by Julio Nakamurakare
Herald staff
theatre review

George: Did you know we’ve made love 113 times?
Doris: What?
George: I figured that out on my Bowmar calculator.

SETTING THE STAGE. This is about the most memorable quote from Bernard Slade’s 1975 stage play Same Time, Next Year, made into a remarkable film (1978) by Robert Mulligan, starring Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda. With these two monstres sacrés in the leads, Same Time, Next Year, the film, was a box office hit that, in spite of being targetted at a specific demographics (the middle to older age generations), attracted moviegoers regardless of age group.
Buenos Aires had its own stage production at the time, starring Thelma Biral and Rodolfo Bebán. Same Time, Next Year, is simply about a woman and a man — Dorys and George — who meet by chance at a seaside resort. It’s love at first sight, which develops, in a matter of hours, into a mutually agreed one-night stand. Both, we learn, are married, and satisfactorily so.
George, for his part, is a successful CPA, happily married to Helen and with three children.He has no apprehensions about life — in spite of having to work hard from an early age to keep a house, wife and baby, he has managed to do fairly well as a CPA.
“What more could I ask for? I have a house, a car, a husband, children, a Motorola TV... Is there anything else I could wish for?” Take one word or two, this is what Dorys says,  a high school dropout who gets pregnant during her senior year and quits school to become a mom and housewife.

IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO. But the one image that lingers in people’s minds is the film’s poster in which Burstyn and Alda smile happily, celebrating what has become a yearly ritual. It is a dear, nostalgia-ridden piece of memorabilia that takes us back to a time when such things as chance encounters and blind dates were not arranged on the Web. You turned round the corner, and there was the love of your life. Or so most folk liked to believe.
Same Time, Next Year, was an emblematic reminder that, yes, changing your life, however briefly, was really possible in material terms. Everyone knew that this was no Cinderella story, no reversal of fortune, no tossing of the coin. Indeed, one of the main assets of Same Time, Next Year, was its almost palpable feasibility.
When Dorys’ husband and children go visit their granny on the father’s side, Dorys travels on her own to a beach resort where, supposedly, she goes for spiritual retirement. George is in town once a year, always the same weekend, to do what CPAs do: IRS statement, yearly balance sheets. A man who routinely stays every year at the same hotel, a cozy nook that will eventually become his and Dorys’ annual love nest.

TRANSITION. Slade’s play made a successful transition from stage play to film. An adaptation, critics said at the time, that turned Same Time, Next Year into a textbook case of how to transport a discourse format to another medium.
Earlier this week, a new production of El año que viene a la misma hora saw the light at the Teatro Maipo, a historic landmark where the genre known as revista reigned supreme for decades. Over the last few years, the Maipo has been home to memorable stage productions, such as Norma Aleandro’s electrifying performance in the local version of the Broadway hit Master Class.
The new version of El año que viene a la misma hora was “aggiornated” by Marcos Carnevale and Lily Ann Martin, moving the action forward from 1951 to 1973, and from a California seaside resort to Argentina’s most popular beach resort, Mar del Plata.
But these modifications are mere ornament. “It is no longer possible to separate the ‘substance’ of a text from its ‘ornaments,’” and to re-express that substance by means of different ornaments. The dictum applies to the work of translators, who must bridge linguistic and cultural differences to transport a text into another language and a different way of perceiving the world.
In this sense, the process of adaptation Carnevale and Martin embarked on, is not bothersome, for “Juan” may be interchangeably used for “George,” while the female role keeps her name, Dorys. Changing the scene from California to Mar del Plata doesn’t make much difference, either, for the “substance” — the romantic inn by the sea, the two lonesome souls in search of human touch — is left intact.

