Optimistic vs Pessimistic at La Casa Encendida

Events & Activities, Theater & Dance — By MAP on February 4, 2010 5:23 pm

At about 10:03 p.m. last Friday, just a few minutes after the stated start time of the sold-out show “Optimistic vs Pessimistic,” I looked around me at the group spilling out of the entrance of La Casa Encendida and into the street, and I had the feeling that the show wasn’t going to start in the theater.

It didn’t. Two actors entered the crowd, which had crunched together near the doors to the theater in the inner patio of the Casa Encendida. One actress, dressed in a modified matador costume and aviator sunglasses, held up a sign with a black arrow. The other, an older man, held up a sign that said PESSIMISTIC on one side and OPTIMISTIC on the other. Follow the arrow, the woman instructed us, and like sheep to the slaughter we did, and went around the corner, up the street, and into the back entrance of the theater.

Once inside, we saw that there weren’t any seats. We, the audience, were standing on what would normally have been the stage, and on the bleachers were enormous disordered piles of chairs with their legs sticking in the air. Next to them was a booth covered with a velvet curtain. The actress in the matador costume told us to crunch together and reminded us that a rope had been pulled around the entire group. We came very close together, and I noticed that what looked like rocks, or possibly potatoes, hung from long strings around the edges of the room.

A pantless emcee in a polka-dot shirt emerged from behind the velvet curtain, while the matador-woman set two rocks swinging.

The emcee announced that the subtitle of the show was: “En el fracaso está la solucion,” and that the hanging stones represent “el peligro constante.” The matador smiled.

Then the emcee went on a rather long diatribe, referencing the time when Spain was a third-world country, and Europe ended at the Pyrenees…

So immediately we knew what we were getting into: a show that felt like a mix of vaudeville, subtle and unsubtle comedy, street theater and social commentary. The emcee half covered his little white shorts with the curtain, and as he grew more animated, his horned plastic hat started to slip from his head. He encouraged us to renounce our parties and other distinctions – i.e. drop “Basque” and take “Spanish” (according to the credits, Oskar Gómez Mata, who played the emcee and was also one of the co-creators of the show, was born in Basque country). He said that this would be a story of the Equidistant Generation—that is the generation made up of people equidistant from all points of view.

Gómez Mata played his part (and later morphed into other central and yet equally undefined roles) with extraordinary energy. He was joined by Esperanza López, co-creator of the show, who covered a number of roles including the matador crowd-leader. Ignacio Fdez. de Jaúregui filled in several other parts. Gómez Mata in his introduction also announced the entrance of the “workers” who formed a supporting cast. The six statuesque young men and women were dressed in identical denim suits with Chinese-style jackets.

I can’t pretend that I understood entirely what this show was about, or what its point of view was, nor, given its participatory nature, that it was very easy to note everything that was going on around me. I felt that I was at the center of a whirlwind of action, and that the actors weren’t necessarily the immediate focus. At one point I tried to scribble something down, and López passed me by and said, “que apuntas?”

But I can give you some idea of themes. One was China. Chinese supertitles ran behind most of the production (I can’t tell what they actually said) and actors sometimes translated things into Chinese. The supposed subtitle for the show, “En el fracaso está la solucion” was, according to the emcee, an old Chinese proverb…. And the workers in their Chinese suits, who were also certainly Spanish workers, suffered much abuse. At one moment, two actors, dressed as old bourgeois, laid white sheets over a table, while the young workers, wearing motorcycle helmets, smashed their heads against the hanging rocks.

“Optimistic vs Pessimistic” was overtly political, but given its basic structure of humor and absurdity, the political points of view held by the actors/directors weren’t the focus. I can’t say that the show had a particular political leaning, though it did crack a joke or two about “the right.” The show was more a chance for people to get the sense that they’d been given license to mix things up, at least in the theatrical space—once the rope was lifted, we were allowed to sit, or stand, anywhere we wanted, and to move the furnishings as desired. At the end, all of the furnishings were gathered in a net and raised high above the stage, and then dropped and covered with champagne and other elements of destruction.

The show was a production of the theater company L’Alarkan, and their website shows that they’ve been producing “Optimistic vs. Pessimistic” for a few years in different European cities. Last week’s production, however, felt specific to Spain, 2010. It was shown for three days (all sold-out) as part of the Festival Escena Contemporanea in La Casa Encendida, which will continue this week with its final production: Feb. 3, 4, and 5, at 10pm, “Experiencias con un desconocido show” by Sònia Gómez, which describes itself as “espectáculo de televisión emitido desde un escenario.”

By Alexandra Atiya