A dystopian future without actors
The Free Theater program from December 4 to January 18 Oh! Misery will make us happythe new creation of the Uruguayan playwright and director Gabriel Calderónone of the most relevant names in contemporary drama. Co-produced with Temporada Alta, the piece arrives in Barcelona with a cast made up of Pere Arquillué, Laura Conejero, Daniela Brown and Joan Carreraswhich repeats experience with Calderón after the successful monologue Story of a Boar (or something from Ricard).
AI comes to the theater
Oh! Misery will make us happy enters a nearby dystopia in which artificial intelligence has replaced all theatrical trades, and where only a residual space remains for human actors: the basement, turned into a labor shelter where four veteran performers keep the machines that have taken their place running. In this context, the theater continues to exist, but without actors, without risk and without the imperfections that made it alive. It is in this void that the piece articulates a satire on the desire for perfection, the need to be useful and the fear of becoming obsolete in a world ruled by technology.
The idea of impersonation, explains Calderón, was the initial engine of the project: “The first idea that appeared was that of robots and artificial intelligence. And, above all, the possibility that someone could impersonate us and improve”. The author links it directly to the profession of the interpreter, who is used to occupying other identities through gesture and word, and who, in fiction, sees how this privilege – and this threat – now rests with machines. “Fantasizing with the idea that someone will impersonate the impersonators – which are the actors – is, for me, the initial seed of it all,” he says.
The work also plays with the classical repertoire. While the robots interpret Life is a dream on stage, the humans, locked in the basement, improvise fragments ofThe great theater of the world to evoke a time that no longer exists. Calderón describes this operation as an exercise in irreverent writing: “From Calderón de la Barca there is only one verse that has remained intact; all the others have been tampered with or ruined by me.” Thus, the text becomes a dialogue between two Calderóns: that of the Golden Age and that of the 21st century, crossed by similar questions but different answers.
Oh! Misery will make us happy it lasts two hours and will occupy the Teatre Lliure de Gràcia until January 18. A theatrical dystopia that, far from technophobia, questions what remains of the gesture, the body and the word when humans become dispensable cogs of an efficient machinery. A dark comedy that imagines a theater without actors to talk, inevitably, about the need to remain human.
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