Tierra

About the show

In keeping with the self-fiction genre into which the Franco-Uruguayan Sergio Blanco has been making inroads for some years, his latest play Tierra is a piece that revolves around the figure of his mother, Liliana Ayestarán, who died in June 2022 in the arms of the playwright in an intensive care unit in Montevideo.

In a beautiful and touching tribute to his mother’s memory, who was a renowned literature teacher, the author quotes three characters who in the past were pupils of Liliana. As the play advances, we enter the lives of these three people, all of them affected by the death of a family member: Celia has lost her son to a violent motorcycle accident, Lucas hacked his twin brother to death in a fit of rage, and Clara is the daughter of a man who was disappeared during the military dictatorship, and whose remains remain missing to this today. Gradually, we will find out that what unites these people is not just being pupils of Liliana or the complex situations of grief that have marked their lives, but that what unites them most is being three theatrical characters who have to portray their stories on a stage. This way, the play, in addition to talking about grief and the way one’s existence is altered after the death of a loved one, also talks about the representation on stage, proposing a series of reflections on theatrical art and the complex aspect of perspective.

Director’s Note

Reviving the dead

“We must situate the dead, that is, make a place for them.” Au bonheur des morts Vinciane Despret

While writing this text about my mother’s death is what allowed me to find the words that could transform my sadness into beauty in times of pain, I must confess that writing it was not so much a literary process, but rather a sort of ancestral rite, since it was my way to summon my dead mother. And this is not self-fiction, it’s the unadulterated truth: every time I sat down to write, convinced that this act would help me bring my mother from the beyond, incredibly, I achieved it, because as I wrote, little by little, I could start to feel her presence by my side. Suddenly I noticed that mum preferred to come as the day ended, which was why for the first time in my life, I decided to write at night: I would start at the end of the day and finish at dawn.

So, during the weeks when I was writing this text, extraordinary things began to happen on my desktop: several books inexplicably changed places in my bookcase, some sentences were deleted from my computer, my pens would disappear, at dawn my notebooks would have words scribbled on them that I hadn’t written, and so on. One night when I thought I felt her presence, I dared to ask her on a blank screen on my computer if it was really her, and her answer was immediate: “Who else would it be?” That’s how I discovered the miraculous power that writing has to revive the dead. During the months when I wrote this text, mum came almost every night to stay with me and write with me. Often when I was sad, mum tried to comfort me, assuring me that being in the world of the dead was extraordinary.

Sergio Blanco