A strong monologue and a powerful performance, a simple set design and a complex character that tells a dramatic experience making it look playful and joyful, the public travels by sea and land at the hands of Felicitos who narrates with absolute descriptive power the desire to have a job title, recognition, respect in the microcosm of a fishing boat.
The monologue cites places, music, customs, behaviors, through a local linguistics that, for locals and strangers to the subject, involves them individually and as a family.
At the end of the performance presented on September 6th at Casa Haas, actor Alfredo Vergara told how the monologue “Entre pavos y guajolotes” was constructed.
The connection that you establish with the public is through a story that starts from when Felicitos decides to embark to work, what do you tell us about this?
´”It is a job that we have been developing with Mr. Ernesto Trejo, writer and director of the production, a production that has cost us time and sweat, I was not the actor who was going to interpret it, this monologue was written for another colleague who embarked due to the necessity of what resulted the pandemic, this comrade comes and tells some anecdotes to maestro Trejo, in that text there are also anecdotes of friends we met who were ‘turkeys’ [like a gopher in English] and that in this research work we met people who were ‘turkeys’ and who developed and grew professionally on a boat until they became cooks”.
Literally, in a canteen drinking some chelas to be able to accurately perceive the gestures, the face, that pain of remembering what they have suffered but that they have no choice because it is what they know how to do, it is a job that we spent eight months rehearsing, We did a little chemistry and that’s the result.
“I really like the character, in fact, he is a homosexual character, Mtro. Ernesto Trejo took great care of this matter so that I did not go to the extreme, making a mockery or a caricature of a homosexual character but rather something very down-to-earth, very real, I really enjoy it precisely because despite the fact that I have the freedom to build, to improvise, he is a very contained character, with a lot of emotional containment”.
It seems to me that it is a monologue that makes us value our integrity, our humanity above all, Felicitos mentions the family, the Virgen de la Puntilla, love, those elements that make up life. What do you continue to explore in those moments of fragility during the monologue?.
-I as an actor did a bit of the psychology of the character together with the Mtro. Trejo, I came to the conclusion even from the clothing that the maestro told me: “He is a person who is very careful with details”, I told him, yes, but the details are not impeccable, in the white, in the black, for me Felicitos is a person who has that human fragility because of what he has lived through, and that is why he uses amulets, protection, he is a person of faith, he is also a family person, and that is why when he talks about some of the reasons why he resists out there is by thinking a lot about his family.
It is like carrying a load that he should not carry, because he is not the person who should bring sustenance to his house, and from that fragility, from that point of view, that fragility arises. How many boys from low-income families, from large families dream of embarking to earn well? because the gophers, the sailors, the fishermen, earn well, but they don’t know what is going to destroy them inside, because they are going to face a very different world out there.
When I spoke with these cooks in the canteen, they explained to me, there are rapes, there are a lot of things, that is the issue that I spoke to Mtro. Trejo about; he can’t be a person looking like he’s not fragile, when he actually is, he’s a little crazy in his clothes, he’s Felicitos!, he’s unmistakable.
