Although I was close to him on several occasions during his prolific professional career, I never had the opportunity to interview him. I think the last time I saw it was in November 2021 when, in the context of the Italian Culture Week in Cuba, the halls of the Castle of Elsinore, vibrated again with the premiere of the performance great glasseconceived by italian playwright Giulia Zacchini and directed by Alexis Díaz de Villegas.
That day I told him I wanted to interview him but he told me to wait until the theatrical performance was over. In the end he seemed very happy and already in the collective euphoria of that beautiful day at the University of the Arts (ISA) I did not have another moment alone with him.
During that week, Zacchini and Díaz de Villegas had given a workshop to theater students and musicians who had graduated from the University, the results of which materialized in the performance, that gave back the soul and spirituality to the School of Dramatic Arts, conceived by the Venetian architect Roberto Gottardi.
ACCOUNT OF A THEATRICAL LIFE
As the playwright Norge Espinosa Mendoza remembers, on his Facebook profile, Alexis appears in the original cast of the fourth wall, a piece by Víctor Varela premiered in 1988, and that shook the Cuban cultural scene at that time. With this director and Obstacle Theater it is presented in Cuba and abroad. He adds to the history montages of him as blind opera, Sigismund former Marquis Y The ark.
After his contact with Vicente Revuelta -warns Espinosa- he premieres the track, by Virgilio Piñera, a show to which he returned on several occasions. In 1998 she joined Argos Teatro, founded by Carlos Celdrán, where he shone in performances such as: Good Soul of Se Chuán, Miss Julia, Stockman: An Enemy of the PeopleY Life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
It was in the former Trianón cinema where under the aegis of the great Carlos Díaz he made his debut in pieces such as SeagullThe popular Celestine, icaros, Phaedra and the unforgettable character of Caligula. And as a good disciple of his teachers, he became a teacher at ISA and created his Impulso Teatro project that became a great school.
His characters remain in the collective memory for the seventh art in films such as: between cyclones, kangamba, The horn of plenty and the irreverent Juan of the Dead. We also saw it to a lesser extent on television, in some dramatized spaces such as stories and crime stories.
About the actor, the Rubén Darío Salazar National Theater Award published on his Facebook profile:
“(…) Alexis Díaz de Villegas or El Majá, as we theatergoers affectionately called him, always advanced towards his final destination. Today that he has arrived, those of us who admire and applaud him, feel a deep loss and a pain without cure and without consolation. He only serves us, like a momentary balm, everything that he delivered to the stage with such passion and so well”.
As an immense actor, teacher, stage brother, friend, they describe him on the page of the Argos Teatro group and he adds: “We don’t want to say that we are in mourning, because the Theater was always his party”.
For his part, the playwright Roberto Viña Martínez, professor of Theater History at ISA, points out on his Facebook profile that the actor who played Juan de Miss Julia, which earned him a Male Performance Award at the 2002 Camagüey Theater Festival, and Juan, el de los Muertos. He highlights that Alexis came to be considered one of the most relevant and versatile artists in Cuban culture.
Due to the many twists and turns that life takes, in my capacity as a journalist and, at that time, a specialist in Public Relations at the Vicente Revuelta Cultural Center, I witnessed, in 2015, the first stagings of his group Impulso Teatro, in the Llauradó room where the Poor BB’s Ballad It was coming to life with costumes that once belonged to the teacher Raquel.
Today, as in an eternal spiral that is recycled, his spirit flies high from the Casona de Línea where his workers say goodbye with tears but with great gratitude for all the good he bequeathed to the Cuban theater with his voice that seemed to make the scene resound to give us great moments that we will never forget.