Abelardo José Estorino López

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Abelardo José Estorino López (1925). Theater director and one of the principal playwrights of contemporary Cuban theater. National Prize for Literature. National Prize for Theater.

Abelardo Estorino was born in Unión de Reyes, Matanzas, and attended primary school there. He later moved to the city of Matanzas to attend secondary school, and subsequently, in 1946, to La Habana to study Dental Surgery, a profession he practiced between 1954 and 1957.

However, theater soon became a vocation that would absorb him almost completely. Already in 1954 Estorino had written his first play, Hay un muerto en la calle (which remains unpublished), and two years later his work El peine y el espejo had appeared, which premiered in the Granma hall of the Ministry of Public Works in 1960.

During this period he worked as a publicist and studied stage direction in the important Teatro Estudio group.

Beginning in the sixties, Estorino's theater began to produce significant results: he adapted for the stage El fantasmita, La cucarachita Martina and El mago de Oz; premiered in 1961, in the Hubert de Blanck hall, his work El robo del cochino, for which he had received an honorable mention in the Casa de las Américas Prize; and began working as a theater advisor to the National Council of Culture.

In 1962 he adapted Miguel de Carrión's famous novel, Las impuras, for the theater. That same year he wrote the musical comedy Las vacas gordas, a work in two acts set in La Habana of the twenties that shows reminiscences of bufo theater.

In September 1964, Teatro Estudio premiered, under the direction of Berta Martínez, his work La casa vieja, for which he had also received an honorable mention in the Casa de las Américas Prize, and a year later his biblical allegory Los mangos de Caín appeared on stage. Later,

Estorino wrote with Jorge Fraga the screenplay for El robo (1964-65), a film adaptation of his own work El robo del cochino. In 1967 he assumed co-direction with Raquel Revuelta of Schnitzler's La ronda and a year later wrote El tiempo de la plaga and La dama de las camelias (puppet version).

From 1971 he was part of the technical team of the National Theater and Dance Department of the National Council of Culture, and during this period he also wrote the screenplay for Tiene la palabra el camarada Máuser (1972).

The seventies proved important for his work as a theater director: in 1972 he directed La discreta enamorada, by Lope de Vega; in 1975, Los pequeños burgueses, by Máximo Gorki; in 1979, Casa de muñecas, by Henrik Ibsen; and in 1981, Aire frío, by Virgilio Piñera, of whom he always considered himself an admirer and disciple.

In 1979 Teatro Estudio premiered, under the direction of Estorino himself, his comedy in two acts Ni un sí ni un no, with which he won the Prize for best staging of a Cuban text.

In 1982, his show Pachencho vivo o muerto premiered at the Teatro Musical de La Habana and in 1983, in the Hubert de Blanck Hall, Teatro Estudio presented Morir del cuento, which received the National Prize for best staging at the La Habana Theater Festival and the dramaturgy prize from UNEAC.

In 1986 Estorino directed La verdadera culpa de Juan Clemente Zenea, by Abilio Estévez; in 1988, La malasangre, by Griselda Gambaro (Prize for Best Staging at the Camagüey Festival); in 1990, Aristodemo, by Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces; and in 1996, Medea, by Reinaldo Montero, with which he joined a cultural exchange program with members of the Repertorio Español company of New York.

His work has been presented on different international stages, such as Czechoslovakia, Norway, Sweden, Mexico, United States, Chile and Spain. Notable is his presence at the Cádiz Festival (1995) with the works Vagos rumores and Las penas saben nadar; as well as in New York (1996), where Vagos rumores won the prize awarded annually by the Association of Entertainment Critics (ACE) for Spanish-language theater. In 1996, his work Parece blanca participated in the International Festival of Caracas and toured various cities in Venezuela.

Between 1998 and 2000, Estorino returned to Manhattan with new theatrical proposals and received a fellowship from the Theatre Communication Group. In 2000 itself he participated in the Ibero-American Festival of Bogotá with Las penas saben nadar; with which he attended a year later the First Monologue Festival of Miami, and, in 2004, the Zicosur Festival in Chile.

Among his international and national recognitions stand out the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, the Distinction for Cuban Culture, the National Prize for Literature in 1992, the National Prize for Theater in 2002, and the distinction of Adopted Son of the City of La Habana in 2003. Because of his enormous merit and talent, he was the first Cuban theater artist to whom the International Book Fair of La Habana was dedicated, and in 2006 he was declared a Member of the Cuban Academy of Language.

