Norman Briski directs Eduardo Pavlovsky in "Solo Brumas," nothing but mist.

Not too many laughs were heard during last Friday’s performance of Argentine actor, director, playwrite and pyscho-drama reseacher Eduardo Pavlovsky’s "Solo Brumas." The irony was perhaps too heavy, the characters too robot-like, the message too buried in the mist, the subliminal text too dense, the air too charged with a sort of collective feeling of guilt. Those mute witnesses of Argentina’s underbelly, the dead babies, pushed mechanically on stage, pronounced dead as one might a fallen leaf, certainly were the ghost protagonists. To clear up any doubt on that point, the program includes a news article of June 9, 2008 (Crítica) which mentions an official norm under which babies born with a weight of under 500 grams are described as dead.

The three lead characters--Pavlovsky, Susi Evans and Mirta Bogdasarian--move about and exchange morbid notions of life, love and aching bones and their actions are decidely without any particular significance. As if to say their lives are meaningless, as if to say society has lost its heart, as if to say that we somehow have lost the ability to communicate with one another. In a final moment of dense emotion Pavlovsky seems to turn into a teacher-preacher-monk-linguist and admonishes us on the need to throw out our old useless language and invent a new one.

Would a new language help us cease being socially blind to things such as the death of infants, who could be saved if men and women and the society in which they live had an ounce or too of good old fashioned social consciousness?

Those readers who happen to be in Buenos Aires might want to drop by the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, Avenida Corrientes 1543, where the show is on stage Friday’s at 9 p.m. Phone: [phone]  web: http://centrocultural.coop