Died Tito Cossa, Argentine culture is in mourning. And his figure deserves a review for an impeccable, committed career, those that are slowly becoming extinct.
The dictatorship crushed. It was 1981 and in some rooms a wind of change was trying to blow. It wasn’t fresh era of resistance. That is what was proposed by that moving artistic movement called Open Theaterhand in hand with a group of brave people, with Roberto Tito Cossa as one of those who put his pen and soul into each scene. “Is there for Cossa’s?“, was a phrase repeated ad nauseam at the window that fall of ’81 and it became a catchphrase. The long line at the theater door was not to see Gray of Absence, with a masterful cast on stage. It was not to be missed.. And, 43 years after that unforgettable postcard, The death of that master of words – this June 6, at 89 – paints a new absence with gray.
He died last year Pepe Sorianothe grandfather of that work that he directed Carlos Gandolfo and who co-starred Luis Brandoni. The book, in Cossa’s handwriting, said: “The ante-kitchen of the Trattoria La Argentina, in the Trastevere neighborhood, in the city of Rome. It is a large room that is used as a living space. On the right is the kitchen, which the viewer does not see; on the left is a exit towards the bedrooms of the house and another that leads to the restaurant room. When the action begins, the sound of a piano accordion is heard. It is the Grandfather, who awkwardly plays the tango Canzoneta, sitting at one end of the room. The other, Frida tries to close a suitcase overflowing with clothes.”.
Thing He knew how to paint times, moods and souls like no one else.. She knew how to observe and transmit. From the armchair, one could imagine himself in the space he had dreamed of. Like the one at La Trattoria, for example, with Soriano playing in the background.
The word “essential” seems so overused, but here it fits this man who curiously was born on November 30, National Theater Day. Author of classics of the scene such as The ninth and Yepeto, was, as he liked to say, “’34 model.
Son of a dental mechanic and a housewife, he grew up in Villa del Parque, among books and curiosity. He didn’t know where his life was going to go, although he believes he was bitten “as a child by the acting bug,” but He quickly headed towards journalism and it was at Clarín, in 1956, where he took his first steps: “In the beginning it was the hey kid who wrote some newsletter,” he reviewed a few years ago.
He then joined the ranks of the headquarters of Los Clasificados, on Corrientes Avenue, where people went to publish their offer or demand for work. He eventually became editor-in-chief of El Cronista.
From the editorial offices he took, among other things, great friends, such as Osvaldo Soriano and the journalist and writer Andres Rivera. The meetings at his house, they say, They had an enveloping aroma of gatherings, washed down by good whiskey.
man of words
With the coup of ’76, his writing changed focus: more dramaturgy than journalistic texts, without ever losing sight of reality, no matter how dark it may be.. What’s more, Cossa was one of those who He found light, if he wanted, in the rubble. And from there she built.
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Roberto Tito Cossa, on Canal Encuentro: “I have the mark of origin.”
Once he left the newsrooms, he dedicated himself fully to his works, to the new ones and to dusting off some that he kept in his drawers. He had already written, for example, goatherd tute (1968), made into a film by Juan José Jusid.
But the emblem of his work will always be The ninth -premiered at the Lasalle Theater in 1977-, a character born by a television request. Cossa was part of a powerful group along with Carlos Somigliana, Ricardo Talesnik, and Germán Rozenmacher: the quartet had written The black planea political satire about the return of Juan Domingo Peronwhich at its premiere starred, among others, Ulises Dumont and Oscar Viale.
A television channel proposed to the group – which was joined Ricardo Halac– write fiction and Tito Cossa was encouraged to mold that character who made the jump to the stage and became a classic of Argentine theater.
The theatrical version of “La nona”, with Ulises Dumont.“Somebody told me: ‘It’s like a play. So I took up the television book and converted it for theater. I ended up making a hit at the worst moment of the dictatorship”, I remember in the interview with clarín in 2018.
A Boca fan, as a boy he played ball as best he could, but he did not dream of being a footballer, but rather an actor. “What happens is that As a kid I was already very shy, I wanted to go on stage but I didn’t have the nerve.. Maybe that’s why, over the years, I approached theater from another side.”
A great conversationalist and analyst of social behavior, he maintained, with great knowledge of the facts, that “theatre serves as any other art, to awaken the sensitivity of a spectator, amuse him, seduce him, make him laugh or cry.” Wow, I knew about that.
