La Cantante calva
by GETA Teatro, Universidad Técnica de Madrid
24-25.3.1998

A friend of mine played the non-existent role of THE CLOCK (you could say special sound efects, as for instance gun shooting sound).

Apart form this detail, I'd like to tell some more about the way we presented the play. First of all, it was played on stage only three times, one held on March 24 1998 and the other two the following day (March 25 1998). It was part of a Universitary Theatre Festival in which we participate every year, with different plays (FESTIVAL DE TEATRO DE LA UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID). Miguel Ortega, codirector along with me, and playing the Fireman, was nominated Best Supporting Actor. Unfairly, I must say, no other recognition was given to us :(

The main reason for this text is to tell about our alternative ending to the play, which as far as I know was completely original. Miguel Ortega and I came up with the idea of repeating the play over and over again, as some other groups have already done, I know.
BUT what we did in the end was much better. We got one actor of the group, by then completely unknown for being new in the University, among the audience. When the play gets to the begininng again (when Mr. and Mrs. Smith starts again the first lines of the text), we just continued for some minutes as if it was completely normal. The audience started feeling a little uncomfortable with the idea of being locked in there for All Eternity, but none of them complained apparently. EXCEPT our Man in the Audience; as a part of the cast, but the public not knowing this, he started complaining about the play loudly. "What the Hell is going on? We have already seen this s**t!", "Oh, come on, this is getting stupid!!", "What? For God's Sake, Burgundy Wine cannot be Australian!". Although most of the audience would rather agree with him, those were not good manners, and people started telling him, some of them quite rudely, to shut the f**k up! As we planned, he didn't obey to the angry people, and finally, when people are wondering what damnthing is going to happen next in that crazy circus, he gets a gun and goes to the stage to kill the actors! One of the persons watching the play even tried to catch him on his way to the Slaughter, but our false audience member slips through his fingers! Then, holding his gun, of course false, onto the face of the actors and actresses, threatens them, but they did not show any emotion; not fear, nor anger... just continued with the play as if nothing was happening, as if they were some kind of robots or something! The member of the audience starts executing the cast in front of the public. The Firemen, Mr. and Mrs. Martin and Mary come to the stage yelling out different parts of their text, and our Violent Hero kills all of them with a Machine Gun we had hidden behind a sofa. Then he escapes.

The curtain opens and closes along with the applause of the audience, but the cast remains dead on the floor or sofas (changing positions during the curtains closing seconds, but dead at last).

Mirko D. Casale Simonovic