Critics at Odds Over Merits of Garcia Marquez’s First Play

In the jaded city where he first found fame as a novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has ventured into the world of the theater. The critics agree that Garcia Marquez, now 60, is as bold as ever--for better or worse.

Garcia Marquez’s first play, “Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man,” opened Saturday at the National Cervantes Theater here. Drawing on themes from his latest novel, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” it brings to the stage the tormented monologue of a woman who has realized, on her 25th wedding anniversary, that she has everything but love.

For 1 hour and 40 minutes, Graciela Jaraiz de la Vera resurrects all the wrongs, the infidelities, the slights and, worst of all, the indifference that her husband has inflicted on her. It is literally a diatribe; none of the 17 other characters speaks. Her husband, Floro, finds silent refuge behind his newspaper, seated in an easy chair.

In 1967, Garcia Marquez came to Argentina for the publication of his novel by Sudamericana, one of Latin America’s major publishing houses. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold 50,000 copies in its first 10 days and Garcia Marquez, en route to the Nobel Prize for Literature, won virtually instant fame.

He chose the city for the world premiere of his first play in part because of that memory, but also because he wrote it for Argentine actress Graciela Dufau. Her role surely is one of the more challenging ever conceived for the stage: to convey, single-handedly, the bitterly lyrical history of a married life.

The play and the performance provoked divergent reactions from among Buenos Aires critics.

Carlos Acidiacono wrote in La Prensa: “Through this cantata one perceives the warmth of a green landscape, the fatalistic and joyful sentiment of the tropics, the exuberance of a world where passion is another fact of Nature. . . . No woman can fail to identify with Graciela Jaraiz, and this perhaps is the strongest point in the success of the work.”

Luis Mazas, in the mass-circulation Clarin, judged the script to be “provocative, charged with poetic ceremony and vitality. The author takes solace in realizing that to be confused is to be human.”

Directed by Hugo Urquijo, Dufau wears as many emotions as she does costumes, sometimes making abrupt transitions from defenseless to shrewish to simply vacant. She prances and slinks around the single set--the living room of a mansion--like a caged lion. Her bags are packed. She is finally ready to leave Floro.

Osvaldo Quiroga, critic for La Nacion, was harsh both toward Dufau and toward the play. Quiroga found that Dufau too often gave in to stereotype, affected tones, inopportune shouts and exaggerated dancing around the stage.

As for Garcia Marquez, Quiroga found only a few lines worthy of the man. More often, the monologue could have come from a soap opera, he said--”a superficial, redundant and tedious melodrama.”

For all the critics, a central question was whether Garcia Marquez had written a true play, which suggests interplay between people. Here, the other characters on the stage are silent props around which Dufau performs.

“Diatribe is a beautifully written text, but not theatrically expressed, because the language of the novelist stops at the words,” wrote Mabel Itzcovich in Pagina 12. “In theater, one has to provoke action. (Here) the spectator encounters only the challenge of a work and an actress that tell a story but leave many chords unplayed.”

For La Nacion’s Quiroga, the script not only lacked the rich images, brusque contrasts and drama of Garcia Marquez’s novels, but also had a fatal flaw as theater:

“A monologue destined for the stage requires a certain expertise capable of translating word into image, reflection into dramatic situation, and silence into emotion. It is evident that this first theatrical work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez exposes his lack of knowledge of theatrical language.”

Garcia Marquez’s friend, Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano, wrote before the play opened that Garcia Marquez had long wanted “to write a lengthy diatribe against himself, spoken by a woman. . . . Perhaps he was obsessed by the idea that he had not been a good husband, distracted by his effort to construct a new world of fiction, and the inconveniences of a literary glory that will be the last of this century for a living writer.”

Garcia Marquez, born in Colombia and now living in Mexico, did not come to Argentina for the premiere. Soriano said the author felt that the play should stand or fall unhampered by his reputation.

“This man is going to attempt a superhuman feat: to try to preserve his public and critical recognition in one of the most decadent, narcissistic and ferocious countries in the world,” Soriano wrote. “Argentines, who never have tolerated lasting success, took him to the top 20 years ago, and it is not foolish to think that now they want to lower him from the pedestal.

“As if to challenge them, Garcia Marquez has written one of the most violent, beautiful and complacent diatribes that could be endured by a man who awaits, impatiently, a judgment not of history but of his own, imaginary woman.”