Ellen Wolf: "In my play, 'Elsa,' what happens is recorded for future generations-"

A very playful cat is at our feet, purring and glancing at us as if it were rehearsing, as if it knew that this interview is about acting. "She gets especially tender in winter," says Ellen, with a wholesome laugh. The reporter laughs and then goes straight to the point.
"So you are the actress Ellen Wolf?"
"That’s right."
"Wolf, not dog!"
"Wolf."

English is like that, a language filled with puns. And Ellen speaks it perfectly, although German was her native tongue.

"You`re looking quite pink for your 80 some...exactly how old are you, if I may ask?"
"I’ll be 82 in December."
"I don’t suppose you’ve been acting for that long!"
"No...actually I started acting in English. It must have been about ten years ago. Funny...but a great experience. I remember once during a class I had to go on stage and do something without talking. No words! Imagine! You can act without words, I thought1"
"As if you were a child..."
"When I was a small child I loved to ’act.’ Maybe that’s why I like it so much now! "
"You never studied acting at school?"
"Not really. I mean at high school there was supposed to be a Christmas play and they wanted me to play an angel. Imagine: me an angel! In a white dress and all! Can you imagine that? I was afraid to tell people that I was going to be an angle in a play, so I just never told them...and I didn’t..well, that was my childhood acting experience, although I did do a bit of singing. Never on stage, though. Furthermore, I became alergic to smoke and at that time smoking was the thing."
"So a long time went by before you took up acting."
"Yes. I don’t know how old I was exactly, must have been 10 or 15 years ago, in English. The first thing I did was a short play by Harold Pinter, called "Trouble in the Works." Then I did other things in English until 2000, when I took a course offered by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I was a bit hesitant about attending, but somebody said: "go ahead!" so I made up my mind and there I was amid all of these English speakers and they suggested I do something more professional than a Saturday workshop in English. That’s how I ended up doing theater in Spanish, a play by Jean Anouilh!"
"Do you find it more difficult to act in English or in Spanish?"
"I don’t know because I don’t act in English anymore, but to tell you the truth I never thought I could do so in Spanish, I mean, that I could play a typical Argentine, me with my German accent! I’d love to act in German, and, in fact, the play I am now doing, Elsa, is based on an interview I had with with a German journalist, about what happened to one of my daughters during the 1976 Dictatorship. That was the raw material for the script. At one point it seemed we were going to do the play in Europe but we ended up doing it in Spanish, here in Buenos Aires. The journalist showed the interview she did with me to a playwrite and that’s how the script was born--in Spanish.It was produced by the Goethe Institute."
"So would you say that "Elsa" is an example of what is called ’biodrama’?"
"Actually, there is a bit of confusion concerning that term. Biodrama is the staging of what happens to people in real life. In Elsa what happens is recorded for future generations, so it is more like a fantasy based on my experience: what happens on stage is not what really happened but about what happened in putting the play together."
"You mean that reality was but the starting point?"
"You might say that."
"The use of video on the stage is an interesting innovation because when you see the actors on the screen a different dimension seems to appear."
"Well, I couldn’t say much about that because I can’t see myself acting, much less on the screen...At first I found it difficult to look straight at the camera because I learned in casting that you aren’t supposed to do that!"
"Is it true that there is an ongoing interest in Germany concerning subjects related to repression and fascism?"
"That’s true but it is curious because I feel that here in Argentina people seem to be loosing interest in what happened under the dictatorship. Anyway, our play brings an optimistic note into the question. From the artistic point of view the danger is to do something too journalistic. Art projects in another direction. We were very fortunate because our director is not only great but she knows how to make actors have fun even when the subject is as tragic as it is in Elsa."
"It looks like theater has gotten into your blood."
"It sure has! People often ask me how I feel acting out my own tragic experience and I answer them saying, ’feel? I’m acting!’ In another play I did, the "Coleman Family," I was dying all the time. But you know what? I had great fun listening to the other actors talk about my death! Maybe I am less afraid of dying than most people or maybe it is just because I have come to understand what acting is about."
"Perhaps the creativity in acting constitutes an ongoing learning experience."
"That’s right. But you sometimes get the feeling that you can’t learn too much from real life because you can’t play with reality."
"Do you strictly follow a script in ’Elsa?’"
"Yes, there is a script but I sometimes change a few words. The thing is that it is based on a translation from German and there are some expressions which I don’t feel comfortable with so I sometimes substitute one word for another. I liked the original German very much. For me something was lost in the translation. When I first saw it I thought: this is horrible! But then I got used to it.

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