Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego

Large posters, like those announcing concerts for global rock stars, bore Mariana Enriquez’s name across the streets last year. As if she were a rock star herself, only a literary one, they heralded the tour of her latest book. This alone shows the scale of the Argentine writer’s work, where stories and novels rooted in the horror genre intertwine with the everyday.

So it is no surprise to now find Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego on stage, the title of the twelve-story collection Enriquez published in 2016. Uruguayan-Brazilian playwright and director Leonel Schmidt read it five years ago, at the height of the pandemic, and immediately saw its potential for the stage.

After long and meticulous reflection, with the author’s blessing, he selected six of the stories (El chico sucio, La hostería, Bajo el agua negra, Verde, rojo, anaranjado, El patio del vecino, and Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego). An intense adaptation process began, with the fundamental challenge of creating dialogue that would extend naturally from Enriquez’s original writing. To weave these six stories together, Schmidt created the character of an anthropologist. The adaptation premiered last year in Montevideo, and Enriquez was pleased with the result. “I enjoyed it very much. I found a reading, my own point of view, and an enormous respect for the texts,” she said.

What do we find in this theatrical lens that transfers the social terror of Enriquez’s stories to a single stage, where the sinister emerges from the everyday? Cases drawn from reality: the murder of a child, the femicide of a young woman burned alive by her husband; imagined stories that nonetheless evoke real histories, such as the memory of the Argentine dictatorship; or purely fictional tales, like a student’s obsession with a child or an investigation into homicide and police brutality.

Poverty, violence, crimes against women, politics, the disappeared… all come before the audience “in an oppressive and, at the same time, liberating climate,” as Leonel Schmidt has sought to bring to the stage the narrative power and atmospheric intensity of Mariana Enriquez’s literature.