At the end of June, award-winning playwright and journalist Sam Brooks led a workshop on critical engagement at Auckland’s Basement Theatre. At just two hours long, it was brisk, but attendees absorbed and discussed concepts and strategies around engaging with and responding to theatre, and fundamental approaches to writing reviews. The workshop adds to a slowly growing network of initiatives to counter a small and struggling arts media landscape. Opportunities to develop into, and even be, a critic are scarce. With that in mind, The Big Idea has offered participants of Brooks’ workshop an opportunity to publish reviews.
Here is the third, by Grace-Amelia Vernal. Grace is an Auckland-based writer with experience across the film and arts sectors in Aotearoa and the UK. She holds a Master’s in Screenwriting from MetFilm School in London.
The importance of being in on the joke
Grace-Amelia Vernal
When do you finally feel at home in a new country? When you get the jokes.
This is the central prompt of Laenye Productions’ El Diván: The Live Therapy Show. Divan as in the therapist’s couch of Freudian psychoanalysis. A title that I am embarrassed at not figuring out sooner. Turns out Divan in English is Diván in Spanish.
This two-man improv show is framed as a session of “Live Therapy” with the flavour of a daytime talk show, focusing on migration, identity, and cultural adaptation. Judging by the number of people who cheered at certain jokes, the audience strongly identified with these themes. The show's proposition that “we are all migrants” had a strong, purposeful resonance in the current cultural climate.
Matías Avaca plays Argentina’s answer to Dr Phil, Lic. Marcelo Sivvera, who practises a deliberately vague self-devised modality called The Method – a comprehensive resolution of problems, concerns and resolved matters. As he tells us, he can fix your life! Exactly how is unclear, as is much in the world of broadcast pseudo-psychology.
Sivvera begins his introductory segment by sifting through questions submitted by the studio audience. The paper handed out pre-show specifically requests “everyday situations, cultural confusions, linguistic doubts, migratory discomforts, or related matters. Please avoid active international crises.” Reasonable parameters for a one-hour comedy show. Small problems can feasibly be solved; unpacking complex geopolitical issues would definitely run over time.
Sivvera offers humorous yet astute observations such as, “Why do English speakers like puns so much?” Good question. Puns are objectively terrible, funny in how not-funny they are. The show highlights how humour is almost a language within a language. Its rules aren’t taught – perhaps because explaining a joke is the quickest way to kill it. Instead, we absorb conventions around irony, wordplay, timing and cultural references without necessarily understanding why they work. Humour is incredibly nuanced, varying from culture to culture and even person to person. As a native English speaker, I couldn’t tell Sivvera why English speakers like puns. We just seem to have collectively decided that we do.
I like my comedy witty, wry and fast-paced, but perhaps that preference is partly a luxury of having a strong grip on the language in which it is being performed. Had I watched the Spanish-language version of El Diván, I suspect I would have been adrift, watching the responses of those around me for cues, trying desperately to keep up, only to be thrown by an unfamiliar word or the speed at which the next joke arrived.
As a talk-show therapist, Sivvera is believable, but he could have garnered more laughs if played more broadly, performing for the invisible cameras we are told are there. The success of these media figures often lies more in their big personalities than their skills. There is some confusion over whether this is a performance of a therapy session or a performance within a performance: the framing device suggests one thing, while the direction sometimes takes us somewhere else. It’s a difficult line to walk between respecting the profession and using its conventions for comedy.
The entrance of Daniel Fernández provides some necessary momentum. What is improv without a partner? In tonight’s session, he plays a man named Winston Peters who has been pushed into therapy by his wife, Jacinda. Seated on the eponymous diván, he bemoans how he doesn’t understand other people’s jokes, while they in turn have no idea how funny his jokes are. Apparently, his daughters pretend he isn’t funny.
Avaca and Fernández have solid chemistry; however, there are moments when the “Yes, and…” could move more decisively, building upon and escalating each other’s offers. Pauses give an audience valuable breathing room, but once a bit has exhausted itself, something new needs to take its place. Otherwise, the scene becomes directionless, and the show stagnates.
There are strong comedic moments, most memorably Fernández clinging to a WWII helmet, decrying the fact that he now thinks and dreams in English but can’t remember the Spanish word for elbow. Is it codo?
Aided by visualisation and word-association techniques, Winston leaves optimistic about his next session — maybe even couples counselling with Jacinda… if there’s a discount? His problems have not been “fixed” as promised, but a weight has been lifted.
The dynamic between client and therapist has long offered theatre a flexible framework for exploring characters’ inner worlds. El Diván is quietly refreshing in presenting therapy as a place for ordinary human difficulties. Winston is an oddball, but not troublingly unwell. His eccentricities provide comedic material that could have been expanded upon, but his problems don't require a diagnosis to justify taking up space on the diván. His cultural isolation and desire to feel understood are treated with sincerity; therapy gives him somewhere to articulate an experience that the people around him may not fully understand. His isolation is specific, but he is not alone in feeling it. Delving deeper into the therapeutic relationship might have detracted from El Diván’s biggest strength: exploring Spanish-speaking migrant experiences in Aotearoa.
What is distinctive about El Diván is that it offers its audience an opportunity to participate in something resembling a therapeutic experience rather than simply witness one. Avaca and Fernández know their audience. They are offering a valuable experience to those who sought them out. It’s the same thing Spanish Winston Peters is clearly craving. The same thing people often go to therapy for.
Connection. To be heard. To be understood. To understand the joke instead of pretending to.
El Diván offers that experience, and its audience receives it warmly. Perhaps feeling at home isn't only about finally getting the joke. It's about finding people who get yours.
