La Marea (October 6, 2007)

This was a free play that the Dublin Theatre Festival put on for 3 nights in the Italian Quarter; we caught it the last night of its performance. Originally in Spanish by someone from Buenos Aires, there are 9 speechless plays simultaneously occurring in a neighbourhood of a city. Any words are either omnipotent narration or internal monologue projected onto a screen near where the actors are miming. Each play is 10 minutes long, some are inside and some are on the street, and they are repeated on a loop for 2 hours until the play is over. You walk through the neighbourhood and watch them in no consecutive order. It had been translated into English, and the city details had all been changed to Dublin, but some of the cultural details remained very Latino (e.g. a huge party for a girl’s 15^th birthday, not 18^th as would be more common in Western Europe.)

There were some common themes, most notably a recurring motif of If Only I Go Somewhere Else My Miserable Life Will Be So Much Better, which is an idea that I think is delusional bullshit. Seeing it repeatedly just annoyed me. The omniscient narration, both internal and external, was fractured and schizophrenic, echoing the way life unfolds for the most part, and so surreal at times that it was laugh out loud funny. I’m not sure how seriously the whole thing was meant to be taken, but at times it seemed to be a farce of itself.

This was only exacerbated while we were watching the scene of a couple making out for the first time. As they started to get into it and roll around against the brick wall, a drunk bachelor party chose that moment to start walking down the street. The scene proceeded without incident until the last, and most likely drunkest, of the entourage walked up behind the actors and started miming and making faces at their making out. He then looked out at the audience and asked what the fuck were we watching, he would show us something, pulled down his pants, and mooned the crowd. Someone yelled out at him that it was a play, and he responded with “Holy fuck! Me arse is in a play!” and railed for a few seconds about how it was the stupidest play in the world. He continued to stagger down the street afterwards, and I could hear him yelling up at one of the other plays a bit further down the street a few minutes later.

Am I glad I saw it? Entertaining enough, but the format probably had more to do with the experience than the play itself.