Ithaca College

Teatro en español

Please join us for our inaugural performance of Papá Querido (Dear Father) on Tuesday, Nov. 14th at 7:30 PM in Textor 103. This performance is a prelude to the troupe’s participation in Cornell’s Theatre festival on Friday, Nov. 17th. Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Aída Bortnik’s play was originally written during Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-83) as part of Teatro abierto (Open Theatre). Teatro abierto was a cycle of 21 one-act plays to resist the dictatorship's attack on theatre and its practitioners. The idea was that if a whole group of black-listed people worked together, the dictatorship would not be able to clamp down on them all. The staging of the cycle was, in itself, an act of defiance. The artists would no longer be silenced and made invisible, though the media gave them no coverage. The Teatro abierto event is generally considered by Latin American theatre practitioners to best exemplify theatre's liberating and contestatory power.

In this play, four adult children of a recently deceased father (very much a Perón figure) meet for the first time at his funeral only to discover that they know very little about their father, nothing about each other, and had all received different messages from this looming, but absent, figure. Much like the widely disparate groups of peronists found after the death of Perón, the only thing that united them was a great man who gave them very conflicting messages.

For more information, please contact Annette Levine: alevine@ithaca.edu