“The depressed person”: our review of the work of Temporada Alta 2022

In the middle of a rectangle made of white tape pasted on the stage floor of the theater of the French alliance, rest a table, a chair and a cup. To the side, but outside the limits of the rectangle, a thermos. The Argentine actress María Onetto, dressed completely in black, enters the rectangle and announces that tonight she is going to talk to us about the depressed person, starting the show.

From the beginning, “The Depressed Person” -a work that is presented as part of the High Season Festival 2022- poses tension in the space: the rectangle compresses, forces the woman to only move within the perimeter. It also limits it because the whole stage can be too big for a monologue that spares any kind of paraphernalia.

Veronese seems to understand that the text on which the staging is based – a story by David Foster Wallace – is already loaded with that paraphernalia and therefore what is seen. It is Onetto who plays him with an amazing ability to jump between diametrically opposed emotions. The staging is sometimes tragic, sometimes sadly comic, and the audience laughs. His recording accompanies him with gestures, gesticulations and certain movements that may seem exaggerated. In the talk after the performance, the actress said that it was her way of naturalizing her performance. If you take into consideration the power with which she handles her action and the intensity with which she holds the character, she achieves it outstandingly.

Onetto manages to pose a question: who do we see on stage? Who is that person who talks about the depressed person, tells the origin of their traumas, reveals their questions, and sometimes lets themselves be possessed by the emotions of the depressed person while narrating a very long text with no points to stop at? In the end, she and the assistant director, Gonzalo Martínez, explained the conundrum: we are looking at the depressed person. The question is, then: why does she talk about herself in the third person?

There could be a clue – or it could be a mistake by the interpreter – at the beginning of the staging. Once Onetto was in character, he sat down at the table and announced something like, “Today I’m going to talk to you about the depressed person.” He said it, however, without the distance that one would have to assume characterizes a certain type of lecturer, someone who is going to tell someone else’s secrets. She did it with pain.

Very close to that moment, the character winks at the audience: after almost 15 minutes and several emotional discharges, he asks if someone can pour him some tea. Then he continues talking and a person from the audience stands up, takes the thermos and pours it for him. Onetto has said that, in the history of the work that premiered in 2019 in Argentina, no spectator was encouraged to get on stage.

It’s 54 minutes of seeing the depressed person talking about himself and suffering while doing it. Raising your voice, lowering it, speaking faster, but never slower, walking around the rectangle and reaching the edge. Her parents broke her up when she was a child and now she lives with a guilt that never leaves her alone. But after judging herself and imagining what they will think of her, she seems to be ready to take a first step and get out of the hole: she is going to start asking the world what it thinks of her.

• Author: David Foster Wallace
• Direction and adaptation: Daniel Veronese
• Cast: Maria Onetto
• Last performance: today, 7 pm at the French Alliance of Miraflores.