"Raise Angels": The Theater of the Disadvantaged and Their Resistance

A story of abandoned beings, fallen from the system, subjected to different forms of exclusion and migration is what is presented in the play Raise Angels and They Will Open Your Eyes, by playwright Ricardo Halac , directed by Rodolfo Hoppe.

Ángel (Ariel Leyra) is a man who was admitted to a hospice by his wife. He's a poet from Chaco who moved to Patagonia in search of better living conditions, but he couldn't fully adapt, and his emotional problems led him to institutionalization. Some time later, through a temporary release program, he manages to join a business where he makes and sells wooden angels. During his daily life, he accidentally meets Tomás (Juan Tammaro), a young man who also spent time in a juvenile correctional facility and later in prison.

Ángel finds him trying to escape because he's committed a new crime and is waiting for a friend to accompany him on his escape. Ángel can't help but help him, even though his situation isn't the most conducive to saving anyone.

These characters are shown by the playwright as bearers of a truth and a nobility that goes beyond their actions, as if the purpose of the play were to point out that in the misfits, in the weak, in beings who express the flaws of the system, there is always a form of resistance.

In Halac 's text, the context and social conditions shape the characters. As is often the case with the works of Argentine realism (the theatrical movement of the 1960s to which Halac belonged), the characters lack strategies , have a limited view of their reality, and act on basic impulses that always leave them as losers.

The identification that is produced with the audience is sustained by this lack, this vulnerability, and also by a series of feelings typical of theatrical fiction, such as pity for the fallen and the discovery of a certain critical discourse in excluded beings, deprived of any prospect of success, mere survivors of a world to which they will never truly belong.

The present of the scene places them at a vanishing point, on a road where Tomás sets out to escape his destiny, recreating the prototypical figure of the deserter, the man who escapes into the desert to flee a system that seeks to domesticate him. The figures of Ángel and Tomás embody two types of characters: Ángel represents the somewhat naive goodness reinforced by the wooden angels he sells and makes, and Tomas is an impassioned, furious being who seeks to resolve and respond to events through violence. In the portrayal of these characters, being on the side of the road means choosing between extreme tenderness, a rejection of competitiveness and efficiency, or discussing the construction of society from a perspective of marginalization and crime.

There is a psychological justification in the dramaturgy for the characters' current state that seems too explanatory and schematic. Both suffered abandonment by their families: Tomás, by his parents, and Ángel, by his wife. This seems to unite them and points to the lack of understanding they arouse in their surroundings. In Halac's dramaturgy, the fallen can generate a different form of solidarity, which, in the author's view, is a resource that allows for some alternative, the small construction of a dissident reality.

* Raise Angels and They Will Open Your Eyes is presented on Sundays at 8:30 p.m., at El extranjero, Valentín Gómez 3378.