On Saturday, May 17, 1947 was a watershed for Mexican theater. A play written nine years ago that had not been staged was premiered. “The most refined work of political satire,” considered critic Laura Navarrete Maya.
A milestone equivalent – according to Navarrete Maya and Aurora Ocampo – to that of López Velarde in poetry, Octavio Paz in the essay, Arreola in the story and Rulfo in the novel.
With the premiere of The gesticulator: Piece for demagogues, by Rodolfo Usigli, the new Mexican theater began. The work is a profound analysis of the hypocrisy of the political class that, of course, shook that universe trained in the art of simulation.
The work was the subject of the cabinet of President Miguel Alemán, the first junior of the Mexican Revolution. She was considered “counterrevolutionary” and, although she was not immediately censored, her season was shortened to disguise it. They demanded that Usigli instead of showing the greatness of Mexico exhibit its miseries.
Opinion was divided into two equally militant and aggressive groups, wrote Usigli: “one considered it rubbish, an outrageous pamphlet against the Revolution; the other, the cornerstone of the Mexican theater and a passionate defense of our Revolution. It has had the honors of insult, slander, diatribe, parody, mockery and union sabotage ordered by a continental labor leader who believed he was alluded to, not to mention the very notable one of a cabinet meeting following of its premiere in the official theater.”
The theme of the staging is the betrayal of revolutionary ideals. The protagonist is a failed teacher who adopts the identity of a dead revolutionary. Finally, they end up murdering him.
The work has not lost its validity since then: the masked dance of simulation and the exhumation of the past to reinterpret it at convenience continue to be basic ingredients of political culture.
For Usigli, theater should be a mirror of society. in comedy Halftone portrayed the cultivation of middle-class appearances; in The family has dinner satirized the upper classes and their ridiculous ideas about vanity, pride and kitsch as synonymous with refinement that continue to be characteristics of the nouveau riche. shadow crown was a historical tragedy based on the empire of Maximilian and Essay of a crime, a crime novel that shows the decomposition of some sectors of the capital’s bourgeoisie, as Eleonora Luna suggests.
The portrait that José Emilio Pacheco made of the playwright in a few lines is accurate: “For Rodolfo Usigli, the theater was the world, the world was a theater and everything else was battle and dialogue.” Convinced that “a town without theater is a town without truth,” for 50 years, the poet writes, he fought to give us a Mexican theater “a representable human comedy, a scenic mural, a one-man dramatic literature in which a single author did the work of many writers: tragedies, dramas, pieces, comedies, farces, theory, criticism, innumerable translations. A Mexican theater.”
The playwright was very clear about his vocation: “either theater or silence. Either theater or nothing… That is why I reprove and reject everything that adulterates or disfigures and betrays him and turns him into a cheap and rootless clown or a Pompadour doll or a falsification with or without myth. Either theater or silence. Either theater or nothing.”
The habits and customs of a good part of the current political class confirm the relevance of a good part of Usigli’s works and, in particular, that of The gesticulator. Years pass and the same vices portrayed by the playwright persist.
“If you think that I don’t understand that I have failed in my life… if you think that it seems fair that you pay for my failures, you are wrong. I also want everything for you. If you think that we will not leave this place to something better, you are wrong. I am willing to do anything to ensure your future.”
Rodolfo Usigli was born on November 17, 1905 in a neighborhood on the old San Juan de Letrán Avenue in what is now the Teresa cinema. The epitaph he suggested was never placed on his grave: “Here lies and waits, Rodolfo Usigli, citizen of the theater.” But even though they didn’t, the playwright continues to wait patiently with his works to continue surprising us.