Theatre in Review: Cineastas (Under the Radar Festival/The Public Theater)

	Photo: Carlos Furman

In the Argentine production Cineastas, life is an enormous Mobius strip of stories printed on celluloid, a reel of endlessly unspooling narratives. Near the beginning of Mariano Pensotti's intriguing puzzle box of a play, someone notes that the first film made in Buenos Aires was in 1905, and 2,500 more have been shot there since then. Watching Cineastas, you might feel at certain moments that every last one of them is unfolding simultaneously -- but hold on: Pensotti, who also directed, and his extremely deft company have much to say about the business of storytelling -- and how the story can alter the life of the person telling it.

There are eight narrative lines in Cineastas, which jumps between reels and reality with remarkable agility. Gabriel is a commercially successful film director, currently making a romantic drama about a man searching for the woman who abandoned him -- and, as it turns out, a half a dozen others. Early on, Gabriel learns that he has a fatal disease, news that begins to alter his work in progress. First, he develops a deep identification with the Mexican actor playing the lead; then he starts inserting bits of his own experiences into the storyline. By the time the studio seizes control of the uncompleted work, he has become something of a Godardian auteur, abandoning conventional narrative for a series of close-ups of his personal objects.

Mariela is a documentarian who is working on a history of musical films made in Soviet Russia. (This is no joke; see Dana Ranga's fascinating East Side Story, which covers the same material.) The choice of subject matter reflects Mariela's identity crisis as the adopted daughter of Russian immigrants. She falls into an affair with Dmitri, a Russian restaurant worker who disappears soon after she becomes pregnant by him; she ends up making a trip to Russia -- to research the film and look for her lover -- that morphs into a personal pilgrimage, ending on a disastrous note of revelation.

Nadia is an indie filmmaker whose career has been overwhelmed by unexpected success. Having made a film that surprisingly burns up at the box office and is the rage of the festivals, she finds herself creatively blocked. Her fed-up French producers force upon her a script about a middle-aged man, one of the desaparecidos who vanished during the military regime of the '70s and '80s, who makes a startling return, reuniting with his adult sons. Nadia is disgusted by this false, sentimental premise, but it also taps into her longing for the father she never knew, and she finds herself taking desperate measures to force his reappearance in her life.

Lucas is a McDonald's employee who dreams of a full-time career in the movies. By day, he flips burgers; in his free time, he works on a melodrama -- about a man who is kidnapped by a mysterious gang and held hostage, forced to dress like Ronald McDonald -- which expresses his caustic opinion of his employer. But the shape of the plot keeps changing, first as Lucas finds himself moving up to management, and later, as his fortunes slide.

In Mariana Tirantte's two-level set design, art and reality run along parallel lines. The directors work out their personal destinies on the ground level while their inventions play out on the floor above. Each member of the five-person cast plays multiple roles, and, from time to time, each of them picks up a handheld to narrate the action. (The performance is in Spanish, with subtitles.) Sometimes, this results in a kind of double vision: When Gabriel consults a doctor, we see his leading man doing the same thing upstairs. At other times, the directors observe their work -- leading in one instance to Nadia's blistering critique of the script she has been forced to work with. There are also moments of sheer delirium -- when, for example, Mariela's personal life is unraveling, while, above, young Soviet chorus kids are disco-dancing the night away.

This could be a recipe for theatrical chaos, but, remarkably, there is never a moment when we don't know where we are and who we are with. Taking advantage of minimal costume changes, the cast proves extremely adept at switching between characters and situations; the production's unsung hero is the performer/prop man who appears repeatedly, rapidly switching around pieces of furniture and, later, stripping both sets bare. I don't know how long this company has worked together, but they perform the author's clockwork creation with remarkable confidence and not even a hint of a slip.

And, bit by bit, the juxtaposition of artists at work with their works of art becomes altogether mesmerizing, as Gabriel, in his desperate hunt for meaning, falls into dissolute behavior and his wife slips into the arms of his leading man; as Mariela begins to wonder if anything about her life -- her heritage, her relationships, her work -- is real; as Nadia grapples with a film that she despises and yet has a powerful emotional effect on her; and as Lucas finds out just how easy it is to betray his vision. There are many memorable moments, and, surprisingly for a translated work, even some powerful words -- for example, when Gabriel picks up a balloon he blew up for a children's party a few days earlier. The narrator notes that the dying man is looking at "his air, trapped in plastic."

Tirantte's costumes are well-suited to each actor. The lighting, by Alejandro Le Roux, shifts between an incandescent look for the everyday scenes, and cold white washes and saturated colors (courtesy of LED units) for the on-screen scenes. Diego Vainer's sound design mostly consists of his effective underscoring.

At the end of Cineastas, someone points out that approximately 400,000 films have been shot since the birth of the art form; furthermore, we learn, it would take approximately 92 years to see them all. It's a tribute to the play's power that you leave the theatre eager to indulge in some heavy filmgoing. Pensotti's play deftly demonstrates how art can be mined out of boredom, anger, loneliness, and various existential and identity crises -- and how the telling of the story can have a profound effect on the storyteller.--David Barbour