Julio Matas

He was born in Havana, Cuba. He is a writer and theater artist. He was an actor by vocation and a writer by inspiration. Playwright, novelist, actor, theater director and professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. He received the ICRA Award from the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami.

Typically, his mother did not want him to be an actor. Her son should be a lawyer. But typically as well, the son pleased his mother, studied Law, and then dedicated himself to acting. Thanks to that he met very early on Virgilio Piñera, the great Cuban playwright, through Mercedes González, a professor at the Instituto de la Víbora Institute that many of us enjoyed at that institution as the director of the theater group. Everything else turned out wonderfully for Julio Matas, who is recognized as one of the most important Cuban playwrights of these past decades.

He studied Law at the University of Havana and Literature at Harvard, always showing total indifference toward the possibility of practicing his Doctorate in Law.

Since 1948, the year he entered the Seminar of Dramatic Arts at the University of Havana, he dedicated himself to theater as an actor first, and director later.

He graduated from the Seminar of Dramatic Arts of the University Theater (1948) and obtained a Master's in Dramatic Arts from the prestigious American university Harvard (1960).

He began his artistic career during his student years as an amateur. He was part of a dramatic arts group at the Instituto de la Víbora, Havana and at the University Theater (1948).

In the 1950s, Matas would meet with his friends at Nuestro Tiempo, a cultural society, where Wifredo Lam, Fidelio Ponce, Agustín Fernández and many others exhibited, and where they held lectures and film screenings, although it was not publicly acknowledged that it was inspired by communists until after 1959. In 1954 he directed Medea, by Euripides, and in 1956 The Bald Soprano, by Ionesco. "I threw myself into it, I was 23 years old," he marvels. Then Virgilio Piñera returned from Argentina where he had been for a few years and they resumed their friendship, while the magazine Ciclón was founded, which was financed by José Rodríguez Feo.

He founded the group "Arena" (1954), where he introduced to Cuba the works of E. Ionesco: The Bald Soprano and The Lesson. He also directed works by T. Williams, V. Piñera and A. Arrufat and in some of them he performed as an actor.

During those years before ICAIC he worked with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Ramón Suárez and Néstor Almendros on short films. "We made a version of a Kafka story called A Daily Confusion," he recalls. "They were two individuals who had arranged a business meeting and the encounter never took place. Another thing I did was a monologue from Hamlet, which Natividad González Freyre would read to me, and I transmitted it, without speaking, with my gaze, but everyone thought it was very boring."

He collaborated in directing the actors of the Cuban film The Twelve Chairs (dir. T. Gutiérrez Alea, 1961) and worked as a director in the Teatro Estudio group: The Dog in the Manger, by Lope de Vega (1964).

For lyric theater he worked as stage manager during the popular opera season at the Auditórium theater (Faust, 1961) and operetta at the García Lorca (The Merry Widow, 1962).

One of the culminating points in Matas's life was being chosen in 1963 to play the role of Oscar in Cold Air, Piñera's alter ego, which was filmed on video. "The idea we all had when the play was being rehearsed was that people would leave, because it was too long, and it turned out to be such a great success that we were amazed; the audience laughed and cried. I felt fulfilled." But it was impossible to continue resisting. When he returned from the United States at the beginning of the Revolution, they had given him a position as director at the National Theater and he had the idea of presenting a work by Thornton Wilder called Our Town, and people protested because it was an American work. The director of the National Theater, Isabel Monal, had been chosen for her revolutionary merits and did not support him.

Founding member of the National Lyric Theater of Cuba, he directed the scenic movement in the staging of Luisa Fernanda, signed by Miguel de Grandy (1963), work for which he received praised reviews. He also directed for the Euterpe group the operas Rita and Il tabarro, in 1962.

As a writer he cultivated theater, poetry and narrative. Julio Matas died years ago abroad.

He has published a book of poetry, "Portrait of Time" (1958), a collection of stories, "Catalog of Unforeseen Events" (1962) and a three-act play, "The Chronicle and the Event" (1964).

He has unpublished a book of poems, "How to Exit the Labyrinth," and another of theater that includes several pieces. "Normandy" is part of a volume of his stories, "Erinia," which he will publish soon.

Matías Montes Huidobro has classified him as part of "the intellectual avant-garde of the late fifties," which came "from the theater of the absurd and cruelty," along with Antón Arrufat. He also wrote poetry, short stories, novels and essays, and countless academic articles as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught for 25 years.

Upon leaving through Spain he wrote to his former Harvard professors, Raimundo Lida and Stephen Gilman, a very alarming letter, saying "he was walking a tightrope," and they immediately recommended him for a position at the University of Pittsburgh, from where he wrote over the years a series of dramatic works that are mostly gathered in The Abduction of Havana (2002) and, finally a novel, here in Miami, Between Two Lights (2003), which he confesses will be the only one, because it is too laborious. For him the literary genres, about which he has written the essay book The Question of Literary Genre (1979), depend on what one wants to say, because "literature is a means of communicating the essential, which functions at different levels: as an emotional act, as an intellectual act and at the same time as a work of art."

In 1965 he left Cuba as an emigrant. After some time in Spain, he traveled to the United States. There he settled in Pittsburgh, at whose University he began his teaching work until becoming a professor in the Department of Spanish Language and Literature.

Between 1968 and 1974 he served as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature and of its Iberoamericana Magazine.

In 1970 he earned his doctorate from Harvard University. He was part of the advisory board of the New Theatre group (Miami) and the editorial committee of literary creation and criticism magazines such as Consenso, América Latina, Italia, Caribe, Estudios Cubanos.

His texts have been included in publications edited in the United States such as Latin American Literary Review (where in 1977 his piece Penelope Inside, Out was published), Playwrights, El Nuevo Herald, Mundus Artium, Exilio, Alacrán Azul, Punto de Vista, Linden Lane Magazine, among others, as well as in volumes such as Revolutionary Change in Cuba (United States, 1976), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Spain, 1974), The Latest Cuban Poetry (Spain, 1973). He wrote the prologue to Persona, Life and Mask in Cuban Theater (United States, 1973) by M. Montes Huidobro and was co-editor of Selected Latin American One-act Plays (United States, 1973), which included his piece Ladies' Game, staged by amateurs and professionals.

In 1992 the Teatro Avante group premiered his work The Going Astray at the VII Miami Theater Festival and Dialogue of the Poet and the Supreme Leader appeared in Cuban Theatre in the United States: A Critical Anthology (United States).

But Matas will go down in history for his magnificent written theater, much of which has also been staged: Ladies' Game, The Chronicle and the Event, Here the Deer Crosses and The Going Astray. He has also published his dramatic works, such as the book The Abduction of Havana, which brings together eight of them. He is the author of the novel Between Two Lights and numerous critical essays. His life has been dedicated to the love of the word and art.

Years ago he acquired American citizenship. His works have been premiered in the United States, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Brazil.