Every play has at least two or three truths. There are terrible plays, sublime plays, trivial plays, and plays that are neither of them and remained at a damned midpoint, but most of the time there is something you could save of the work. A movement of light, a scream by the actress, something, a silence in the room, the beautiful insanity of a character, or the actor who will say, “You cannot be a bad person and cry with an orgasm at the same time.”
At ten o’clock at night in the city of Matanzas, the El Portazo theater troupe just had their ninth staging of Semen. El portazo is unlike any other troupes for artistic reasons and for reasons of resources. The artistic reason is that El portazo, seems a meeting of a group of theater lovers. And the economic reason is that I have not seen another group of theater at intermission to pass a cap for people to donate some money, because they do not have it, nor do they have an institution that gives them any, and they are infatuated, very infatuated with performing.
They represented Semen, a text by Yunior Garcia under the direction of Pedro Franco. El portazo, created in 2011, concludes with this work the trilogy En Zona, which also contains the repertoire titles Por gusto and Antígona.
The staging is not a memorable one. It tells the conflict between two sisters – lovers too, a father, a young drug dealer, hence the stories that connect to each other, and hence the drama, and instability, and irresponsibility, and disorder in everything. There are good performances in the work – no good, in my opinion; there are regular performances and very poor performances, which are basically what makes you think about what a group of amateurs. But Semen has, as any work, three parliaments and a shocking scene.
“Semen smells clean,” an actress says .
“Doing it with a condom is like bathing with an umbrella” that actress also says.
And then adds the truest truth of the night: You cannot be a bad person and cry with an orgasm at the same time.”
The shocking scene is in Semen when Jany – character played by Maria Laura Herman, guest star from Stations Theater – starts picking underneath, between one leg and the other , begins to sink her finger gently , and goes like the tour finger , and the finger moves in circles, and the finger is in and out slowly, and sinks back into the vaginal mud, and the finger is doing just what her head wants to do, if the mind of Jany wants the finger to move faster the finger obeys, and if she wants it to stop at one point so does the withering finger and thumb for when Jany mind wants to stop, and Jany has enjoyed all this, a gasp after another , a laugh , a cramp between her thighs , a kink in the hips , Led Zeppelin in the background , and life seems perfect at that moment .
Those are the parliaments and that’s the scene. Other things are the conditions in which parliaments are said and where the scene takes place. El Portazo is not presented in a theater with a stage and rows of seats, but in a premise in a downtown street in Matanzas. An old and decadent place, which has lost chunks of ceiling and it is poorly painted and poorly enabled, without adequate lighting, but allowing them to enter at least thirty people, placing chairs in a space not big, that some people sit on chairs, and others on the floor and others remain standing.
The theater, itself, is a poor art, but El Portazo is even more so. The theater in the world has been subsidized by money from men that always have so much money but they know that the theater , rather than give them to subtract budget , but despite this they build up a building and name it to host some troupe. I Do not know how much big companies collect after great seasons of great stagings , but at least in Cuba troupes sometimes invest money that not then exceed the tickets sold for prices five and ten pesos when in the best cases , the theater was replete .
But that is not even the situation of El Portazo. They belong to the Hermanos Saiz Association, and not to a performing arts institution that subsidizes them, so they have decided to discontinue the work, and in the middle of the scene placed a thermos and cups of coffee, and start selling coffee at one peso per cup, and actors also sell posters of works, and sell condoms, and pass a cap for people to take and raise some money for future functions.
Semen- once all ends you think about it-not a great start, but something during the work you shudder and twisted a little. I do not know what it is, if poverty or poverty art overflows we do not know if the scream of orgasm that fulfilled the actress, or complicity in Nancy Sinatra’s voice, or the smell of coffee, so strong coffee, so black, so delicious coffee.
