by Hasan Altaf
The set design of Mariano Pensotti's El pasado es un animal grotesco (“The Past is a Grotesque Animal” — the title comes, according to Pensotti, from a song by the band Of Montreal) seems at first just a conceit, one of those clever tricks that make a play experimental or avant-garde: The stage is occupied almost entirely by a large, circular platform, partitioned into four quarters, that revolves constantly throughout the performance. The scenes play out in one quarter at a time, for as long as it takes that sliver to disappear from view (the speed seemed variable). The platform works perfectly, even, once it becomes familiar, unobtrusively – the actors never seem dizzy, running from one section to the next without a pause; the sets of each room are changed, added to or subtracted from quickly, out of our sight – but, more importantly, the platform is not just a way of earning avant-garde brownie points: The audience realizes quickly that it is in fact a symbol that works on many levels to encapsulate and heighten the drama.
El pasado, which I saw at the Public Theater in New York, focuses on the lives of four young Argentinians from 1999 to 2009, as they move from their twenties into their thirties, from being very young to less so – in the playwright's words, El pasado depicts “the moment one stops being who one thinks one is to become the person one is.” The rotating platform is an obvious metaphor for time passing, both personally and globally: With each revolution, the characters move forward into the future, away from what they used to be and towards what they will become, and the world moves forward, too, away from the past and into the unknown. The partitions of the wheel also suggest a clock, the quarters of an hour, which works will with the format of the play – each scene, prefaced by the date, presents a discrete moment in the life of one of the characters. Credit for making this device work so smoothly belongs both to Pensotti, who wrote and directed the play, and particularly the actors, who seem completely at ease, as if the ground were not quite literally shifting beneath their feet.