A true story does not stay intact.
Buenos Aires, February 2026.
A second season usually signals success, but in Una sombra voraz the return feels closer to a reopening of a wound than to a victory lap. Mariano Pensotti and Grupo Marea bring the piece back to Dumont 4040 with a schedule that reads like a calm invitation, Saturday evenings, and later, weekend doubles. The work itself is anything but calm. It is built around a disturbing question that contemporary culture keeps avoiding while feeding on it: what happens when an experience becomes material, then representation, then brand, and finally a public commodity that no longer belongs to the person who lived it.
The plot begins in the thin air of a mountain, but the real altitude is moral. Julián Vidal is an alpinist defined by an absence, his father disappeared on Annapurna in 1989, leaving behind a myth that hardens into identity. Years later, in 2017, Vidal attempts the climb that swallowed his father. Something unexpected happens, and the event turns him into a story that others want to own. The mountain becomes less important than the narrative economy around it, the interviews, the fascination with risk, the appetite for tragedy framed as achievement, the public desire to consume a life in a digestible arc.
Then comes the second layer of extraction. In 2021, a film recreates Vidal’s story, and an actor, Manuel Rojas, embodies him on screen. The stage work places Vidal and the actor in the same space and forces the audience to watch the collision between lived experience and performed experience. Vidal speaks as someone trying to hold onto the truth of his own past. Rojas speaks as someone whose career, self image, and emotional life are altered by borrowing that past as a role. The piece constantly shifts perspective, not as a clever device, but as a warning: the “real” and the “fictionalized” do not simply differ, they contaminate each other until both are changed.
Pensotti has described the structure as a false biodrama, and that label is key. A biodrama usually trades on authenticity, inviting the audience to believe that the stage is offering access to something unfiltered. Here the promise is deliberately unstable. The work shows the collateral effects of narrating and representing personal experience, including the seduction of coherence. Once a story is staged, filmed, edited, reviewed, and applauded, it starts to behave like property. It demands a hero, a turning point, a moral, a closure. Reality rarely provides those clean shapes, but the market for stories insists on them. The piece asks, without pleading, whether the price of being “understood” is being reshaped.
Climate change appears as a conceptual trigger rather than a sermon. The play’s origin is tied to reports of long lost climbers’ bodies being revealed as ice retreats, an image that is both literal and symbolic. Warming uncovers what was hidden, but exposure is not the same as truth. A body found is not a life explained. In the same way, a narrative told is not an experience resolved. The mountain, and the warming that changes it, become a mechanism for thinking about what resurfaces when time and nature stop protecting our secrets. The piece avoids easy eco messaging, using the climate element to highlight something colder: what emerges can be turned into spectacle the moment it becomes visible.
The casting intensifies the duality rather than smoothing it. Diego Velázquez and Patricio Aramburu carry the work as a two headed mirror, one face anchored in testimony, the other in interpretation. Their presence allows the play to stage an argument that is usually invisible in cultural products. The person who lived the story and the person who performs it often become entangled in a relationship that is intimate, unequal, and strangely transactional. The performer needs the story to be convincing. The subject needs the portrayal to be faithful, or at least not predatory. Both risk becoming trapped in the version that sells.
The return for a second season also matters for what it says about local theatre ecology. It is presented as a notable local premiere cycle for the company after years away from the independent circuit, arriving after the success of Los años in the Martín Coronado hall at Teatro San Martín. That trajectory positions the work at an intersection of scales, intimate performance with international circulation. Its earlier life in a French version at Festival d’Avignon in 2024 and a German language version in Vienna in 2025 signals a different type of legitimacy, not just cultural prestige, but portability. The play travels because the problem it dissects is no longer local. The global audience increasingly lives inside representations of itself, mediated by screens, profiles, interviews, and curated confessions.
What gives the piece bite is that it does not flatter the audience. It suggests that spectatorship is never innocent. The public wants the real, but it wants the real shaped into entertainment. It wants intimacy without responsibility. It wants the raw story, but only in forms that can be shared, rated, and consumed without lingering discomfort. In that sense, the play’s title lands as more than poetic. The shadow is voracious because representation feeds, it feeds on pain, on risk, on private history, on the unresolved. And once it feeds, it grows. The subject becomes smaller inside the story about the subject.
A second season, then, is not just a calendar update. It is proof that the cultural machine recognizes itself onstage and still leans in. The play does not offer a verdict, and that restraint is part of its power. Instead, it leaves a tension hanging in the air: if telling your story can change your life, what happens when other people’s telling changes it more than your own.
Phoenix24: periodismo sin fronteras. / Phoenix24: journalism without borders.