Una sombra voraz / La obra

Description

This book brings together two works by the renowned and award-winning Argentine playwright and theater director Mariano Pensotti: A Voracious Shadow and The Play.

A Voracious Shadow—currently on stage at Dumont 4040, featuring performances by Patricio Aramburu and Diego Velázquez, and originally premiered at the Avignon Festival in 2024—tells the story of Julián, a middle-aged young man who sets out to climb the Annapurna massif in the Himalayas, where his own father died decades earlier without completing the feat; and of Manuel, an actor with a stalled career who is commissioned to portray Julián’s story on film.

The Play, meanwhile—which will be revived at the end of June at the Teatro Alvear in Buenos Aires—follows the journey of Simon Frank, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi camps and who, in 1962, years after arriving in the small Argentine town of Coronel Sívori, begins to build sets that faithfully recreate the places of his life in Poland, turning the town’s inhabitants into the cast of his autobiographical work; and of theater director Walid Mansour, who decides to stage the entire story together with five residents of the same town.

These are two representative texts from Mariano Pensotti’s body of work, addressing some of the recurring themes in his theater: how the past changes because we reshape it every time we narrate it; the relationship between parents and children; the traces of the past that persist in the present; family myths; doubles—and how we become distorted reflections of what we once imagined we would be.

Publishing these texts in book form is a way of countering the ephemeral nature of theatrical experience; but above all, it is a way of bringing outstanding literature into circulation.