"A text rejected, remade, forgotten in a drawer, perhaps premiered without any success, disappeared again and finally acquired and preserved by the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin since 2002. It is an unpublished play by Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), one of the greatest Argentine writers. Perhaps ahead of its time and unreadable in 1934, today it acquires an unusual dimension and becomes a key to present and future theatre. In a psychiatric hospice, a troupe of insane people stage a play written by one of them to test work and art as therapeutics. But the fragile boundary between madness and sanity, between reality and fiction, personal and social scourges shatter the initial naive intention. Written thirty years before Peter Weiss's famous Marat-Sade (1964), Arlt's drama is equal to it and even surpasses it in many aspects. Untitled in the original, those who rescued it, Oscar Brando and Ignacio Gutiérrez, decided to respect the way in which the Germans have recognized it: Ursaverio, which, in the manner of Goethe's Urfaust, warns of the later and successful Saverio el cruel (1936). As illustrated by the drawings by Pedro Dalton that accompany it, with this work, until now unpublished and practically unknown, Arlt offers us a revolting, unbridled and brilliant look at the individual and social madness of a world always shaken by the questioning of its meaning."-
