The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Argentinian Plays

Mariano Tenconi Blanco, Fabián Miguel Díaz, Leonel Giacometto, Franco Calluso, Juan Ignacio Fernandez, Candelaria Sabagh, Catherine Boyle, Gwen MacKeith, William Gregory, Rosalind Harvey, Kate Eaton, Catherine Boyle

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786828965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nel teatro

From Ushuaia, the southernmost town in the world to the edges of the great Paraná river, and from the city of Buenos Aires to its fertile plains and the estuaries of northern Argentina, The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Argentinian Plays provides a unique insight into the preoccupations and the creative responses of one of the major theatre-producing countries in Latin America. Includes the plays: La vida extraordinaria (Extraordinary Life) by Mariano Tenconi Blanco, translated by Catherine Boyle Pato verde (Green Duck) by Fabián Miguel Díaz, translated by Gwen MacKeith Fonavi by Leonel Giacometto, translated by Rosalind Harvey Nou Fiuter (No Future) by Franco Calluso, translated by William Gregory Poema ordinario (Poor Men's Poetry) by Juan Ignacio Fernández, translated by William Gregory Fuego de dragón sobre dragón de madera (Dragon Fire over Wood Dragon) by Candelaria Sabagh, translated by Kate Eaton

FUEGO DE DRAGÓN SOBRE DRAGÓN DE MADERA. / DRAGON FIRE OVER WOOD DRAGON

MARIA CANDELARIA SABAGH TRANSLATED BY KATE EATON

Maria Candelaria Sabagh

Candelaria Sabagh is a teacher, dramatist, director and theatrical researcher. She was born in Río Ceballos in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1976. She began her training as a young girl by getting involved in theatre workshops and became a dedicated reader of philosophical texts as an adolescent. Nowadays she defines herself as an artist-political-activist. She graduated with a degree in stage direction from U.N.A (National University of the Arts), and a degree in teaching philosophy from U.N.C (National University of Córdoba). She is currently working on her dissertation for a master’s degree in playwrighting (U.N.A). Her teaching activity includes working as an assistant on The Semiotics of Theatre and Analysis of Text II (Department of Dramatic Art, U.N.A) and Project Design I to IV (Department of Visual Arts, U.N.A,). Since 2002, she has headed-up the theatre company Amarillo en Escena Trajo Mala Suerte (Yellow on Stage Brings Bad Luck) with whom she has staged numerous shows. Some notable productions include Ofiuco, her graduation projects from U.N.A., Zoom in 90’s and The Canterville Residence, No More Zzzzs and Ego; With these last two shows she toured nationally and internationally to Córdoba, Chile, The Netherlands and England.

Characters

HER

Woman-child

She projects a specific kind of femininity
through her gestures which indicate a
vulnerability, a fragility.

Acts out the strength she doesn’t have

A danger to herself.

HIM

Twelve years older than her

Dangerous to everyone else.

ACTOR STAGE-HAND 1

ACTOR STAGE-HAND 2

Act One

PROLOGUE TO HAPPINESS

(She is sitting on a bed or sofa; broken-down, worn-out She wears a light nightdress. Barefoot. She gnaws at a part of herself, a knee or perhaps an arm. She has her laptop, which is open, with her. The image on the screen saver is the title of the play ‘Dragon Fire over Wood Dragon’. This image is projected, greatly magnified, onto the back of the stage. Everything that happens on the screen will be replicated in the projection.

She weeps. It is the weeping of an inconsolable child. She tires of wiping away tears that fall steadily with a sustained rhythm. Sometimes she sighs before an empty firmament. She gets up, she goes towards some sort of boundary, a frame, or a door if you like, which she looks through. She looks towards an adjoining space. She speaks, camouflaging the weeping, which grows.)

HER: – Sweetheart, you’ve got an hour of play left and then we’ll go and get Vicky. I told her nanny I’d take you both to the playground today. OK? Tommy? (…) Did you finish your hot chocolate and your rice cakes? I love you, honeybun, answer me once in a while… (She blows him a kiss. She looks at him a few seconds longer. As she goes back to her laptop she says automatically.) Not so close to the screen, Tomás… (She returns to her laptop and moves the mouse. Instantly, the greatly magnified image of the desktop with its icons and files, appears projected. The wallpaper photo is of Tommy, a five-year-old boy who stares at the camera with glowing eyes. She chooses a Word file from the desktop ‘Dragon Fire over Wood Dragon’ and opens it. She puts: Edit – Select all – Copy. She clicks on the icon for the new file and pastes the contents of the old one. The file copies rapidly. The page that can be seen, as usually happens, is the last one. In this case it’s from a play that concludes with the words:

