Juan Villoro is one of those Latin American intellectuals who take refuge in their cultural capital to build, on the foundations of their knowledge, stories that leave their mark.
He does it with sufficiency as an essayist, a genre in which he seeks to untie complex or everyday matters, and in any case fundamental; also in the journalistic chronicle, to which he named the platypus and who knows how to write with a wise touch.
That is why nothing different could be expected when he announced that he became a playwright. The protagonist had to be a character with the same cultural capital.
The monologue is the theatrical genre that some storytellers prefer when they dare to explore drama. Gabriel García Márquez did it with Diatribe of love against a seated man, immortalized by Laura García.
Mario Vargas Llosa went further in his theatrical adaptation of the Decameron, in what he called The Plague Tales, which he himself dared to interpret. Now the Mexican Villoro is launched into the theater scene, well into the theatrical narration to be more precise, with Conference on the rain.
The narrator and protagonist is a librarian who lives in his safe world among books and suddenly the female presence ends up moving his world. First, a woman he despised, despite always being determined to accompany him, and abandoned him as expected.
Then another appeared, who with self-confidence only wanted from him the body that gave him joy, without compromise, the longed-for relationship of any being that flees from the safe, but as almost always happens in these events, someone wants to go further and ends by cause a hecatomb.
We are learning about this in the middle of the conference that the character gives to an audience that is not very clear who he is. He comes to talk about the rain, “or rather what happens when it rains”, according to the prologue written by Villoro himself. He even brings several appointments prepared for it, as every good intellectual does, but in reality the digressions that he takes give us an account of his life.
In the end, the surprise of the relationship coincides with the audience the speaker was addressing. A monologue that I hope we can see soon on stage well represented, because it promises.
This short dramaturgy is found in a book by the Angosta publishing house. Read it and #HablemosDeLibros and theater, so take advantage of these last two days to go to the functions that the Manizales Festival has prepared.
Underlined
* A conference is a mental laboratory.
* Success is the statistic of cretins.
* Intelligence only exists in a loose, spontaneous state, it cannot be a pose.
* What is a conference if not an organized ramble?
* Between losing a friendship and losing a book, any bibliophile prefers to lose a friendship.
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