WHERE DO I BEGIN? The version currently showing at the Maipo stars actor-media mogul Adrián Suar, who, in spite of having all the makings of a much younger man, is now 41 and has thus officially entered middle age-dom. His partner is TV and film actress Julieta Díaz, 31.
Other than his undeniable knack for showbiz production, Suar, who started out as a matinee idol, has gone quite a long, long way from teen attractiveness to fine acting and comedic skills. Díaz, on the other hand, finds herself on familiar ground either on TV soap operas and film, even landing the role of the 1970s guerrilla leader Norma Arrostito in the documentary Norma Arrostito, la Gaby.
Pairing Suar with Díaz was a wise choice, for the chemistry between the two performers is apparent in every scene, complementing one another and filling in for the other when s/he fails to rise to the occasion. El año que viene a la misma hora was evidently a cherished project of Suar, who also calls the shots in the field of mainstream theatre.
As an actor, Suar has proved beyond reasonable doubt that he is a fine comedian. Case in point: the charming, befuddled husband he played in last year’s box office hit Un novio para mi mujer. But the asymmetries between the screen, big or small, and the awe-inspiring theatre stage are hard to cope with — TV or film performers may rely on facial gestures, however minimalist, or just on a simple gaze. On the stage, the language of acting relies heavily on bodily movement, for the actors’ lines and movements must be clearly heard, seen and understood from the front to the back rows.
The stage design in this production of Same Time, Next Year (Jorge Ferrari) is almost static, exposing the two characters’ isolation unto themselves and their estrangement from the outside world, for they find this essential factor in one another.

WE’RE IN FOR A LONG, LONG RIDE. As already stated, the adaptation problem here is not the Porteñización of setting and language, and the thirty-year’s temporal shift.
    As for Mulligan’s movie, almost anyone over the age of 40 has sweetly melancholy memories of it.
The temporal shift in Same Time, Next Year / El año que viene a la misma hora is conveyed, in both movie and stage versions, by vignettes and photographs of, respectively, the US civil rights movements, the Flower Power, Vietnam, Watergate (Mulligan’s narrative starts in 1951 and concludes in 1973); and the local flavour of sports heroes, government leaders and dictators, beloved films, all moving in a loop through thirty years of Argentine history. The images, far from moving at snail pace, have viewers jump into a mäelstrom of things past — close in time, far away in the recesses of memory.
As any D.A. expert, semiologist or discerning viewer will tell you, no choice is “innocent,” nothing happens by chance, there’s always a well thought-out reason for everything.
Mr. Suar makes a point of this, freezing the loop on President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, about the only colour photograph in the whole parade. True, the image does not freeze on Ms. Kirchner’s likeness, but it presumably stays a bit, just a bit, longer for a persistent visual effect.
Much as producers may insist on chance and choice, there’s a clear political statement and commentary here — likeable to some, hard to palate to others. At any rate, an obtrusive element in the brief-long socio-political span which, after all, is about history and memory, not about the present, which Ms. Kirchner clearly stands for.
This is called interference.

THE WAY WE WERE. One of the main attractions of the Robert Mulligan film was Marvin Hamlish’s romantic music, the soundtrack to a love story that withstood the passing of time. George and Dorys reunite once a year for a couple of days, of hours, of minutes, but they couldn’t have been any happier had they been able to marry, author Slade seems to be telling his audience.Indeed, the film he scripted and Mulligan directed, viewed today,  flows by like a breeze.
Carnevale-Martin’s version of El año que viene a la misma hora is laden with the kind of irritating fillers that stretch the play to nearly two interminable hours.
The jokes and gags in this El año que viene a la misma hora, whether carefully adaptated from the originally or developed from scratch to suit temporal and geographical transformations, do not quite work the way they were intended to.
What really matters here, the end product, is miles away from the beloved memories we held about George and Dorys, who felt neither guilty nor culpable of infidelity. This is not the feeling conveyed by this overlong, overstretched, slow-paced production. The actors are not entirely to blame, for they deliver their lines in a rather adequate fashion, and do their best to give this version some measure of credibility.
It is simply that transitions, transpositions and other ways of moving between genres do not always work. Suar and Díaz are both television, cinema, and overall showbiz stars, and this fact alone will suffice to draw audiences in search of romantic comedy/drama.
El año que viene a la misma hora will be — already is — a box office hit, and will continue to be so if it makes another transition: to the summer resort of Mar del Plata, where the action takes place, and where star-gazing has always been a national sport.