Rolando Ferrer

Cuban playwright, actor, and theater director.

He published in Ciclón, Carteles, and Bohemia. He worked as a professor of Theater History in the Amateur Theater Department of the National Theater of Cuba and as a literary advisor and artistic director of the theater group La Rueda. He received two mentions in the ADAD theater competition and one in the "Hernéndez Catá" short story competition.

He made his debut as a playwright in 1949 with the work Cita en el espejo, in a program that included texts by two other emerging authors.

During that time he worked as an actor in the group Las Máscaras, directed by Andrés Castro, which in 1951 premiered his work La hija de Nacho and, in 1954, Lila, la mariposa, considered the highest point of his dramatic work and one of the essential titles in the history of Cuban drama.

In 1957 he joined the cast that premiered in Cuba La soprano calva (Eugene Ionesco's play that inaugurated the theater of the absurd worldwide) under the direction of Julio Matas at the Sala Atelier.

Subsequently, his one-act works were premiered: La taza de café (1959), Función homenaje (1960), Fiquito (1961), Los próceres (1963), Las de enfrente (1964), and he wrote other short pieces and two titles for children: Cosas de Platero and Busca, buscando.

His dramatic work presents two stages. In the first, the full-length piece stands out, indebted to a psychologist scene, which takes family conflicts as its center and develops in a closed universe, removed from social confrontations and class perspectives. In the second, the one-act work prevails, fashionable on the international stage of the time and, perhaps, more in keeping with the social reality of intense transformations that shaped the island context of the sixties and seventies. This is a period that reveals a frank social vocation as well as a desire for search and experimentation.

Among the constants of his theater are found themes of woman and family, inquiries into national psychology, the reinterpretation of popular culture references, and the singular and acute reworking of popular speech.

He also distinguished himself as an adapter. He created distinctive adaptations of Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare; 1964), Amphitryon (Plautus; 1970), The Three Sisters (Chekhov), The Ridiculous Précieuses (Molière; 1971), The Court of Divorces (Cervantes; 1974), among others.

As a director, he staged The Crucible (Arthur Miller, National Theater of Cuba, 1961); Noh Theater (Three works by Yukio Mishima, National Drama Ensemble, 1965); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Japanese Interludes (La Rueda Group, 1967 and 1968, respectively); De sentir y decir (Texts by José Martí, 1971); La dama duende (Pedro Calderón de la Barca; 1973), Mirandolina (Carlo Goldoni, 1975); El son entero (Poems by Nicolás Guillén, 1975), these last four with the Rita Montaner Group.

His personal poetic approach in this regard was characterized by emphasis on details, the key to producing a suggestive and evocative stage.