Halac, Ricardo

(1935– )

   Argentine playwright, scriptwriter, journalist, and theater teacher. Born in Buenos Aires, Halac was attracted to the theater at an early age. An avid reader of drama while still in his teens, at age 17 he reportedly attended a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage in his native city that instilled in him the determination to become a playwright. His desire to familiarize himself with Brecht’s work led him to enroll in German classes at the Goethe Institute, an international cultural association sponsored by the German government. Three years later, he received a scholarship to study theater in Berlin and Munich. Halac then abandoned his studies in economics at the University of Buenos Aires for a one-year stay in Europe, a stint that afforded him the opportunity to visit other European cities.

   While abroad, Halac began working on his first drama, Soledad para cuatro (Loneliness for Four). After his return to Buenos Aires and further rewrites, the play debuted at the Teatro La Máscara in 1961. From the beginning, he was hailed as one of the initiators of a neorealist movement in Argentine drama. The movement incorporated satire, black humor, and the grotesque into a theater steeped in social concerns, and its practitioners are often included under the designation Generation of the 1960s. Other Halac plays of the period include Estela de madrugada (Estela at Dawn) and Fin de diciembre (End of December), both in 1965, and Tentepié I and II (Pick Me Up, 1969). Along with his theater work, Halac began working as a print and broadcast journalist in Buenos Aires. His first incursion in print journalism was for the daily El Mundo. In 1965 the World Press Institute granted him a fellowship that took him to the United States, where he briefly resided in St. Paul, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter in New York. During this period, Halac also joined the program Historias de jóvenes (Stories of Young People) for Channel 7 on Argentine television, where he collaborated with the writers Paco Urondo, David Viñas, and Osvaldo Dragún. In the 1980s Dragún would lead the Teatro Abierto Argentino, in which Halac would participate. In the early 1970s, Horacio Verbitsky approached Halac with an offer to join the original staff of La Opinión, directed by Jacobo Timerman. Halac began writing for the paper’s cultural supplement-a section then edited by Juan Gelman—along with Verbitsky, Osvaldo Soriano, Tomás Eloy Martínez, and Carlos Ulanovsky, among others. That period also marks his participation in the television program La noche de los grandes (Night of the Greats), along with Roberto Cossa, Carlos Somigliana, and Juan Carlos Gené. Because some of the programs were perceived to be controversial by the more conservative sectors of Argentine society, all the collaborators earned the enmity of the feared Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA, Argentine Anticommunist Alliance). David Stivel, the director, and all the writers were threatened with death. Halac, a Jew, was the object of particularly virulent anti-Semitic threats in a series of anonymous, late-night telephone calls. Soon after, Halac left for exile in Mexico.

   On his return, and following the military coup of 1976, a new dramatic direction began for Halac with the premiere of the plays Segundo tiempo (Second Chance, 1976, translated in 1982 as the Last Latin Lover), El destete (The Weaning, 1978), and Un trabajo fabuloso (A Fabulous Job, 1980). In a work that is perhaps an early exploration of the economic ruin that would soon beset the country, Un trabajo fabuloso is the absurdist tale of a man, Francisco, who, unable to support his family with several jobs, transforms himself into a transsexual to supplement his income as a prostitute for wealthy foreign businessmen. The play was unpopular with both critics and audiences. It represents, however, the beginning of an authorial exploration of the social circumstances surrounding the years of the military dictatorship.

   This period also represents a time of intense activity for the author, who combined his dramatic and journalistic work with the teaching of theater, both in private workshops and in educational institutions in Buenos Aires. In addition, Halac wrote the script for the film El soltero (The Bachelor, 1977), directed by Carlos Borcosque and based on a short story by Halac. A later incursion in film would result in the script, cowritten with David Lipszyc and Juan Carlos Cernadas Lamadrid, for the historical drama La Rosales (The Rosales, 1984), directed by Lipszyc and based on the 1892 sinking of an Argentine navy ship of the same name.

   In 1981 Halac was among the participants of the first cycle of Teatro Abierto Argentino, the best-known example of cultural resistance to emerge from Argentina during the military’s “dirty war.” His play Lejana tierra prometida (Distant Promised Land) explores the hopes of a trio of characters who plan a trip to a new land of promise, while three spectral female characters haunt the scenic space. The women are designated as Vieja 1, Vieja 2, and Vieja 3—perhaps a dual use of the word “vieja” (old woman) to signify age and an affectionate nickname for one’s own mother—and are united in their anguished waiting for their vanished children. Their presence is an eloquent reminder of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and of all those who, like them, awaited the return of their desaparecidos. Halac went on collaborate with other cycles of Teatro Abierto Argentino. For the 1983 cycle, he produced Ruido de rotas cadenas (Sound of Broken Chains); for the 1984 cycle, he wrote El dúo Sosa-Echagüe (Duet Sosa-Echagüe). The 1984 cycle was canceled, however, and El dúo Sosa-Echagüe would not be staged until 15 years later.

   With the return of democracy, Halac intensified his teaching and his work for television. He collaborated with Cernadas Lamadrid in the 1983 miniseries Compromiso (Commitment) and in a series of documentaries for the program Yo fui testigo (I Witnessed), which would garner the author’s criticism—though no death threats this time—for programs on controversial topics such as Isabel (“Isabelita”) Perón. Between 1985 and 1987, for example, he traveled to the Argentine provinces to conduct theater workshops under the sponsorship of the Dirección Nacional del Teatro.

   He continued his work for the Argentine stage with the plays La perla del Plata (The Pearl of the River Plate, 1987), a musical-theater piece that Halac, dissatisfied, has removed from circulation; Viva la anarquía! (Long Live Anarchy! 1992); Mil años, un día (A Thousand Years, One Day, 1983); Aquellos gauchos . . . (Those Gauchos . . ., 1995, in collaboration with Cossa and with José Luis Castiñera de Dios, who wrote the music), a play that references Alberto Gerchuroff’s 1910 classic, Los gauchos judíos (The Jewish Gauchos); and Frida Kahlo, La pasión (Frida Kahlo: The Passion, 1996). The new century saw the staging of new Halac plays such as Metejón, guarda con el tango (Metejón: The Guardian of Tango, 2001), Luna gitana (Gypsy Moon, 2001), and the one-act dramatic comedy Perejiles (Parsley, 2003), as well as the restaging of Soledad para cuatro at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes 39 years after its premiere. In 2006 Halac also published Escribir teatro: Dramaturgia en los tiempos actuales (Writing Theater: Playwright for Contemporary Times).

   Halac’s work has been translated into English, and he has received numerous awards including the María Guerrero Theater Award for the play Mil años, un día, which explores the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and which has its genesis in memories of news of the European Holocaust, news that his father had culled from Argentine newspapers during the author’s childhood.

   In his later years, Halac has been involved in several cultural directorates. Since 2002, he has headed the theater workshop sponsored by Argentores (Sociedad General de Autores de la Argentina, General Society of Argentine Authors), for which he was vice president in 2001 and 2004. Previously he had served as the director of the Teatro Nacional Cervantes in 1989 and 1992 as well as the director of the Centro Cultural Marc Chagall of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Israeli Mutual Association of Argentina) between 1993 and 1996. Ricardo Halac lives in Buenos Aires.