For those of you who saw director Jay Scheib’s fantastic interpretation of Daniel Veronese’s Women Dreamt Horses as part of Buenos Aires In Translation at P.S.122, here is a chance to see some of Veronese’s work as a director and designer.

Lincoln Center Festival will present Un Hombre que se Ahoga a new 90-minute adaptation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters performed by Proyecto Chejov.  The director is Daniel Veronese, former Artistic Director of Argentina’s celebrated theater company El Periferico de Objetos. El Periferico de Objetos, last seen in New York performing Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine (which played major arts festivals around the world) in 2000, was renowned for its political and confrontational productions, many of them combining puppets and life-size dolls with actors onstage.

In Un Hombre que se Ahoga  the director has taken a bold approach to staging the iconic Chekhov play, The Three Sisters, by reversing the gender of the characters.  He initially cast the best actors he could find for the production, but he soon realized that the gender of the actors he had so carefully recruited did not fit the characters in Chekhov’s masterpiece.  He also found that the play’s language and action was not essentially rooted in gender.  And so in Veronese’s version, it is the women who make decisions and the men who wait.  All of the characters, however, as in Chekhov’s time, live within the confines of their own daily dissatisfaction.

Veronese’s production has no music, no theatrical lighting, no costumes, and no makeup. The actors perform in street clothes.  There are no entrances or exits. The twelve actors are on the stage during the entire piece. There is no attempt by the actors to assume gestures reflecting the gender they are playing. Bereft of technical effects or scenery, the work is seen through words and actions that often seem on parallel tracts.  One soon forgets that the sexes are inverted.  But this imaginative adaptation captures the Chekhovian themes: the tedium of the provincial life, the frustration due to lack of opportunities, and the mind set of the middle class.

PROYECTO CHEJOV (Argentina)
Un Hombre que se Ahoga (North American Premiere)
A freely interpreted version of The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Directed by Daniel Veronese
Scenery by Daniel Veronese
Lighting by Gonzalo Cόrdova

With Claudio Da Passano, Adriana Ferrer, Gabriela Ferrero, Malena Figo, María Figueras, Fernando Llosa,Marta Lubos, Pablo Messiez, Elvira Onetto, Silvina Sabater, Luciano Suardi, and Claudio Tolcachir.

3 performances ONLY:

Tuesday, July 17, Wednesday, July 18, and Thursday, July 19 at 8 p.m.
Venue: Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 West 65th Street
Tickets: $50