Refurbishing a former Buenos Aires sparkplug factory into the Picadero Theatre, they premiered their first festival on July 28, 1981, featuring Cossa's Gris de ausencia ("Pale of Absence") among the evening's repertoire. Playwright Osvaldo Dragún seized the opportunity to organize an Teatro Abierto ("Open Theatre") movement, calling on Cossa and fellow playwrights Luis Brandoni, Jorge Rivera López and Pepe Soriano, as well as receiving support from prominent intellectuals such as Nobel laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and writer Ernesto Sábato. The climate of repression that prevailed in Argentina during its last dictatorship eased somewhat in 1980 as General Jorge Videla prepared to transfer power to General Roberto Viola, an advocate for increased, if limited, artistic freedom. La nona, is still revived in Buenos Aires and elsewhere and was adapted into a film version in 1979. His most successful play, La nona represented a turn towards the grotesque in which the protagonist, a hundred-year-old Italian Argentine grandmother, burdens her working-class family with her senile dementia and ravenous appetite. One exception to this was his play El avión negro ("The Black Plane", 1970), a commentary on exiled populist leader Juan Perón's 1964 attempt to return to Argentina.įollowing a fallow creative period, Cossa premiered La nona ("Grandma") in 1977. Contributing to the cultural sections of mainstream Argentine newsdailies such as Clarín, La Opinión and La Nación between 19, Cossa avoided direct political references in his work. The Neo-realist work earned him many Argentinian drama prizes. Cossa produced his first play, Nuestro fín de semana ("Our Weekend") in 1964. An admirer of Fidel Castro, he worked secretly as a local correspondent for Cuba's state-owned press agency, Prensa Latina, between 19. He first acted in the theatre at the age of 17 and, in 1957, he and friends founded the San Isidro Independent Theatre. Roberto Cossa was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in the quiet residential borough of Villa del Parque.
Roberto Cossa (born November 30, 1934) is a prominent Argentinian playwright and theatre director.