EVA PERON TRAP DOOR THEATRE
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The next morning Le Figaro called the play “sinister, inept, indecent, odious, nauseating and dishonest.” The string of insults probably delighted the playwright, flamboyant Argentinean expatriate Raul Damonte Botana, better known by his pen name, Copi. Like the exuberantly anticommercial Trap Door Theatre, now giving Eva Peron an intriguing but overly embellished production, Copi showed no interest in mainstream bourgeois tastes. For all the Peronists’ stink bombs and high masses, the play has no more to do with the “real” Eva Peron—a woman surrounded by contradictory myths—than a Warhol silk screen has to do with the real Jackie O. Copi and Warhol both manipulate their subjects’ celebrity auras, eliciting divergent cultural meanings but never uncovering any underlying substance.
The characters in Eva Peron, set in what may be a presidential bunker, are the cancer-ridden Evita and her nymphomaniac brother, money-hungry mother, morphine-toting nymphomaniac nurse, and dazed, nearly mute husband, Juan Peron, holed up for the last hour of Evita’s life. She’s presented as a vain, erratic, foulmouthed, drug-addicted petty dictator desperate to put the finishing touches on her legacy while endowing her family with ill-gotten gains—when she’s not threatening to leave them penniless. Out of Copi’s charnel-house imagination swirl lyrical images of indulgence, perversion, greed, pity, indolence, and cruelty as Evita flatters and bullies her politically faltering mob, drunk on power but beginning to understand that their regime is crumbling.
In the evening’s savviest performance, Thomas plays Evita as an empty collection of gestures and poses. This Eva Peron has no more character than the yards of well-tailored tulle she wears to look the part of Argentina’s first lady. All flash and no substance, she’s the perfect blank slate for myriad meanings, just as Copi most likely intended. v
