Gustavo Ott's dramatic cocktails.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: BOOKS - Short Story

So just what does a Molotov cocktail have to do with love, a vegetarian, and conditioned reflexes? In one way or another they all appear in the work of the ingenious Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott, whose plays have been produced all over Latin America, as well as in the United States and Europe. The winner of numerous prizes--including the 1998 Tirso de Molina and the 2003 Lopez Aranda, among many others--Ott has twenty-five plays available in Spanish and eleven in other languages. He began writing when he was still a student. He studied law at the Catholic University Andres Bello in Caracas but changed to communications in his third year. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1991, with specialization in audiovisual communications. His senior thesis was a play, Pavlov, which deals with the media and violence as a conditioned reflex. On his professional education, Ott says: "I studied playwriting in London, and for free, since I worked there as a waiter at the National Theatre, and had professors like Harold Pinter, what luck. In Caracas, I also had excellent teachers: Rodolfo Santana and Jose Ignacio Cabrujas. Then, at the University of Iowa, I took part in the International Writing Program. The rest I've always learned from books, which everyone knows teach more than life. Even though, maybe for convenience or compassion, we like to think it's just the opposite."

Ott's subjects are very wide ranging. He says his latest obsession is God: "I've noticed that he sneaks in on me through any little crack. Maybe it's that part about being omnipotent, omnipresent and all, but he really is butting into everything I do." He is also interested in "the subject of friendship, the uses of power, prejudices, guilt, and that everyday fascism that we all exercise so shamelessly."

He notes that even within a single play there are multiple subjects. "Tu ternura Molotov and Dos amores y un bicho are the plays that mark the beginning of this new era of concern with this 'cocktail of subjects' in a single play, within a form which overrides the content. In this regard, I'm one of those who thinks of the subject first. I explore it carefully, maybe more than the characters, situations, or forms. If there's one thing I really pay attention to it's the subject and the story. I've learned to hide them and bring them out through metaphor. Now I try to say everything obliquely through metaphors, turn situations into poetry."

One characteristic of Ott's theater is the surprise ending: "I work a lot on the last pages. In them I see the chance to allow ourselves excesses, to present new riddles, to dare to transform everything. That's Coetzee, of course. But in my case, I hold off until the last pages for the climax, the dramatic secret, character development, defining the metaphor. The only thing I don't put in the in the last pages is the end." He adds by way of explanation: "The last pages aren't the final moments, instead they're all the moments at once. From moments to memory and from memory to landscapes and even ideas that in some cases aren't even theatrical or couldn't be. Maybe because the last pages of a play are the last pages of man. Not of life, but of lives, the many lives of man, those lives that run out but never end. The tension in the last pages of a love, a calling, a friendship. But also the last pages of decency or violence, the last pages of randomness. In short, I find the whole metaphor in the last pages of a country."

Ott insists that he belongs to no school of theater: "I have many schools, because I write many plays in different genres and styles. Sometimes I write comedies, sometimes I work in psychological realism like the Americans, other times I explore expressionism, epic theater, the absurd, and a lot of Borges, particularly in my predilection for form. I've also mixed genres and written expressionist comedy, psychological absurd, expressionist realism, you see. I always like to be someone else when I write and I almost always try to...