EL PASADO
ES UN ANIMAL GROTESCO
Buenos Aires, Argentina
The play is set in Buenos Aires, in the period between 1999 and 2009. The backdrop is the scene of major social and economic changes which affected Argentina in those years.
Mariano Pensotti deploys the fragmentary narrative of ten years in the lives of four young people. Locked up inside a rotating mechanism of perpetual motion, two girls and two boys pass from the age of 25 to the age of 35 before our eyes: 35, the age at which one ceases to be what one thought one was going to be, and becomes what one is.
As in those outlandish tales of the 19th Century, the plot is stuck in a precise frame of time and history in which stories mingle and split off into multiple secondary stories, characters and situations.
The past appears as an animal from the jungle of dreams, an animal which changes shapes every time we call it to mind, a grotesque animal.