Azucena, played by Martha Vidal, faces two shocks: she retires, and her mother dies. Emptiness has her searching for nothing less than love and the meaning of life. That exploration takes her to a small neighborhood movie theater where she and her friend Graciela (María Elena Pérez) meet Aníbal (Carlos Sorriba), an inveterate movie buff. As if that were not enough, Azucena also indulges in experimentation with esoteric practices that, according to the program notes, “could establish a new interpretation of the present and a line of communication with the beyond.”
Spectators wear headphones to hear the performance as if they were sitting on stage. The effect is achieved thanks to “binaural sound,” a technique that records the voices of the actors with two microphones installed in what would appear to be a mannequin head placed on stage. This is also used to reproduce music simultaneously and pre-recorded sounds, such as street and beach environments.
“I always say that, above all things, this work is a sensory experience that has comedy, drama, melodrama, suspense; there is a bit of everything,” Sorriba told Chany Robson in Uruguay on the radio program “El Gato en el Tejado.”
In conversation with Artburst Miami from Montevideo, the play’s author and director describes the passion of mixing the languages of cinema and theater.
The fruits of that crossing “have been the motivators of my writing,” assures Milesi. “I like to think from the cut of a shot, from the fragmentation of an image, how a movie scene looks and how one language can be nurtured from the other without falling into the cinematographic representation of the shooting,” explains Milesi. “I use elements of cinema translated into theatricality.”
He underlines that he finds “the motor of theater” fascinating, referring to the body of the actor live, the stage presence, and the energy of the spectator coexisting in the same space with the actor. “But there are always certain resources of cinema that have been magnetic to me, such as intimacy, proximity, because they help empathy and the most hypnotic game,” he says.
He confesses that it is harder for him to be distracted in a movie than in a theater and that while the atmosphere of the 1950s of the last century flies over Are You There, Bette Davis? the work pays tribute to a way of seeing cinema that is disappearing: the small neighborhood rooms. Milesi remembers when he was just over 20 years old in evening screenings at the Uruguayan Cinematheque, “a tiny room that is already disappearing here in Montevideo. We were very few, just four people, and that inspired me a lot.”
As proof of the cinematographic element used in the stage performance, he cites the use of actors with their backs to the public. “It’s a rule to say in theater: you can’t turn your back,” he says. “I review my staging and realize that I use the back as a narrative resource. I want to narrate from the back, and…
Read More: Things to Do in Miami: “Are You There, Bette Davis?” at Miami-Dade County