Pavlovsky, Eduardo

(1933– )

   Known familiarly as “Tato,” Pavlovsky is an Argentine playwright, writer, and psychoanalyst. He is also a stage and film actor. His play Tercero incluído (translated in 1997 as Third Person Included) was one of the works presented in 1981 as part of the first cycle of Teatro Abierto Argentino (Open Theater of Argentina), a cultural venture that represents perhaps the best example of cultural resistance to the military dictatorship in Argentina.

   Pavlovsky was born in Buenos Aires into a family that would produce at least two generations of prominent physicians. His grandfather, Alejandro (c. 1865–1934), emigrated from then-Russian Rostov (Ukraine) to Argentina, where he became a noted writer, journalist, and, for a time, director of the Buenos Aires Zoo. In 1957 Pavlovsky began his training in psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. He also trained in psychodrama in New York. He soon focused on the treatment of children and adolescents. In 1968 he would publish Psicoterapia de grupo de niños y adolescentes (Group Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents), the first work of its kind to be published in Spanish in Argentina. A prolific writer and theoretician, he has published over 15 works on the theme of psychodrama and theater-as-therapy.

   An amateur actor from early on, Pavlovsky has spoken about the impact that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had on his development as a playwright. He formed the Yenesí Theater Group (1960– 1966), noted for introducing works by Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter to Argentine audiences, as well as for staging works by Fernando Arrabal, Anton Chekhov, Griselda Gambaro, Luigi Pirandello, and Sean O’Casey.

   His work debuted on the Argentine stage in 1962. He would achieve first international recognition with the publication of La mueca (The Grimace) in 1970 in Havana, Cuba. His best-known work, El señor Galíndez (Mr. Galíndez), premiered in 1973. El señor Galíndez along with the 1977 work Telarañas (Cobwebs) would earn Pavlovsky the censure of the military junta. In 1978, after a failed kidnapping attempt, he went into exile in Spain, where he remained two years.

   The dramatic exploration of the psychology of torture features prominently in his work as a playwright. One early critic said of his work, “Pavlovsky no es un escritor que escribe ‘para’ el teatro, sino un psiquiatra que hace teatro” (Pavlovsky is not a writer who writes “for” the theater, but a psychiatrist who does theater). His belief that many torturers share a commonplace mentality toward their activities—a mentality that led Hannah Arendt to coin her well-known phrase, “the banality of evil”—has earned him the censure of those who insist in depicting torturers as monstrous exceptions to the human condition, peculiar only to regimes to the right of the political spectrum. Repeatedly, in plays such as El señor Galíndez, El señor Laforgue (Mr. Laforgue, 1982), Potestad (Paternal Authority, 1985), and La muerte de Margarita Duras (The Death of Margarita Duras, 2001), Pavlovsky has explored the theme of torture while presenting recognizable characters to his audiences. El señor Galíndez, for example, depicts two sadomasochistic torturers who are joined by a third man who has been identified by the author as a stand-in for Alfredo Astiz. Unlike his two colleagues, this third man appears to have made a cool study of the applications of torture and is not compelled by psychological urges. Similarly, in El señor Laforgue—set, according to the author, in Duvalier’s Haiti to deflect the attention of a military junta that employed similar methods to deal with the disappearance of prisoners—another seemingly normal man participates in the vuelos de la muerte (death flights), drugging prisoners and pushing them to their death over the Atlantic Ocean. This is a clear reference to the actions of Lieutenant Commander Francisco Scilingo as detailed to Horacio Verbitsky in his book El vuelo (The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior).

   In addition to his work as a playwright and psychoanalyst, Pavlovsky has earned acclaim in his native Argentina and abroad as a screen actor. He has acted in several of the best-known movies of the postdictatorship period, such as Cuarteles de invierno (Winter Barracks, directed by Lautaro Murúa, 1983); Tangos: el exilio de Gardel (Gardel’s Exile, directed by Fernando Solanas, 1984); Los chicos de la guerra (The Boys of War, directed by Bebe Kamín, 1984); and Miss Mary (directed by María Luisa Bemberg, 1986). He has also acted in two versions of his own work, La nube (The Cloud, adapted for the screen by the author from his play Rojos lobos rojos, directed by Fernando Solanas, 1998) and Potestad (directed by Luís César D’Angelillo, 2001). His work in the former won him the Best Actor Award at the Festival de Cine y Cultura de América Latina in Biarritz, France.

   Pavlovsky is a frequent contributor to international theater festivals-Potestad has been staged in over 40 festivals. His plays are popular with theatergoing audiences and critics in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. He is the recipient of numerous awards at home and abroad. Eduardo Pavlovsky lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.