Brenda Werth
Photo by April Sweeny
Bio
Brenda Werth is author of the book Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina, co-editor with Paola Hernández and Florian Becker of Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Global Perspectives, and co-editor with May Summer Farnsworth and Camilla Stevens of Escrito por mujeres. Her current research explores the politics of nonfiction in 21st-century Argentine documentary theater and performance.
Romina Paula’s play Fauna (2013) is about the making of a film that will never materialize, a film that brings together a daughter, a son, an actor, and a director in the attempt to tell the story of Fauna, a wild but well-read, otherworldly being, who over the course of her lifetime becomes Fauno. Highly intertextual, self-reflexive, and subtly ironic, the play explores how to tell the story of one’s life, how to capture what is true and real, and how to decipher where reality ends and fiction begins. Central to this exploration is the theme of gender and how the fluidity of gender impacts the ways in which lives are imagined, narrated, and documented through artistic creation.
At once a playwright, director, novelist, and film actor, Paula exemplifies the extraordinary versatility of a new generation of Argentine artists working on the cutting edge of theatrical performance. Her play Fauna draws self-reflexively on theatrical and filmic techniques in an exploration of what constitutes reality and fiction, love, truth, gender, life, death, experience, representation, and art.
Argentine theater has never been so vibrant or visible, yet while Argentine playwrights present their work regularly internationally, translation of the plays into English has lagged, making many of the innovations of twenty-first century Argentine playwrights inaccessible to English speaking audiences. We are grateful to the NEA for the opportunity to address this major blind spot in the area of translation and make this extraordinary play available to English speaking audiences, thus opening a corridor for artistic and critical intellectual exchange between the Americas, and providing a space of reflection on the transnational nature of artistic practice. Paula belongs to a generation of women artists who not only defy disciplinary boundaries, but also break down traditional gender and production hierarchies within the theater. With this in mind, we believe that the accessibility of Paula’s theatrical work to an English speaking audience will help to inspire a current generation of women theater makers, scholars, and students of theater here in the US.
from Fauna by Romina Paula
[translated from the Spanish]
8. Between the Boys
SANTOS: Why doesn’t she want you anymore?
DIRECTOR: Julia?
SANTOS: The actress.
DIRECTOR: Where did you hear that she doesn’t want me? (They look complicit, as they have just finished eavesdropping on the women.) Besides, I stopped loving her first.
SANTOS: Oh, yeah?
DIRECTOR: Yes.
SANTOS: Congratulations, then.
DIRECTOR: I don’t understand.
SANTOS: I’m congratulating you on being the winner.
DIRECTOR: Ah, now I understand—irony.
SANTOS: Yes.
DIRECTOR: So, can I be sincere with you?
SANTOS: Yes.
DIRECTOR: I didn’t stop wanting her one bit, I am in love with her.
SANTOS: I know.
DIRECTOR: Oh really? It’s that obvious?
SANTOS: Yes….and I like you.
José Luis laughs, a lot.
SANTOS: I’m being serious.
DIRECTOR: Oh, really?
SANTOS: Yes.
DIRECTOR: But you seem so crude.
SANTOS: I am crude. And I feel attracted to you—you who are so weak.
DIRECTOR: I’m weak?
SANTOS: Yes.
DIRECTOR: I suppose I might be. Who are you? Where did you all come from?
SANTOS: Us? From nowhere, we have always been here. It was you two who came looking for us.
DIRECTOR: That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean it literally. Why is it so hard to make ourselves understood in this place?
SANTOS: Is it difficult?
DIRECTOR: Yes, very. Julia insisted on bringing me here, and I showed up not even knowing who Fauna was. I had never even heard her name. I like fiction. I have no idea when it comes to this stuff, these biopics. I like writing a script, thinking about the screenplay as artificial, completely fictional and shooting it, even if it does end up resembling a life when it’s finished.
SANTOS: When what’s finished?
DIRECTOR: The film.
SANTOS: Ah, right.
DIRECTOR: But I can’t be a part of this, not like this, it seems too costly.
SANTOS: Costly?
DIRECTOR: Yes, it seems like a high price to pay for I don’t know what. Right now, I feel like I’m paying a very high price.
SANTOS: Are you saying that because of us?
DIRECTOR: Look at the state I’m in.
SANTOS: It looks to me like you’re doing pretty well.
DIRECTOR: I have nothing.
SANTOS: What?
DIRECTOR: Just that—I have nothing, not even symbolic capital. I could have never gotten here if it wasn’t for her. I am a fraud.
SANTOS: Because of Fauna?
DIRECTOR: Because of Julia. Okay, yes, Fauna also. I don’t realize when or from where things are resonating; I don’t have that ability, that disposition. Julia does— she feels things, she’s awake, she perceives them, she understands. She pursues things driven by an internal certainty she possesses, that comes from who knows where. I really trust her and this sense she has and when I see her determination I go along and follow her. Like right now, for example. That’s how we got here.
SANTOS: I get what you’re saying to me but it doesn’t seem so important to know who discovered what thing first. What’s clear is that you’re here, the same as her, doing research on your film, trying to get closer to the figure of Fauna.
DIRECTOR: But the whole Fauna thing isn’t even true.
SANTOS: What’s not true?
DIRECTOR: Fauno, Fauna, it’s all a myth.
SANTOS: What exactly isn’t true?
DIRECTOR: That she existed.
SANTOS: What do you mean? Where did you get that?
DIRECTOR: Julia invented all of it so she could be the center of attention.
SANTOS: Are you referring to the movie?
DIRECTOR: No, to your mother. Didn’t you see her just now strutting around, dressed like her, bewitching us all? I already know her ways.
SANTOS: She’s an actress.
DIRECTOR: Exactly.
Romina Paula (b. 1979) is a critically acclaimed playwright, film actor, theater director, and novelist. Her novel Agosto was translated into English by National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow Jennifer Croft and published in 2017. Paula's dramaturgical work has toured the international theater circuit, premiering in Brazil, Chile, Spain, France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany, but none of her plays have been translated into English. Fauna centers on the making of a film that will never take place. The film brings together a daughter, a son, an actress, and a director in the attempt to tell the story of Fauna, a wild but well-read, otherworldly being who over the course of her lifetime becomes Fauno. Featuring dialogue with such figures as Shakespeare, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Dorothea Lange, the play explores how to tell the story of one's life and how to decipher where reality ends and fiction begins.