Cuervo

Coming directly from Paris, Cuervo is a haunting multimedia theater performance honoring the legacy of Chilean playwright Óscar “Cuervo” Castro, who founded Teatro Aleph in Santiago de Chile in 1967. In 1974, Óscar and his sister Marietta were arrested by agents of Pinochet’s Chilean military dictatorship. Despite the extreme violence they experienced in captivity, Óscar turned his despair in Chile’s concentration camps into a work of art. Astonishingly, Cuervo, as his friends and colleagues called him, found a way to stage a new play each week in the camps’ dining halls, transforming the lives of hundreds of prisoners. After being released, Óscar found shelter in the French Embassy and was later invited by French luminaries such as Ariane Mnouchkine and Claude Lelouch to rebuild his life and his beloved theater in Paris, now named Théâtre Aleph. In April of 2021, Castro passed away in France. Three years later, his sons Cosme and Óscar Jr., now working in Paris, crossed half the world and the Andes with cameras in hand alongside their father’s unpublished theatrical autobiography, Théâtrographie. Guided by that narrative, they set out to find his former fellow prisoners, friends who had shared his playfully creative attempts at psychological survival. They visited the camps where he was detained and tortured, retracing his steps through harsh years of political suppression and theatrical bravery. The result is this freshly reimagined Cuervo, adapted and directed by Cosme Castro and Óscar Castro, Jr. from an excerpt of Théâtrographie: a theatrical, audiovisual, and testimonial adaptation that includes a staged reading enriched with audiovisual sketches, silhouettes, and photographic images of crucial spaces captured by his sons half a century later. Journeying through memory and highlighting art as a means of resistance and resilience in the face of oppression, this cautionary tale is more timely than ever.ity, Óscar turned his despair in Chile’s concentration camps into a work of art. Astonishingly, Cuervo, as his friends and colleagues called him, found a way to stage a new play each week in the camps’ dining halls, transforming the lives of hundreds of prisoners. After being released, Óscar found shelter in the French Embassy and was later invited by French luminaries such as Ariane Mnouchkine and Claude Lelouch to rebuild his life and his beloved theater in Paris, now named Théâtre Aleph.