The End

She scrolls up to the beginning. She selects and deletes the first scene. In its place she writes:

• HAPPINESS

HER: (Writing.) – Summer. Siesta at my family home in Córdoba. I am in what we call ‘the woodland grove’, an area of the park that offers the possibility of a unique perspective. If you’re lying on the ground and looking up at it from below, depending on how the breeze stirs the branches of the trees, pieces of sky appear, intermittently. These turquoise landscapes shape shift with the swirling of dense branches, canopies of leaves and the impressively three-dimensional yellow flowers that twist and twine around each other. (She opens a file showing a photo of this woodland. As she starts to speak, she contemplates the image on her screen and then on the projection that expands the wood to its natural size above the stage. She gets up and walks around, going over it.) An unexpected phenomenon: various acacias, whose growth rate some landscape gardener had failed to calculate and had ordered to be planted too close together, unwittingly creating a micro-universe. Birds, insects and small furry animals rest there, side-by-side, more or less hidden from any predators. The unexpected happenstance of a verdant oasis in the midst of an arid, ragged, mountainous terrain. It was there that I was sleeping, abundantly empty, when in the blink of an eye my whole world changed. (She takes her mobile phone and listens attentively, frozen like a mouse that knows it has been seen.)

HIM: – I’ve been dreaming about you for months. I long to walk down the street holding your hand. Last night I couldn’t bear it, it was too much. I was imagining you with me all the time, I had bought a Glenlivet – the one they drink in The Sopranos – for the midnight hour and I was smoking a Cohiba. I yearned to have you by my side, for you to be the woman who moved with me to this house, to share my world, to be close enough to me for me to see you. You inhabited my thoughts. All the time, your face, your intelligence, your smile… you were present the whole time. Perhaps it’s really selfish of me but I can’t go on like this with Laura. Everyday I’ve been imagining my life with you, with you and with our children. Carrie, Tommy and us, the four of us. It will hurt my daughter and hurt me to break the news to her, but I can’t go on like this, I’m done. I’m going to get a separation. It’ll take a while, so I’ll need your patience, but I realise that I love you, I want you and I dream about you. You are my love, you are my woman and I want us to be together, Maria Sol… my little Sunshine.

HER: (She turns off the phone. She runs towards HIM, jumps into his arms. He spins her around as she hangs onto his neck, like in an advert. They look at each other, they caress, their eyes filled with tears. They kiss, they look at each other; they separate still looking at each other until each last finger has said its goodbye. She returns to her place. Euphoric.) This is it, I thought. This is one of those immense, superlative, foundational moments in life, like when Tomás was born, and I knew straightaway that nothing would ever be the same. This grove is the landscape that will be immortalised in my memory. It is where I am when I discover that indescribable happiness is mine for the first time ever in my story. This is how it must be (I wager) how a princess feels when at last she sees, arriving from afar, the armoured knight who is coming to save her forever from the icy solitude of the tower. I see the turquoise sky between the branches, the yellow of the flowers, the greens, the browns. The birds sing, two commonplace butterflies, white ones, fly by and then fly off again, butterflying happily. A hare passes close to me. There are dragonflies, ladybirds, bees. A breeze gets up and some flowers rain down, softly, delicately.

HIM: – ‘The landscape is a state of mind’.

HER: Yes, he had told me that once. Now I understand. Now everything makes sense. What I wanted, what I cried for, the love that I gave to him so completely. Now is the moment when my true heart receives benediction for the unblemished zeal of its devotion. I am completely happy, and the world and nature kiss me. Today is 25^th December 2012. Christmas in the Year of the Dragon. I am the Fire Dragon, a dragoness who senses for the first time that she won’t be burnt to death by the fire of her own flames. I unfold my wings. I am not afraid, and I am ready to fly. (She heads rapidly towards her laptop. She starts to search for something on the Internet, but the image of the woodland is still projected onto the stage. Her speech is giddy and euphoric.) I would like to shout it to the furthest corners of the universe, but I can’t. I’ve managed to keep the secret for a whole year now, an epic endeavour, desperate to share it with the whole world as I was. Oh, Gero, Gero, my love, my big fat sweetie, love of my life, my love…! I don’t ...