Mariano Tenconi Blanco and his new play: “Mother fiction”

“Fictions create myths and that those myths allow us says Mariano Teconi Blanco, who premieres “Mother fiction “co -production between the future theater company and the National Comedy of Montevideo, on Thursday, September 18 at 19.30 at the Metropolitan Theater.

The piece, starring Diego Velázquez, Camila Peralta, Marcos Ferrante and Valeria Loisnext to musicians on stage Ian Shifres and Gonzalo Pérez Terranovaexplores the complex relationship between artistic creation, family ties and Rioplatense identity.

“Mother fiction” It focuses on the history of an Argentine playwright who, upon receiving the commission to write a work for the National Comedy of Montevideo, faces a creative blockade. We talked with Teconi Blanco, author of “The captives” and “Extraordinary life”, among others, and Valeria Lois.

Journalist: Is the work part of a real event? Did you take that job and have a blockade and transformed the blockade into work? As “the orchid thief” by Charly Kaufman.

Mariano Teconi Blanco: The work is an autobiographical fiction. I share many things with the protagonist. I am also theater author, my mother is also Uruguaya, I was also commissioned by a work for the National Comedy of Montevideo. But other things are fiction, and follow the course and logic of writing. The idea of ​​the writer who writes that he cannot write, and that what he does is not stop writing, I take it from one of my favorite books of Uruguayan and Universal literature, “The luminous novel” by Mario Levrero.

Q.: How do links with our families determine in art? How intertwine in the plot a century of history, the culture of both shores of the Río de la Plata and maternal love?

MTB: Carlos Butti, the protagonist of the work, says that as a boy he imagines Uruguay for the stories that his mother and grandmother did Uruguayas, and that he learned to imagine imagining Uruguay. But at a certain moment, Butti realizes that what he should write in his work is the story of his mother and grandmother. His mother lived in Montevideo. His grandmother is a native of a rural place in Artigas, on the border with Brazil. Reality modifies fiction and at the same time fiction modifies reality.

P.: In what sense is a tribute to all mothers and how is the relationship with yours?

MTB: I think that fictions create myths and that those myths allow us to better understand our own life. Romeo and Julieta taught us to love, or Hamlet teaches us that the father is always a ghost that has things to tell us. I believe that this story of a child and his mother is also, already his way, all the relationships of daughters or sons with their mothers. And since you ask me my relationship with my mother is divine; She is very anxious for the premiere.

Q.: What can you say about the rich shared culture, from the gaucho and tango to authors such as Florencio Sánchez, Copi, Hudson and Levrero?

MTB: I think that more than talking about Argentine literature or Uruguayan literature we should talk about literature or art of the Río de la Plata. The Gaucho began with Bartolomé Hidalgo, who is Uruguayan. And the podestá, Uruguayans, are central to the Argentine Theater.

Q.: What is the most? Strange autobiography, essay on Uruguayan literature, musical comedy, intimate newspaper, manifest on art, political theater, theater inside the theater, ode to the Río de la Plata or celebration to all mothers?

MTB: I think it’s all that. Perhaps, above all, the first and last.

Q.: Valeria, you are representing a hurt and broken mother in “Early”, here appears another mother and her son, what can you say about both mothers?

Valeria Lois: The early mother, apart from being hurt and broken, is on stage an active, dangerous and provocative body. It worries, scares, fears for her. Maria, the mother of the mother fiction, has something endearing and moving. In it there are things from the mothers of the Argentine comedies of the 80’s. Maria is the most good, the most beautiful, the funniest, the most swelling, the most depressed. Because let’s say that more than a real mother is the idea that the protagonist has about his mother. Which is also the way in which children in real life look at their mothers. With that polarity as a child who thinks that his mother is the best and worst in the world almost without continuity solution.

Q.: What attracted you to the text and what can you tell us about the creative process with Teconi?

VL: Tenconi writes the works that I like to see and act. And the process is a continuation of the link between actress and director that we have since the beginning of “extraordinary life.” Mariano is a director full of words (written and oral) capable of repeating one and a thousand times what he is looking for with patience and care. Being working with him again and in a project of the future theater company gives me a lot of joy. And share the scene with Diego Velázquez, Camila Peralta and Marcos Ferrante or speak.