Nerit Olaya – A love what he doesn’t give up

The Sullana-native actor has a successful adaptation of a Latin-American classic amid his highlights, and bringing that art inside his hometown.

 

By Nelson         Peñaherrera Castillo

 

Every word has power. I’m not talking about divinity, neither metaphysics. If you can read aloud the first sentence of this paragraph, and you can vary the tone or the intention, it’s possible you notice it. It’s better if you are alone, not to avoid others doubt on your mental balance but learning to hear yourself in the silence, and discovering what your communication skill is. That is what the Sullana-native actor Nerit Olaya Guerrero (1958) is doing.

 

Once upon a Good day, after reading again the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti (Paso de los Toros, Sep. 14, 1920 – Montevideo, May 17, 2009), he conceived a play based upon his novel The Truce (1960), that tells the story of a retired man who loses his wife and builds a new relationship with a young female whom he doubles in age, with the consequent disappointment of his sons and daughter, plus the conflicts everyone of them holds by themselves.

 

Further making a conventional play which every actor learns the lines and performs a whole routine on the stage, the Olaya’s proposal seems a kind of live audiobook. The technique is called scenic oral narration. It’s not only about to have acting talent, also to be a teller aware of the attendance’s reactions for providing feedback immediately what looks for creating some type of emotion. “It’s other interesting way to stimulate the public to approach reading literary works,” he explains me.

 

The Olaya’s Match

The play was premiered in Lima, where the actor lives, beginning 2018 with a positive critic. The success called the attention of Uruguay Embassy.

 

The next challenge was carrying the play not only to Benedetti’s country but his own hometown, very close to Tacuarembó City (218 miles to the north of Montevideo). During the Benedetti’s Week, annually organized, Nerit Olaya simply flowed. When the play ended, the excited applause of the public warned the actor that he had done it very well. It was September 2018.

 

Uruguayan Embassy in Lima catalogued the Olaya’s version as special cultural interest. The Truce began to go a round the whole continent.

 

It’s Good to add the Benedetti’s play has been adapted twice for films, once in Argentina, once in Mexico. It also turned a radio play, but as the Peruvian writer Alonso Alegría (creator of the NubéLúz TV show for kids’ glossary, among others)said on his Facebook account, “the Olaya’s match  is taking the risk to use the best, maybe the unique, way to adapt to the dramatic genre, that famous text.” And everything started from trusting in the power that a simple word has.

 

Also in Sullana

With that experience, he wanted to reprise by combining in one only play, the tales of Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges  (Buenos aires, 1899 – Geneva, Switzerland, 1986), Chile’s Isabel Allende (really born in Lima, 1942), Mexico’s  Angeles Mastreta (Puebla, 1949). The performance is entitled About Love and Other Losses,  also successfully premiered in Lima, mixing suspense, eroticism, and homesick. And it also went around other stages outside Peru.

 

Although, maybe, one of the milestones in Olaya’s career has been performing it in his hometown, and not necessarily the urban area. During August and part of September 2022, About Love and Other Losses has been performed in such as unexpected places like San Vicente de Piedra Rodada, Sullana District, or Sojo and Jíbito, Miguel Checa District.

 

“The viewer is sit down in apparent passiveness, but it’s really in permanent creative attitude, because it goes imagining how much the narration suggests, in a game of emotions, sensations, and images,” Nerit Olaya refers, who call to recover the word as vehicle of the thought, that goes giving up step by step to the rolling empire of the wordless graphic.

 

Like scenic oral narrator, he has received the 2015 Palabras de Invierno Special Award (Matanzas, Cuba), 2016 ContArte Special Award (Havana), 2016 ContArte Formation Award (Havana),and Nuestras Palabras Award (Las Tunas, Cuba, 2022).

 

He is also editor and style corrector. He’s edited works of Peruvian theater people like Carlos Gassols, Sara Jofré, Sergio Arrau, Rafael Hernández, Juan Gonzalo Rose (poetry), Alfredo Pita (narrative), and authors of other topics like Marco aurelio Denegri, Mario Bunge, Jesús Mosterín, or César Lévano. Or what? As I said atop, every word has power. The trick is in learning to use it.

 

 

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