relationship with his mother, with his father, with his sister, with food, with the taxi, with the fact of living in a world of men… ”. In tune, Bona points out that if “the girl” has something, it is that she is extremely sincere and questions – sometimes in a crude way, without paying attention to what is supposedly correct – her ties, herself, what she feels: “You can see her , the terrible doubt, the stagnation, the absolute certainty, the weaknesses in which it falls, the shortcuts it takes to fill gaps. Everything is there, the miseries and virtues; I think that makes her a lovable character ”.
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“Many anecdotes that are told, I lived them. It’s quite an autobiographical piece ”, confesses Gilda Bona, who actually drove a taxi in New York. And at the beginning of the 80s, it is worth emphasizing: a thorny time to live in the Big Apple, a city on the verge of bankruptcy, devastated by the crack epidemic, with historical peaks of crime … Bona was 22 years old and had little experience in steering wheel: learned in the parking lot of a supermarket aboard an old Volkswagen beetle. And when she took the exam to obtain the taxi driver license, she was the only woman among thirty immigrant men, of different nationalities. “The truth is that he drove very well,” he remembers with a smile; and he returns to the zigzagging eagerness, the need to go through the avenues: “Things got complicated when I was trapped in a crosstown, with major traffic jams, there I had to calm down.”
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On the streets of New York, he barely saw two other female taxi drivers, whom he greeted cordially but from a distance. To liven up the trips, he tuned in to his favorite station: WBGO Jazz 88.3. In the meantime, the most diverse situations: from anonymous confessions to hostile grimaces. As a protection, “he had an iron under the seat, just in case.” “I was a Latin woman driving a taxi, on top I looked like a girl… Of course I suffered discrimination. Most of my colleagues looked at me with distaste; Passengers distrusted my driving skills. All the men around me -the one who was then my husband and our friends, who were many years older than me- were dedicated to cinema but worked as taxi drivers. And they earned much, much more than I did in other jobs. So, I thought: Why not me?
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Part of this personal anecdote inspired the playwright and director to New York Animal World, which echoes “those people who do not divert their own urgencies, pay attention to them to better understand themselves”. Creator of a series of notable works with a gender perspective, by the way. Between them, 24 hour turn, a piece that earned him nominations for the Trinidad Guevara, Florencio Sánchez, ACE and Teatro del Mundo awards, where he referred to the fearsome universe of the medical bureaucracy. In The Traslasierra wolf, was encouraged to a record little approached in the local scene: fantastic terror, appropriating the Creole legend about the seventh male child, which here attacked a traveling journalist who is precisely following the trail.
Yanina Gruden, for her part, is an actress with ample resources who has been able to enrich her craft on the basis of training and references. Among her most notable roles: Izumo, a charming and intelligent Japanese Juliet kidnapped by a Romeo (from the Peruvian revolutionary movement Tupac Amaru) in Lima Japan Bonsai; the endearing vintage lady who falls in love with another by letter exchange in I want to say I love you, both pieces by Mariano Tenconi Blanco. It was also Bertha, a painter in Camaraderie, version of Analía Fedra García of Comrades by Strindberg: a work of overwhelming validity that exposes the power games in the bosom of a couple, the inability of a real parity in love, the manipulative condition of some men, female autonomy … And closer in chronology, it was the daughter who visits a mother with days numbered and, in the meantime, questions her own motherhood in Your love will be shelter, under the direction of Cristian Drut, which is replenished this year.
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Showering in changing her skin, with a deep capacity to enter and exit emotions, and also with an irresistible capacity for comedy, Gruden now debuts in the one-man mode as “the girl”, the total protagonist of New York Animal World. “Another risk, another adventure”, in the words of the interpreter, obviously delighted with the material. “It is a very rich and very complex text, very full of life, that needs to be inhabited: you cannot say it from the outside, you cannot let it crystallize. It is the sea and you have to swim in it, see how you face the waves. Which makes it have a very particular acting poetic, something that as a performer is appreciated. There is a maelstrom, action, many sides; And I go through all the levels, I go through all the states: anger, sadness, passion, enjoyment, anguish … It’s funny, I feel very much when I act it, but at the same time I’m composing a lot. It is not a naturalistic performance but I do believe that it is very true ”.
“In general, I like to investigate, take references, especially when the material is more alien, it is further away”, Yanina Gruden is passionate. “But with this work, which I feel so close to, I chose to appropriate the character in another way. Yeah sure, I saw Martin Scorsese movies from the 70s and 80s –Taxi Driver, After Hours, The king of comedy-, I read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, more than anything to illuminate aspects of a city that paradoxically I do not know, to see it, to recreate it in my head. But later I was composing from what we discovered with Gilda with the body, from the text, from the tests that we were doing. I found the temperature of the character in the first rehearsals… Although the monologue is inspired by Gilda’s story, written with a lot of imagination, beauty and efficiency, I already feel it very proper. I will tell you that I enter almost in a state of possession! (laughs) That this happens is great, thanks to the text and the direction of Gilda ”.
Sundays 8 pm at the Teatro del Pueblo, Lavalle 3636, CABA.
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