Interview with Maritza Nuñez

Past Wednesday, we had an invited poet, Maritza Nuñez, come over and give a sort of discussion about herself as an author, her inspirations, and about a monologue she wrote about poet Gabriela Mistral.




This monologue "Niña de cera" (translation: "Girl of wax") had become so popular that actually throughout many places in the Eastern Hemisphere of the world plays and an opera would be made out of it. It was so popular, so well done and even including music (depending on director's visions) that it attracted people from Finland and Japan to play it.



Anyway... here is a bit of the talk we had from her, some of the annotations I could make of some questions made by us students:



1 Q: What made you write theatre?



1 A: She began in poetry, until one day she actually "saw the characters doing something more than talking, they were doing actions". She likes the monologue kind of writing because it is a challange to her. In the monologue one has to really analyse a character's psychology.



2 Q: Which is the reason why you have chosen this particular character?



2 A: Gabriela Mistral was a poet, she had written two plays and 1 play. Her mother would actually read some poems to her while she was little, as she was afraid of the darkness, so she could go to sleep.



3 Q: Why make a unipersonal play?



3 A: She likes making this kind of monologues, the one before the death, in order to confirm more facts known.



4 Q: In the monologue "Niña de cera", who is Doris?



4 A: She was a literary agent. She was also Gabriela's lover, as Gabriela had a double sexuality. It seemed normal to Ms Nuñez as she has always liked to make character's fight for their right of liberty. Quoting her: "It is not a right, but a duty of human being to seek their own liberty."



5 Q: If Gabriela Mistral would read this monologue, would you think that she would change or erase any part of it?



5 A: She says that Gabriela would probably invent something from which she could get inspired to create a second monologue, very different to the first. Every author/writer is very attached to fiction in their lives, at times more of what they would want life to be like than what it actually was.



I pretty much liked the whole interview and discussion with her, because she seemed honest and nice. But at times I keep wondering does she really had liked this play so much because it was a sort of best-seller or because she really loved the character that inspired her?