Lost Tango-Dances to Gables' New Theatre
By: Beau Higgins Oct. 17, 2005
Lost Tango at Coral Gables' New Theatre
October 21 - November 20, 2005Thursday October 20 - Preview. 8 p.m. Tickets $20Friday October 21 - Subscribers and Donors' pre-opening at 8 p.m.Tickets (for non-subscribers) are $55 and include an hors d'oeuvre buffet courtesy of Catering by Lovables and meet the playwright at 7 pm, followed by the performance at 8 pm. Saturday October 22 - Press opening at 8 p.m.Tickets $ 40Sunday October 23 - 1 p.m. performance followed by a post-play discussion with cast and playwright. Tickets: $ 40Remaining performancesOctober Thursday 27, Friday 28, Saturday 29 - 8 p.m., Sunday 30, 1 p.m. November Thursday 3, Friday 4, Saturday 5 - 8 p.m., Sunday 6, 1 p.m.Thursday 10, Friday 11, Saturday 12 - 8 p.m., Sunday 13, 1 p.m.,Thursday 17, Friday 18, Saturday 19, 8 p.m., Sunday 20, 1 p.m. (closing)Ticket prices for all performances:Thursdays - $30; Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays - $40; Students Rush Tickets- $10New Theatre at 4120 Laguna Street, Coral Gables, Florida 33146Tickets: 305 443 5909For more details please visit us at http://www.new-theatre.org With Barbara Sloan and Euriamis LosadaAbout the play A reclusive former movie star invites a free-lance writer to her apartment for a rare interview. Each has more at stake than either is willing to let on, but their secrets spill into the open before long - all except the deadliest one.The arrival of a new play by award-winning playwright Mario Diament is always good news. So is Lost Tango, here in a revised version, fresh from its European premiere at Rumania's legendary Jewish State Theatre earlier this year.About the playwright Mario Diament (Playwright) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A seasoned journalist and writer, he is the author of several award- winning plays, most of which have been produced in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. He is a three-time winner of the Argentores Award, presented annually by Argentina's Society of Authors. He won the 2002 Carbonell Award for Best New Play for Smithereens and was a 2000 Carbonell nominee for The Book of Ruth that also won the Streisand Festival Award in San Diego, California. In 2003, his play Blind Date was also nominated for the Carbonell Best New Play award and was included in the Top Ten choices for the best theater of year by both The Miami Herald and the Sun-Sentinel. His play Houseguest received the Los Angeles Weekly (LaWee) Award. Two of his plays, The Book of Ruth and Blind Date have had their European premieres in Bucharest, Romania. Blind Date will open in May in Buenos Aires and will later open this year in Mexico City. New Theatre has produced several of his plays, adding Lost Tango to this ongoing list of premieres later on next season. Mr. Diament lives in Miami, where he teaches journalism and playwriting at Florida International University and writes a weekly column for the Argentine daily La Nación. I started writing Lost Tango thinking about the interesting dramatic situation that a journalistic interview offers. Two strangers meet, one of them asks questions and the other feels compelled to answer. There is no coercion, no legal apparatus that may force the interviewee to discuss and expose his or her intimacy with this stranger, except the enticement, or fear, of the printed word. This also gave me an opportunity to bring together two of the great passions in my life - theater and journalism - into a fencing duel, a game of cat and mouse that, just like in the tango dance, alternates between triumph and defeat. They have a claim over each other: is celebrity a product of the press or is the press feeding on celebrities? The play was conceived as a mystery, and in a way, as homage to the detective flicks that have always fascinated me, in which what seems the obvious truth, suddenly turns out to be false. Lost Tango was the first of my plays that Rafael de Acha read, and it prompted him to commission my The Book of Ruth. Since then, and even while we were working on Smithereens and Blind Date, we talked many times of the possibility of staging Lost Tang at New Theatre. So I was thrilled when one day in January, he called me to let me know that he had decided to include it in his upcoming season. People in the theater are fascinated by world premieres. Understandably so, the appearance of a new play is an event as promising as a birth. But on the other hand, the truth is that many of these world premieres, even when blessed by the critics and the public, rarely get another chance of being produced. This is why the forthcoming re-encounter with Lost Tango, ten years after its premiere, makes me as happy as if it were a new play. It not only speaks well of Rafael's courage and capacity to challenge convention, but is also reaffirms the vitality of the text. In more than one way, Lost Tango has been my most difficult play. It underwent countless re-writings until it arrived to the current version, which I consider its final. One of the reasons for these difficulties was, I suspect, the fact that Tango was a play written in a period of transition, during which I went from my first experiences in the theatre of the absurd and the paradox to a more personal form of theater. Tango has one foot in the world of my play Houseguest and another in that of The Book of Ruth. And Valeria Durand is a character so complex, so full of mystery and surprises that she never ceases to dazzle me. What Tango shares with the rest of my work is the relentless exploration and questioning of the Myth. Perhaps because I grew up in a country of semi-gods, the country of Carlos Gardel, Eva Perón, Che Guevara and Diego Maradona, I always felt the need to draw back the curtain and expose the hoax, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. FALL IN LOVE TODAY! ADOPT A PET FROM YOUR LOCAL ANIMAL SHELTER |
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