Creating a prodigious play of theatrical layers, the new work by Mariano Pensotti tells the artistic enterprise of a theatrical director. A specular and dizzying mise en abyme, spectacular in its staging, which invites the audience to gradually uncover the facets of truth through theatre.
Simon Frank is a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi camps. In 1962, years after his arrival in the small Argentine city of Coronel Sivori, he began to create settings that were faithful reproductions of places from his life in Poland.
The copy of his house serves as the stage for an autobiographical comedy that, with the passage of time, comes to involve the entire community, initially only as enthusiastic spectators, but gradually also as actors and technicians. In 2005, Simon Frank was arrested; the police had discovered that the true nature of his life was very different from what he had presented. In 2019, the theatrical director Walid Mansour decided to stage the entire story, together with five inhabitants from Coronel Sivori, creating fiction from fiction.
This is La Obra by Mariano Pensotti, an articulated reflection on the mechanisms of representation, which invites the spectator to disentangle truth and falsehood in the great theatre of the world.
Duration: 90’ without intermission
Cities
SEASON 2024/25
Antwerp | 31 January and 1st February 2025
DE SINGEL | Info
Simon Frank is a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi camps. In 1962, years after his arrival in the small Argentine city of Coronel Sivori, he began to create settings that were faithful reproductions of places from his life in Poland.
The copy of his house serves as the stage for an autobiographical comedy that, with the passage of time, comes to involve the entire community, initially only as enthusiastic spectators, but gradually also as actors and technicians. In 2005, Simon Frank was arrested; the police had discovered that the true nature of his life was very different from what he had presented. In 2019, the theatrical director Walid Mansour decided to stage the entire story, together with five inhabitants from Coronel Sivori, creating fiction from fiction.
This is La Obra by Mariano Pensotti, an articulated reflection on the mechanisms of representation, which invites the spectator to disentangle truth and falsehood in the great theatre of the world.
Duration: 90’ without intermission
Credits
La Obra
text & direction Mariano Pensotti
with Rami Fadel Khalaf, Alejandra Flechner, Diego Velázquez, Susana Pampin, Horacio Acosta, Pablo Seijo musician Julián Rodríguez Rona
set and costume design Mariana Tirantte
music and sound Diego Vainer
production Florencia Wasser
lights David Seldes
video Martin Borini, Jose Jimenez
direction assistance Juan Francisco Reato
dramaturg Aljoscha Begrich
documentary realization
script and direction Mariano Pensotti
art direction Mariana Tirantte
general production Florencia Wasser
cinematography / DOP Soledad Rodriguez
camera assistance Maria Eugenia Brigante
gaffer Eugenia Gargano
direction assistance and edition Ignacio Ragone
general assistance Juan Francisco Reato
art team Lara Stilstein, Tatiana Mladineo, Luli Peralta
a Wiener Festwochen, Athens Epidaurus Festival, Festival D’ Automne à Paris, Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa coproduction
in collaboration with Grand Theatre Groningen