In Pablo Manzi's bleak satirical vision of the Americas, the characters in each scene don't know each other but share a restless anxiety. A lecturer (Jimena Larraguivel) in scene one reluctantly tells her partner (Joseph Balderrama) in their kitchen in Chile 2014 about the way she had been attacked in class earlier that day by a student she had asked to wind up her presentation in time for the break. Interrupted, she angrily slammed her teacher against the board using her hands to force the teacher's mouth wide before putting her mouth inside the teacher's mouth to tell her “a secret.” None of the class intervened and the teacher walked out terrified.
Three white male racists gloomily sitting in some small-town United States meeting room in 2019 consider quitting their group as all the immigrants have gone. Joe (Sebastian Orozco) says, “I don’t know where they all went, we killed them, they escaped, they vanished.” He asks, “what enemy can I talk about in the town when there are only white people left?”
Two soldiers guarding the Chilean desert border with Peru in 1998 tentatively begin a conversation after hours of silence. The eighteen-year-old says he was sanctioned for getting drunk and beating up a foreigner but the problem will go away because the foreigner died of his injuries.
In a municipal office in Mexico 1880, a public executioner Jose (Sebastian Orozco) sits in dumb silence as his mother (Jimena Larraguivel) and an official (Eduardo Arcelus) talk about an execution that went wrong. But the official tells them executions are to be ended because they are no longer having an impact on the population. It prompts Jose to reveal that among the final words of the hanged man was the prediction that, “the day will come when they don’t cut our heads off in front of people… because we’ll cut them off ourselves.”
Outside the nightclub Inferno in Chile 2017, a bouncer (Joseph Balderrama) wearing a bulletproof vest and military-style helmet tries to stop a young woman (Pía Laborde-Noguez) re-entering the nightclub where she had just been involved in a fight as she tried with her hands to rip open the mouth of another girl to see the community inside.
LatinoLife: In your play, we see many stories that take place during different time periods and in various parts of Latin America. Why did you decide to write this kind of narrative?
Pablo Manzi: My time spent travelling around Europe generated a strong social contrast within me. I realised that something was missing while I was in Europe. The missing piece was the atmosphere of danger that I felt in Latin America. I realised that this was a common experience that I had also felt in other Latin American countries. This familiar story that someone is going to rob you or that something bad could happen. The idea that places with lots of people are dangerous places. Violence led me to think that there could be a shared experience across my continent. This allowed me to think deeply about a topic that I had wanted to explore: the notion of communal life and what kind of social circumstances have helped to fragment and tear apart community life in different ways.
LL: Do you think that your play reflects the Covid-19 age in which we are living?
PM: I have always wanted to make it very clear that I wrote the play before the outbreak of the pandemic. This process of isolation and of the fragmentation of social life was already occurring before the Covid-19 outbreak. The pandemic may well have exacerbated this pre-existing trend or made it more transparent. If we cut all ties with our community, it then becomes very difficult to react when crises arrive such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Some people have told me that the pandemic made them see that this process of quarantine and of locking oneself away had already occurred in their lives before the first lockdown. The pandemic was the trigger that made them realise that they were leading a more solitary life than they had previously imagined. That they were more distanced from community life than they thought. This is the most important observation for me.
LL: Given the protests in Chile during the 'Social Explosion' and the ongoing rewriting of the Constitution, do you believe that there is hope for Latin America? Does your play convey a message of optimism?
PM: For me, at the end of the day, there is always room for optimism. And these windows of opportunity don't always need to be conflictive or problematic. I do believe that we can rethink and remodel the social context by which we live and this gives me a lot of hope. In the play, for me, the most important message is how we can rethink public spaces where there are lots of people. Normally, there are negative connotations attached to places like supermarkets, the underground, plazas, and shopping centres.
The traditional Left has often had a negative view of such spaces where commercial activities can take place. But I do believe that there is a desire in such places for people to be surrounded by others. I perceive this to be a form of resistance and a way of saying 'I don't agree with this life that they are offering me. I don't like the way that they are telling me that everyone else is a danger to me and that I should keep my distance from all strangers. That crowds of people should seem suspicious and threatening to me.' It is essential that we reinterpret this notion of public space.
LL: How was the process of translating the play from the original Spanish into English? What was your experience like working with the translator, William Gregory, and director, Sam Pritchard?
PM: It was a very interesting concept for me. Of course, there are many differences between Latin America and the UK. But there are also some shared experiences. For example, Margaret Thatcher's political vision had a very strong influence on the Chilean political elite. William and Sam worked tirelessly and conducted a wealth of research to bring the play to an Anglophone audience. It was quite impressive how they always pushed me to reconsider things from an alternative perspective. Many people who participated in this project are part of the Latin American community here in London. This gave me a new way of thinking about my work and translating it.
Translation is not just about changing words from one language into another. The act of translation also involves ideological decisions and political discussions. So it's really important to know the audience and their culture before bringing the play to the stage. The question is, how can I talk about the social context in Latin America and filter my ideas so that they may be transmitted to a completely different social context? It was very important for me that the political sentiment behind my work would not be lost during the translation process.
LL: What kind of image of Latin America do you wish to project to your UK audience?
PM: It's hard for me to say since I do not live in London, so I don't know much about the Latin American community here. But one thing that I would like to change is the presumption that we Latin Americans are depoliticised. The idea that we are biological bodies and when political conflicts arise, we retreat and adopt a passive position. For me, it's really important that we use these moments of conflict and our own contradictions to generate change. I believe that this is more productive than isolating ourselves and adopting a more essentialist position.
LL: Do you think that this tendency to be reclusive and to isolate oneself stems from the experience of dictatorships in South America during the Cold War?
PM: What happened in Chile, and more widely in Latin America I believe, is that the Pinochet dictatorship implemented a radical experiment of neoliberalism. This involved changing the entire social environment in which we live.
I grew up during the end of the Pinochet dictatorship and the next three decades of the democratic transition. During this period, there was a lot of continuity between the dictatorship and the nascent neoliberal democracy. The members of the military regime wanted to restore their reputations and wash the blood off their hands. They presented the transition from dictatorship to democracy as a natural process.
The past members of the military regime suddenly claimed that they believed in democracy. This created the very ambitious political climate in which I grew up.
We had to try to get our heads around what had happened during the dictatorship and what kind of country we were. The leaders created a space of control where they silenced any voices that challenged them. All this occurred behind the façade of a democracy that supposedly included everybody and supported pluralism. Instead of being a space for exchange and dialogue, democracy became a space for control. This generated widespread anger because we can see that the neoliberal social model has created great inequalities in this country.
