Florencio Sánchez (born in Montevideo in 1875 and died in Milan 1910) is possibily the greatest Uruguayan playright. Theaters, streets, squares and the most important award in Uruguayan theater bear his name.

However, almost a century after his death, his work has been censured by the government and relegated to performances by amateur groups or drama schools. (1)

Like Onetti, who pursued and demanded a city identity from his colleagues, Sánchez “ended up with stereotypes of a misunderstood national theater” (2), a theater that did not run along with the transformations going on at the beginning of the past century. He later would say, “this national theater thing, gentlemen, is brilliant sophistication. The theater does not have a flag… it is universal, human…” To Sánchez, “unknown customs were written” with expressions that came from Buenos Aires’ slang, imported theater passions and feeling. These elements were used to create national works (3). This so called “national work” Sánchez criticizes, has redeemed gauchos as violent heroes, fatefully dragged by the mercifulness of the circumstances. A report and claim of a reality that to Florencio Sánchez, was not real.

At the same time he “proposes a universal theater (because of his topics and personalities of characters) whose imposition in a specific environment is a concession to contemporaneous realism” (4).

Therefore Sánchez focuses his attention on individuals. We see how they sink into a reality that does not accept old-fashioned traditionalism, nor tolerates customs that later become pride. They fight (and lose) and without getting on their knees, they lower their face. “They get a healthy man, a good man, a worker (…) they quit respecting him, they grope him, they step on him, they paw at him, they even take away his last name, and when the miserable (…), tired, devastated, useless and hopeless, mad of shame and suffering, he decides it is time to end such a filthy life, everybody tries to stop him. ‘Don’t kill yourself, life is good’…’Good for what?!’” (Barranca Abajo). On other occasions, father and son take an attitude of stillness, of stubborn inertia towards changes, characteristic of the people from the country, the first, and an open minded attitude towards different ways of seeing and understanding things, common to the young protagonist and the city he lives in. “You and I live two lives connected by family bonds, but completely different. Each of us rules our own life, you don’t have more authority over me than what my affection decides to give. (…) Everything evolves, old man; and these times have filed away the moral, the habits, the styles used when you were raised… those are ancient things today. (…)

You expect, just as the parents from older times (…) that I don’t talk, laugh or cry without your authorization; that in your words I am listening to the oracle (…) that I do not know more than you.” (M’Hijo el Doctor)

But in the city, progress and poverty coexist. Sometimes like a presence with which the characters move, accustomed (Canillita), and sometimes like a decadent bourgeoisie’s destiny, getting used to the hard way, to a reality from which they won’t get out, where no hope exists.Already given to crawl in the most dreadful of the shames, which makes them careless, resigning to the ways things are: “As if I hadn’t tried to overcome but without success (…), because I will never be able to get away from my professional living category…Some resources are left…People that does not know people well and leaves room for surprises. Some good old generous friend, a little try at the red 36 (…) And about the other thing, about dignity and I don’t know what, custom is a second nature” (En Familia.) Even when he did not have a stable cast in Montevideo, most of his plays, besides being presented first in Buenos Aires, and besides the fact that they were presented in Montevideo by Argentine companies and with Spanish casts that visited Uruguay, Florencio Sánchez playwrights were already considered the most important ones of the region.

Only just in 1908 a stable cast of Uruguayans was established. At that time Sánchez was planning a trip to Europe for the year after, where he would die.

In October 1909, sick, in Geneva, Italy, he writes a letter to a friend saying, “I am sick, and apparently bad (…) I have bronchitis in my left lung (…) I am disconsolate and feeling to leave myself die” (5).

He died in Milan the 7 November 1910. He was 35 years old.

One of his plays received recognition since the beginning and resisted the passage of time not because of its esthetic relevance but for its precise image of the eternal human beings’ conflicts, from a country that began to determine its identity in this new century. As one of his characters would say in one of his plays, “That will be my play. Unravel from life (…) the causes for the human pain and expose them and spread them as a weapon against ignorance, passions and prejudices (…) I wanna offer all humanity a mirror in which they will all be able to see the reflection of their passions, misery and vises. This is what we do, these are our crimes, and this is why we are tearing apart.”

Notes:

1. Florencio Sánchez en la escena nacional: 1900-1910, de Gabriela Braselli. Buenos Aires 1998, Editorial Galerna. Cuadernos del GETEA Nº 9. Osvaldo Pellettieri and Roger Mirza editores.
2. Tabaré Freire: Capítulo Oriental Nº15, Centro Editor de América Latina, Montevideo, 1968.
3. Florencio Sánchez, Conferencia sobre Teatro Nacional, quoted at the same source of note 2.
4. See note 2.
5. Letter to Julián Nogueira, Génova, 20/10/1909, quoted in note 2.