"El Año en que Nací (The Year I Was Born)." On The Boards Opens 13/14 Season With a Latino Play. (Sponsored)

OnThe Boards has been an organization very well respected in Seattle since artists founded it in 1978. For many years now, it has supported local performing artists as well as international innovators in contemporary dance, theater, and music.

OtB is starting their 2013-2014 season with a Chilean play written by Argentinean Lola Arias. Her play, El año en que nací, is about eleven Chileans born during the reign of Pinochet. They wonder about their parents lives and start reconstructing them using letters, old clothes, hazy memories, and music, in their attempt to better understand their past, their present, and their future. Can you imagine what that must be like?

The Pinochet era has probably been one of the most difficult eras in Chile. Many disappeared creating much fear and anger among its citizens.

In El Año en que Nací, writer Lola Arias, added several moments of humor. During interviews to newspapers,  Arias has explained why she wrote these funny parts.

“Humor is a very corrosive element to face horror and tragedy, an element that, at times, allows you to think about things much more than pain does,” Arias told La Tercera.

“I am interested in the tension created by someone telling their own story, always on the edge of the abyss, feeling their limits,” she said. “It makes it much more human and contradictory. An actor can play with it in a way that person’s son cannot. The son presents all the contradictions, and it is much more complicated.” - The Santiago Times.

I really hope you come to support this play that will run from September 19th through the 22nd. In the mean time, I’ll just think about an old phrase that came to my mind after reading what this play is about; “To know where you’re going, you must know where you came from.”

Buy your tickets here. 

About the Writer

Lola Arias is a writer, director, actor and musician whose work plays with the overlap zones between reality and fiction. She works with everyone from professional performers to laymen, animals and babies. She has created work for both stage and site-specific performances, most notably with Ciuades Paralelas, a festival of site-specific urban projects she founded with fellow OtB alum Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll). Her works have been performed throughout Europe and Asia. This performance marks part of her first tour to the US.

Preview of El Año en que Nací.