Who would writer Juan Villoro invite to dinner if he could choose anyone? Cervantes, for starters (“Cause he seems like a decent guy”) and Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher (“Not many people know who he is”) and John Lennon (“to balance things out”). He would have chosen Jesus Christ as well, but I picked him first, so I guess he figured he’d be tied up.
Instead Villoro settled for me and my girlfriend, only half as brilliant as Cervantes, half as talented as Lennon and definitely not as nice as Jesus Christ. We sat around his house last Saturday with other invitees after checking out Villoro’s new play, La Conferencia de la Lluvia (The Conference about Rain), at the Compania Nacional de Teatro Theater in Coyoacan.
The thing about Juan is that he tells and writes stories in the same way.
“So my shrink and the guy that cuts my hair are starting to give me the same advice…” he starts, and I smile, feeling like I’m listening to him read out of one of his books. In fact he’s one of those guys that would be great doing the voice-over for his own book on tape.
I remember thinking immediately that I liked his conversation style when I first met him at the San Miguel Writers Conference last year — much like his writing, you feel immediately taken into his confidence. You might be thinking to yourself that that sounds a bit like a comedian that can’t stop telling jokes, but it just comes off genuinely, I can’t explain it.
La Conferencia de la Lluvia is a bit like that. A man who gets caught up in a dialogue with the audience, repeatedly shifting from confession to comedy to tragedy throughout the hour or so he’s on stage. It’s the story of a librarian who, upon arriving at a conference where he is supposed to talk about rain (and its poetic symbolism), realizes he’s misplaced the notes for his talk. He begins to talk extemporaneously and from that first flabbergasted moment goes on to confess other things — the other items he’s constantly misplacing, the collapse of his marriage, his literary manias and the romance that has broken his heart.
The show has some lighting dramatics that were completely unnecessary to put the audience in the mood but once-librarian-turned-actor Diego Jáuregui is exactly how I would have imagined this neurotic book lover if I would have read it first on the page. Jáuregui said after the show that he was nervous but it didn’t show. Although the memorization of his hour-and-half-long monologue is unimaginable, in the end it came off genuine, just like Villoro, sitting next to me in the dark theater, smiling, listening for the laughter of the audience enjoying his story.
You can still catch the show if you’re quick about it. It will be showing through February and March, on Saturdays and Sunday at 1pm. The entrance is free, but you need to go on the theater’s website and make a reservation in advance.
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