Güiton Onofre

9th International Classic Theater Festival of Alicante

Somewhere in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century, a troupe of comedians from the league, made up of a comedian and a musician of various instruments and contraptions, set out to perform the comedy nunca vista sobre las tablas de las azarosas andanzas by Onofre Caballero, tenido por “guitón”; which is the same as saying rogue, truhán or ganapán. His life remains written in a book that they will dust off and open when the performance begins, because he is a character lost among others of more renown belonging to the same picaresque and itinerant life, plagued by accidents and marked by hunger and the vicissitudes of the supposedly golden age. Thus, the comedian, while setting up before the eyes of the spectators the stage that appears to be the places through which Onofre passed, will unfold and act out the various episodes that marked the existence of the script, from when he was orphaned as a child and exposed to the bad care of a hidalgo until his unexpected entry into a religious order and his literal ascent to the altars. He enters both extremes, the company, a “naque”, he goes through, reliving it with intensity, effort, much humor and emotion, each of the main acts that happened to Onofre: the masters who mistreated and starved him, the characters on the road who swindled him, the failure of his enterprises to grow socially or his revenge plans, the violence, the humiliations, the final loneliness and the apparent triumphs. The few happy days and the dark ones. Trances that will lead him, in sum, to a career of rancor and continuous deception. And the impossibility of erasing an original stigma that a fall as a child, in the fire, left marked on his face, and that will turn out to be the rubric of an unfortunate destiny. After the performance, the company dismantles the stage and invites the audience to reflect on what and who the comedy reflects. And in whom the script Onofre looks.