“The diary of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain, as it was written 120 years ago, is no longer funny, it was anachronistic, I decided to update it,” says Alejandro Maci, who presents alongside Teresa Costantini a reversion with another title, “Adam according to Eve (chronicle of a disagreement)”.
After its time at La Feria del Libro and its debut at José Ignacio during the summer, it premieres on Wednesday at Dumont 4040, with performances by Maci and Costantini, has a locker room Virigina Vega, the musicians on stage Fabian Picciano, Pol Medina and lights David Seiras. We talk with Maci and Costantini.
Journalist: How is this updated revision of Twain’s classic?
Alejandro Maci: Last year, Teresa brought me the proposal to do the diaries of Adam and Eve in a small theater space that opened in José Ignacio, Uruguay, a beautiful open-air theater in the forest. She had read the text when she was a teenager and she didn’t have it in mind so she sent it to me and I told her that I saw it as outdated in current times. The work that is 120 years old today is sexist, it does not have the grace of another time when we were accustomed to such an unequal female position. After a while I wrote a new text no longer coming from the original but linked to a new game. Teresa loved it and so we did two performances in that space that went very well. Those two performances inspired what is done now in Dumont 4040.
Teresa Costantini: This work about the founders of the human race and where Adam is according to Eve shows a militant Eve, who is not in the shadows, who wants to occupy the space of the woman who knows. Being these primitive beings, there is a disruptive and funny text by Maci that shows a fight between Eve and this Adam who considers himself the first, he has the arrogance to say that he knows everything and she bends that speech. In that Eden of the beginnings it appears who wants to be the Eve of this century.
Q: What can you say about the text?
A.M: There is a very different position of Eve, that is why she precedes and is Adam according to Eve, because she is an Eve of the 21st century, updated, militant, in a game of humor and presented from a stage joke, she is more provocative and not the most respectful woman. and behind the man as the original text stated.
Q: Why did you want to take it and readapt it?
A.M: The classic text doesn’t make sense to me today, the humor it intended to have no longer makes us laugh, I even came across a passage that said “Adam sometimes hits me but I get irritated”, we are all for a world where that never happens again . It was necessary to maintain the theme of the first cell of the couple, the first love, but with the generic issues in crisis.
TC: I had a memory of this text that China Zorrilla and Carlitos Perciavalle wrote and when they offered me this space in José Ignacio I wanted to return to this text. We are neighbors with Maci and I wanted to jump into the pool with him. We didn’t know where he was going to go, Maci wrote a very own version of him and of these times where there is a historical review, a discovery of feminism and the militancy of Olivia Landon, Twain’s wife.
Q: How does Twain’s wife, a rights activist, appear?
A.M: It is another of the great omissions of Twain’s book, Olivia Landon was Twain’s wife and was an activist connected to the suffragettes of the time, which is why her position is part of this game. It seems to me an unacceptable forgetfulness of such an advanced woman who was on par with him, they were travelers and inventors.
TC: There is a lot of today’s woman in Maci’s Eva, a militant, activist Eva with a lot of drive and there is also the wife and partner Eva who discovers the man and they fall in love. She discovers the happiness of being in pairs. Olivia and Mark were very close, it is a love story that talks about the beginning of the human race in a different way.
Q: And how is the man portrayed? What place does it occupy today?
TC: The man today sometimes seems to be very scared seeing what he can do or say, but Adam’s role in the play is to understand, discover the woman and match the roles from the encounter. The work shows a balance from disagreement to encounter, the balance that men and women must build. When you have to fight for certain spaces and places that were denied to women. We talk about Mark and not Olivia, who was also a writer. There were moments of matriarchy in history but the strength of man dominated and it continues to be a struggle. The challenge today is to make man understand that we are peers.
A.M: He is a man who still clings to the old structures, to a mode of subjection and domination that is put into crisis in this game. Part of the comedy has to do with a different Eve that makes her see a different time and relationship with Adam. The setting will be in a space with tables, it gives a very attractive destructuring of the place that Dumont allows in one of his rooms.
TC: This is a traveling theater that we have in our suitcase ready to take to the stage. We will be there for a month. Arriving at a theater forced us to set up lights and scenery, we have a team and we put together a light setup and we will move as needed. If they don’t let us stay because it’s going well, we’ll stay and the idea is to call on other casts to do the play and have other perspectives and generations.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
