The last Leer la Historia peña, corresponding to the month of January and held in the Uneac Gardens in Cienfuegos, brought together various intellectuals and artists from the courtyard in a space already in the habit of weaving literature based on analysis and Reflection of texts based investigative component.
Precisely in one of its moments, the audience had the opportunity to hear the criteria of the renowned playwright Atilio Jorge Caballero, director of the theater company La Fortaleza, who brought Zona to the event, a play that premiered here in 2017. About Her , his author He first discussed the investigative rigor he subjected the cast to. A lyrical singer from Kazakhstan, two engineers; someone so obsessed with the customs of the Soviet Union that he converted his own; and another, the only specialist in toxic nuclear waste in Cuba, who turned to cattle ranching after the 1991 shutdown of the nuclear power plant, are some of the sui generis creatures that Caballero has scrutinized. “We have a habit of looking around before developing a show for the most pressing issues moving around where the group is located, essentially the city of Ciudad Nuclear. Almost every text that we have conceived has gone through this filter, with sensitive topics such as domestic violence, exile etc.,” says the author.
Among the audacity that Zona possesses is the insertion on the stage of the real characters on which its protagonists are based. “It was me who had to confess to them that illegal detective work was being done on them, and secondly, my desire for them to be present at the premiere and that they ended up speaking about themselves in front of the public at various times,” claims.
Once the actors’ soliloquy has ended, any true citizen of CEN using their lived experience for the play has the opportunity to interrupt the logical sequence of actions. These interventions thus represent living stories, and hence the play acquires a hyper-realistic sense, contrary to the prescriptions of all fiction. “For us it was a capital position. It had a lot of acceptance; published in the magazine Conjunto de Casa de las Américas, it was invited to the Havana Festival as it was the first time in Cuban theater that they worked with real people in the same context in which an event of this type took place ”, affirmed the playwright too.
In addition to Zona, other texts were also reviewed in the nomination, such as In nomine dei by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago and two volumes on Marti’s work, say Think, Foresee, Serve. The ideology of José Martí, by Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, and Martí in Jorge Mañach, with a prologue by Salvador Arias.
Rock, which takes place in the morning on the last Thursday of every month, also has the musical presence of the ensemble guitar orchestra.