A BATTLE IN FAVOR OF THE VERNACULAR THEATER

A documentary has come to recover part of the history of the vernacular theater, and luckily brings to the present many of the conflicts that it continues to deal with. Pedro Maytin now puts in front of his camera numerous personalities who offer their views about what is already more than theater. Because the vernacular is not limited to what we have seen on stage: its typical characters and models have been fused with our reality and it is not too difficult to recognize in the streets gestures, voices, attitudes that refer us to the behavior of those characters. Personal interests, double standards, the jocular and erotic sense of a phrase, the economy, the desire to climb up the social scale; all this is still part of the life of the Cubans, and that guarantees, for the ghosts of the bouffe, a more current existence than the founders imagined. La tradición vernácula en el teatro cubano (The vernacular tradition in Cuban Theater,) with script and narration by Carlos Padrón, produced by Agencia Caricatos, recovers prints, photos, voices, images of that battle that, among us, is still the way we see ourselves in the scene, and also outside it.

This documentary sends us questions about the future. He does it with humility and respect. We should thank him for that return through time, and for his willingness to avoid the “deserted museum” look. Because the vernacular theater speaks to us face to face. And it is in this way, also with this documentary, that it demands our acclamation.