March 4, 2008
Chilean playwright gives reading at WCL
The Washington College of Law is not a typical place to enjoy a new play.
But when Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta mesmerized his audience last week with a reading from his seriocomic play on the campaign against dictator Augusto Pinochet, it drew attention to the ways that creative artists can have an impact on the political system and human rights.
Skarmeta is an award-winning writer whose works include the novel that inspired the 1994 Academy Award–winning movie, Il Postino (The Postman). He read in translation from his new work, The Referendum: or, How to Defeat a Dictator Through Poetry.
The play follows the travails of an advertising man enlisted in what seems like an absurd and doomed cause: a 15-minute television pitch to convince Chileans to vote against Pinochet in the 1988 referendum on his rule. The ad will be permitted on the airwaves only once, for 15 minutes, and will be the only chance the opposition will get to speak out against the longtime dictator and convince undecided voters to vote “no” on keeping the dictator in power.
The premise seemed, as Skarmeta said in his play, like “a fairy tale.” But it was based on the conditions of the actual referendum. There were, indeed, anti-Pinochet ads, clips from which were shown to the audience. And they were, indeed, allowed to air only briefly. They were broadcast about 15 minutes a day for a month, recalled Christian Campos, an actor who was in the original anti-Pinochet commercials and is now cultural attaché at the Embassy of Chile.
Skarmeta’s play tells how the fictional adman decides to emphasize a vision of the democratic future over anger and recrimination for Pinochet’s crimes, and craft a commercial with images of rainbows and optimistic ordinary people.
That, said Campos, was quite true. “It was brilliant. It had nothing to do with talking about the sins of the regime. We avoided doing that, and instead, we chose to speak about hope,” he recalled.
The play showed the important role that comedy and creative expression can play in communicating political visions, something that is particularly evident in Latin America, said College of Arts and Sciences dean Kay Mussell. “The literary and political traditions in Latin America are close in a way they’re not in the U.S.,” she noted.
It was the first time the College of Arts and Sciences and the Washington College of Law had cosponsored an event.
