Ghosts of Valparaiso
A Play in Two Acts
Andre Vltchek
Badak Merah Semesta
2018
Ghosts of Valparaiso
Copyright 2014 Andre Vltchek
All rights reserved
Written by: Andre Vltchek
Preface by: Gaither Stewart and Patrice Greanville
Edited by: Tony Christini
Cover Design and Layout by: Rossie Indira
Cover & Portrait Photos by: Alejandro Wagner
First e-book edition, 2018
Published by PT. Badak Merah Semesta, Jakarta
http://badak-merah.weebly.com
email: badak.merah.press@gmail.com
Preface
As artists from Sophocles to Camus were the living testimony, writing a political play is as difficult an undertaking for a writer as it is irresistible. With every word, with every line, the playwright is tiptoeing his way through a mine field, forever wavering between a political treatise on the one side and a propagandistic banality on the other.
From the first line of the first scene to the closing words of the final scene the author walks on a razors edge, the theatrical-literary on one side, propaganda on the other, while the dramatist in reality is thinking in tragic, philosophic, theoretical, historical terms.
The history of social realism, whose origins can be traced to the French revolution, and whose impulse yielded a rich crop of 19th and 20th century painters, writers and playwrights, including a powerful and influential American contingent, and which later, in a more self-conscious, pronounced way, infused socialist realism, is something of a cautionary tale.
Despite enormous and well deserved successes such as Eisensteins Alexander Nevsky (1938), whose script was co-written with the gifted Pyotr Pavlenko, moral didactic plays are an artistically elusive form. In most cases the feat is difficult, if not well-nigh impossible. Indeed the frequent failures we saw during the period of socialist realism in theater and cinema plays, and later in the well-intentioned but ultimately clumsy attempts by postwar Western Marxian activists and leftwing writers to educate (and inspire) the masses through scripts that presented poorly drawn characters overwhelmed by symbolic didacticism, constantly spewing the correct line, ended up losing audiences not so much through ideological resistance as simple boredom. However, when the exceptions hit the mark they leave an imprint not easily forgotten, and Vltchek is exceptional.
Vltchek shows in his political play, Ghosts of Valparaiso , you cannot be free against the unfreedom of others. But how to be free remains the unanswered and perhaps the unanswerable question. Camus Theatre, for example, leads the reader to believe that every person bears within himself a portion of illusion, but that the best part of man is that of the revolt that leads to freedom. Inevitably in every literary debate in the end what kind of freedom becomes the question. And for whom. Likewise, Camus The Just, set in Moscow in 1906, probes the motives and conflicts of a group of revolutionaries planning a political assassination, which the writer executes without falling into the trap of literature as propaganda.
The complex and bewildering story of Sophocles Antigone is the polarization of one of the basic elements of the relationship between man and societythe individuals challenge to Power and Powers reaction to that challenge. The confrontation between Antigone and King Creon reflects the dialectics of Western society since the time of the ancient Greeks in all its political, social, moral and legal ramifications. The reading I give to the tragedy is socio-politicalthe individual vs. Power. Since the ancient Greeks, Antigones challenge to power has been repeated down through the centuries as people have risked all for personal freedom.
The challenges facing Andr Vltchek in the composition of Ghosts of Valparaiso were great, which, during the reading, bewildered me, hesitations as a rule overcome by the authors use of delayed revelations in good theatrical style--by an apparent love affair being born on the stage, by suggestions of realistic sound effects, and by the supernatural quality of the ghosts of the past which I will not reveal here.
Vltcheks impassioned accusations of political crimes against humanity perpetrated by the USA, the West, NATO come through clear, as they should, in the words of both the ghosts and the survivors, as well as the authors hopes for and appeals to the rest of the world to resist and to be ready to answer the call to go to barricades in defense of the rest of mankind.
In Sophocles, the Chorus, that is the public and society, discerning or not, vacillates in its support, first for the man of State and Power, then for the higher right. For the Chorus, Antigone is less than human. She is one who no longer counts, somewhere out of the world, a substratum, to be compared to the unconsidered masses, non-represented, non-participating, non-voting majority of the world who have no role in the exercise of Power. At the end of Sophocles tragedy, one wonders which gods and what kind of gods they are all appealing to if they all believe they are acting within the mandate of the gods. However that may be, Creon, the King, is the representative of arbitrary Power which the oppressed, for whatever their reasons, have the divine right to doubt, question and bring down.
Freedom requires that man act polemically, precisely in order to realize himself and to bring about a just society. In order to reject the fatalism that leads us to accept that what will come to pass will come to pass. People die but others must go on. This is the thin line of decency and civilization which both Erasmus and Voltaire praised in their writings, and which in each epoch somehow manages to resist (successfully) the assaults of barbarism, or merely survive to fight again another day. That they exist is indeed the ultimate miracle. As many have wondered before, where do such people come from?
Gaither Stewart
and
Patrice Greanville
Ghosts of Valparaiso
A Play in Two Acts
Main characters
Diego
Niar and Asian Lady (performed by the same actress)
Father
Mother
Waiter
Laura and Victoria (performed by the same actress)
1 st SOLDIER
2 nd SOLDIER
Girl Student
Boy Student
Scenes
ACT ONE
Scene One: Large and bare room, some unnamed war torn country in Southeast Asia, probably in Indonesia, in a small and remote provincial capital. Country is invaded by the US troops. Time: late morning or early afternoon.
Scene Two: Valparaiso; one of the old fashioned bars in this historical Chilean port city. Time: the same day as SCENE ONE; approximately the same hour.
Scene Three: The same as SCENE ONE but several hours later.
Scene Four: The same as Scene Three, immediately after
Scene Five: The same time and place as in Scene Four
ACT TWO
Scene Six: The same as SCENE TWO but several weeks later.
Scene Seven: Dining room in some old house in Valparaiso.
Scene Eight: Same as Scene Six, immediately after Scene Seven.
Scene Nine: Same as Scene Eight, immediately after.
THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION
Act One
Scene One
SCENE: Large room in a rustic house, neat and clean but bare; a bed on the left side of the stage. Two chairs but no table and one lamp hanging from the ceiling. The door on the right side is always shut. The wall clock, which doesnt move, is stuck at 12 oclock.
