Los mansos (The meek) of Alejandro Tantanian: chronicle of a theater piece

Abstract

This article approaches the play Los mansos (The meek), by Argentine playwright and director Alejandro Tantanian, in which the author offers an autofictional stage proposal based on his reading of The idiot by Fiódor Mijáilovich Dostoevsky. Tantanian unites the symbolic life of some of the leading characters in The idiot with Dostoevsky's own biography to, in a game of appropriation, transfer the double experience to his own personal experience as a writer for the theater in the 21st century that results from the open wounds in the twentieth century of war, migration and exile. Our work starts from these creative stages adding, at the same time and along the same lines, that of a group of performers directed by the Cuban playwright and director Abel González Melo who, in 2021, begins to stage Los mansos (The meek). Multiple game, therefore, that will lead our research to the genealogy of a process in which the public —including readers of this work— is an indispensable part of thinking about our immediate present from what the theater, now and always, can offer the common space.