It takes place in a pool and stars Juana Viale: what is "Subacuática" like, the immersive play that impresses with its stage design

We're asked if our medical certificate is up to date upon entering the Club Estrella de Maldonado , through the entrance at El Salvador 5470 in Palermo. And the membership fee? It's Sunday, 7 p.m., and we're about to see a play in an unconventional space , a rustic setting for a theatrical performance: a swimming pool. We enter through the men's locker room, where the smell of chlorine , the tropical humidity, the sauna-like heat, the droplets sliding down the walls are striking. Without goggles, flip-flops, or even swimsuits, we sit on a white plastic chair, since there are no seats when the stage is a pool and the scenery is water. We're about to see Subacuática , the play written by Melina Pogorelsky and directed by Fernanda Ribeiz and Luciano Cáceres . It premiered last October at the SUTERH swimming pool on Balcarce and Venezuela Streets, and has just been revived this year at the Club Estrella pool in Maldonado. That wasn't the only change: the cast now includes Juana Viale, Joaquín Berthold, Anahí Gadda, and Maricel Santin. The entire experience won't take more than an hour.

Pablo (Berthold) has been a widower for four years, ever since his wife, Mariela (Anahí Gadda), died giving birth to Lola. Stroke by stroke, as he swims, this man allows himself to reflect, remember, break down, and even share his thoughts with Mariela. With the help of Luciana (Maricel Santin), his sister, he raises his daughter as best he can; he stays afloat. At the pool, he meets Alejandra ( Juana Viale ), the mother of Tobi, her daughter's swimming partner. Separated and overwhelmed by motherhood, she too stays afloat as best she can.

Eleven years ago, during her second birth, Melina Pogorelsky , an author who has developed creatively in the field of children's and young adult literature, suffered a complication that kept her in intensive care and away from her baby for several days. Since then, a question has been on her mind: what would have happened if she had died? As a writer, she thought, that (hypothetical) answer could be explored in a work of fiction. She began writing, and some time later, that story developed into Subacuática , her first (and so far only) novel for adults, published by the independent publisher Odelia.

Then came the day director Fernanda Ribeiz , with whom she had already been working on another project, invited her for coffee and, over amaretti and sugar packets, confessed her interest in bringing that story to the stage. Pogorelsky accepted, and despite not being a playwright, she took on the task of adapting it. Not without effort, she conceived a dressing room with three stools for the set. But: "We have to do it in a pool," ventured Luciano Cáceres, who joined the director's team, and just as he posed the challenge, he also provided the solution.

If adapting a novel into a play entails difficulties, adapting it to a space as unique as a swimming pool is even more complicated: “It's a very lively text, which we adjust with each performance. Sensory aspects come into play: the smell of chlorine, the discomfort of the space, the acoustics, the characters splashing you; at some point, it's an immersive work,” Pogorelsky tells Revista Ñ . And he highlights the work of the actors, whom we'll see in leotards, and their physical dexterity.

“The story begins with a widower who lost his wife during childbirth. Without being lighthearted, we also wanted the work to be lighthearted, to have a hopeful ending, to spark laughter and emotion. Pablo makes breakfast and baby pigtails for the baby, and inside he wants to die. The everyday goes on and seeps into life,” the author believes.

For her part, Fernanda Ribeiz , part of the directing duo with Cáceres , knew Melina Pogorelsky from her children's universe. Someone said to her: "But haven't you read her only novel for adults?" And so another story began. "I feel it in the back of my neck," Ribeiz recalls the first line of the story, in a conversation with Ñ . She was fascinated: "There's a whole universe already condensed there." Coming from the audiovisual world, she wanted to venture into theater.

Water was an important element for the play: Pablo's character experiences grief and conducts his soliloquy in that suspended time that occurs when he swims in the pool, stroke by stroke. "It's the only time he has for himself, in which he returns to Mariela, his deceased wife. It's a visually powerful moment, representing that suspended time as the words advance, all that passes through the character's mind only when he swims." Because after that, life goes on, of course.

“What I find beautiful is that the play also speaks to motherhood and fatherhood without judging whether what these characters do is right or wrong. It embraces the possibilities each person has to be a parent, despite their own difficulties. Alejandra is a mother who is overwhelmed, who does what she can, and that's fine. What they do isn't judged, but rather embraced,” says Ribeiz. She adds: “I think with Luciano Cáceres we found that union between worlds, the theatrical and the audiovisual, which resulted in an audiovisual theater.”

Yes, Cáceres confirms. He came up with the pool idea. Why? Because he lived in San Telmo for a long time and remembered the SUTERH pool with steps and... and why not? It wasn't easy, he also confirms. He experienced some of the pool's discomfort firsthand when he took his daughter to swimming and couldn't change her in either the men's or women's locker room and ended up juggling in some "neutral" space. Whether in that pool or this one, the one at the Maldonado club, rehearsals took place after 10 p.m., outside the official swimming pool hours for the rest of the members. Or on weekends, also at an unrelated time. They dived late and came out even later, past midnight, cold or hot, hungry or sleepy.

“For a long time, when I direct, I seek to generate an experience,” the actor and director tells Ñ , “that goes beyond telling a story and acting it out; that something begins to happen from the moment you enter the room,” says the man behind the one-man show Muerde (Currently playing at Timbre 4), in which the actor is on stage and “in character” from the moment audiences enter the room, for as long as the process lasts. In the case of Subacuática , produced by Club Media, he believes that “the entire experience is multiplied by the senses, by the smell of chlorine, by the fact of entering through a dressing room.”

"And it's not self-pitying material," he adds, "the commonplace would be to wallow in the suffering of loss; all of that is there, but with humor, with the idea of ​​staying afloat, of raising a girl with love, with the help of that hyperactive sister who wants her brother to be happy and rebuild his life. It has very poetic moments."

* Subacuática is presented on Saturdays at 10 pm and Sundays at 7 pm and 8:30 pm at the Estrella Club in Maldonado, El Salvador 5470.