La Obra

*Please note: This performance contains adult themes. Audience discretion is advised. This show is intended for ages 12+. Created by Argentine director Mariano Pensotti and his company Grupo Marea, La Obra is a vertiginous theatrical work about memory, complicity, historical violence, and the strange power of performance to make us believe. The play begins with a theater director attempting to reconstruct a little-known story that took place in the small Argentine city Coronel Sivori, with five of its residents. Together, they tell the story of Simon Frank, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazi concentration camps, settles in their city in the early 1960s and begins building a meticulous replica of the home he left behind in Warsaw. What starts as one man’s re-creation of his life becomes an elaborate theatrical event with the villagers drawn in first as spectators, then as performers and collaborators. With Argentina’s tumultuous history in the background, the play grows into local legend until one day, Frank's identity is revealed to be far different than what he has performed. In the aftermath, the community of Coronel Sivori is left to reckon with the role they played in it. Performed in Spanish with English supertitles