Louis de Tavira brought from Germany Furora play that sparked controversy in European theaters where it has been presented since Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz premiered it in 2018, although the playwright couple could well have conceived it in Mexico, where –says the stage director– “We sink into fear, anger, intolerance and polarization that makes dialogue impossible”.
The work also causes furor in De Tavira when he talks in an interview about this drama about the politician Heiko Braubach (Juan Carlos Vives), a mayoral candidate who runs over a young drug addict who leaves him disabled and whose mother, the nurse and social worker Nele Siebold (Stefanie Weiss), offers to help, but ends up blackmailed by a social media troll nephew, Jerome (Rodrigo Virago).
For this reason, De Tavira calls for ideas to debate this crisis in which, as a society, the world and Mexico are trapped.
“Furor is a recent work that brings to the stage the debate of a devastating current affairs. It brings together two of today’s most important playwrights, each with their own style, trajectory, concerns, who converge to write a play about the crisis of civility that we are experiencing in the world, not only in force in Europe or Germany, but that we can recognize very clearly in our society and our crisis (Mexico)”, says De Tavira about the production of 25 Production, with costumes by Jerildy Bosch, set design and lighting by Jesús Hernández and sound by Rodrigo Espinosa.
The “thriller”, conceived by Hübner and Nemitz and translated by De Tavira and Weiss, premiered in a short season last November at the Teatro de las Artes, and will have performances from Thursday to Sunday from April 13 to May 14, in the Julio Castillo theater of the Cultural Center of the Forest, in Chapultepec.
scenic microcosm
For De Tavira, who has also come from embodying Samuel Beckett’s The Last Film of Krapp, Heiko Braubach is a person, beyond a character, who is experiencing an internal conflict confronted with the external conflict that his condition as a politician implies just when he aspires to to be elected mayor.
“One fine day, an accident happens to him that brings together the three characters involved in the play; that is to say, the tragedy breaks out in an event that happens every day in all cities and that becomes for us a figure that means very little, pBut behind it is hiding a tragedy that destroys lives and that conflicts with a whole vision of a proposal for a project.social object that is totally questioned, subjected to a furious debate. That is why it is called Furor, because this happens in an area where there is anger in society, something that does not work, that cannot continue like this”.
He says that, independent of the personal and family tragedy, Furor allows the public to look out from that scenic microcosm at the enormous complexity of the global crisis, which encompasses many dimensions.
“From the drug addiction of youth (Enno), from the helplessness and loneliness of a single mother (Nele) who has to make ends meet working to barely support her home, who is also a social worker. And a boy (Jerome) who has interrupted his studies and his possibilities in the most absolute skepticism, who is an inhabitant of social networks, but also a labor slave for a parcel delivery person, who has no hours or benefits and who, in Through that, he accumulates hatred. Suddenly, one night, this politician (Braubach) returns to his house driving his car, and a drugged boy passes him, whom he runs over and leaves an invalid”, reports De Tavira.
“The politician stops, he even saves the life of the young man, but the tragedy also becomes a scandal in the media, for being who he is. And comes all the handling that is given to what happened. There is an investigation by the public ministry, an expert opinion that determines that this man was not at fault. And there is a handling of the press, in which the hand of those who lead the electoral campaigns is immediately seen so as not only not to harm the candidate, but also to favor him in the political campaign. But, there is a lot of skepticism, and in the networks it is not seen like that, they begin to question, there is a parallel investigation, which does not coincide with the expert opinion. And, in the midst of that, lives undone.”
I thought we were going to talk about the play Furor, but you are talking about Mexico.
Exactly. We are talking about Mexico. We are talking about something that happens here every day and about a crisis in which we are trapped and in the face of which it is necessary to think. I am interested in this work because it raises a debate on ideas, because it raises questions that concern us all and that we ask ourselves, and whose answers escape us as we sink into fear, or rage, or intolerance, or the polarization of society, which makes any dialogue impossible. A very great skepticism towards the democratic exercise, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, there is no other proposal.
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