Monti, Ricardo

(1944– )

   Argentine playwright, acting teacher, and director. Born in Buenos Aires, Monti first ventured into theater as a student in courses sponsored by the Nuevo Teatro and Fray Mocho theater groups. He soon abandoned an acting career in favor of writing for the stage. He is considered one of Argentina’s premier acting teachers because of his widely acclaimed group and individual acting workshops.

   His first play, Una noche con el Sr. Magnus & Hijos (A Night with Mr. Magnus & Sons), premiered in the Teatro del Centro in Buenos Aires in 1970, under the direction of Hubert Copello, and was well received by the critics, garnering him several awards. In 1971 Jaime Kogan, the director of the Payró Theater, staged Monti’s next play, Historia tendenciosa de la clase media argentina, de los extraños sucesos en que se vieron envueltos algunos hombres públicos, su completa dilucidación y otras escandalosas revelaciones (Tendentious History of the Argentine Middle Class, of the Strange Events in Which Some Well-Known Men Were Involved, Its Complete Elucidation and Other Scandalous Revelations).

   International acclaim arrived in 1976, when Monti received the Carlos Arniches Award in Spain for his play Visita (Visit), once again directed by Jaime Kogan (1937–1996), who remains the director most closely associated with Monti’s work. In addition to the earlier plays, he would go on to direct Marathon in 1980 and La obscuridad de la razón (1993, translated in 2004 as Reason Obscured). The late 1970s witnessed brief incursions by Monti into Argentine cinema. In 1977 he collaborated with the director Ricardo Wullicher in the script for the movie Saverio el cruel (Saverio the Cruel), adapted from the novel by the same title by Roberto Arlt. The following year, he would collaborate with Wullicher and Vlady Kociancich in the script for the film Borges para milliones (Borges for Millions).

   In 1981 Monti collaborated in the first cycle of Teatro Abierto Argentino (Open Theater of Argentina) with his play La cortina de abalorios (The Glass-Bead Curtain). Teatro Abierto Argentino is the best-known example of cultural resistance to emerge from Argentina during the years of the military junta. Monti’s plays have been translated into English, French, German, and Portuguese, and his works have been staged in Europe and Latin America. Some of his best-known works have been adapted for Argentine television, such as the 2001 Visita (adapted and directed by Mario Sábato), Marathon (directed by Kogan), and La obscuridad de la razón. Both Visita and La obscuridad de la razón have been adapted for the opera, with music by Pompeyo Camps, in 1990 and 1995, respectively.

   A self-described loner, in a 1999 interview Monti eloquently called his theater “un escudo contra la muerte” (a shield against death). Critics have also hailed him as a practitioner of the “tradición del teatro-circo” (theater-circus tradition) because of the “style and world vision of his plays.”

   In addition to the titles mentioned above, he is the author of Una pasión sudamericana (A South American Passion), a 1989 play dealing with the turbulent life of Camila O’Gorman. An earlier, unrelated version of the O’Gorman story—with echoes to the military junta in the 19th-century regime of the caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas—was brought to Argentina in 1985 by María Luisa Bemberg (1925–1985) as Camila.

   Monti is also the author of the historical monologue Asunción (1992); No te soltaré hasta que me bendigas (1999, I Won’t Let You Go until You Bless Me, translated into French as Hotel Columbus, 1999); Finlandia (2002, Finland); and Apocalipsis mañana (2003, Apocalypse Tomorrow). He is also known for his 1994 stage adaptation of Julio Cortázar’s seminal novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) and for the translation and stage adaptation of Le visiteur, by Eric-Emanuel Schmitt, in 1999.

   He is the recipient of numerous awards in his native Argentina as well as abroad. Ricardo Monti lives in Buenos Aires.