From his earliest works, Estorino's theater was interested in studying two fundamental aspects: the conflicts of provincial families and unequal relationships between genders, which in turn motivated two constant preoccupations in his work, the rebellion against patriarchal family order and the unmasking of appearances, conventions and prejudices. Already from El peine y el espejo he sketched in a single act a picture of typical social discrimination against women in rural Cuban surroundings of the fifties; while twenty years later the comedy Ni un sí ni un no, which takes as protagonists a young couple in La Habana of the seventies, once again addresses the theme of women's rights in the new society, and the struggle between new and old conceptions.

With El robo del cochino, a work in three acts, Estorino had ventured into one of the themes that characterize Cuban theater from the triumph of the Revolution: the conflict between the new and the old, and with it the changes that the new system produces in family life. This work, which takes place in the city of Matanzas in the summer of 1958, presents the conflict in a petit bourgeois family: Juanelo wants his father to intercede in favor of the liberation of Tavito, a young peasant who has been arrested for the alleged crime of having stolen a pig, when in reality his only "crime" had been helping a revolutionary. This circumstance, which tenses the relations between father and son, also causes the character of the mother to use her voice and change the state of submission in which she had been living until then. The fusion of the political with the familial, the progressive psychological development of the characters, as well as the growing prominence in the plot of the guerrilla struggle, are some of the achievements of this theatrical piece.

In his work La casa vieja the plot is set in the years after 1959, and begins with the death of the father of a provincial family living on false prejudices and still bound to the schemes and traditions of the past. The funeral unleashes tensions between two siblings, whose conflicts reflect the transformations in the new consciousness of the people: he opposes the retrograde positions of his family and she opposes the cutting short of a young woman of the people's future by moralistic prejudices. Due to its interest, this piece has also been adapted for film by director Lester Hamlet.

Los mangos de Caín is a much more experimental work and makes better use of theater's expressive resources. This one-act piece uses symbol as a resource, since it is a biblical allegory in which a demythologized Eden is presented from the original family: the main motif is God's displeasure at Cain's offering, who in turn attempts to unmask the hidden intentions of Adam, Eve and Abel to reveal where evil and injustice truly lie.

With La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de Don José Jacinto Milanés Estorino enters another fundamental dimension of contemporary Cuban theater, which is the treatment of figures from the literary past: in this case, the conflict stems from the controversial madness of the Matanzas poet José Jacinto Milanés, in the colonial context of abolitionist struggles and slave uprisings. What is interesting here is the questioning of History, which fuses with allegory; the relationship between the poet's psychological involution and the worsening of the country's political and economic situation; estrangement as a way to appreciate that circumstance; the poetry that arises from the combination of memories, introspections and reveries; and the discontinuity of the fable from independent episodes.

Later, Estorino proposed a version of La dolorosa historia… with his other work Vagos rumores, where he synthesizes and reinterprets characters and situations from the first to achieve greater poetic density and dramatic intensity. This second piece emphasizes the artist's responsibility toward his social reality and once again proposes understanding the present through the past.

Morir del cuento, a drama in two acts that has been called a "novel for performance," returns to the Cuban family, to machismo and the discrimination against women, and to the spirit of rebellion and the search for truth: a crime and a suicide are the two episodes that sustain a plot in which the present and the past interweave through collective memory. This work stands out for its marked narrative character, for the use of the theater-within-theater technique, and for the elaborate characterization of its characters.

In his most recently premiered works, Estorino has continued deepening into the universe of women: Las penas saben nadar and El baile attest to this, two privileged pieces, like so many others of his, by the masterful interpretation of Cuban actress Adria Santana.

Moreover, in his famous work Parece blanca Estorino took as a point of reference Cecilia Valdés, the canonical character of Cirilo Villaverde. Starting from a free appropriation of the plot of the nineteenth-century novel, the author explored themes with deep current repercussions such as power relations and conflicts of race and gender. This has been called a work of maturity within Estorino's dramaturgy for the skillful use of parody, for the effective actualization of myth in contemporary Cuban reality, for its marked intertextual character, and for the use of a variety of resources that reveal a postmodern sensibility.