“I guess you all signed up for the classes because you consider yourselves to be social misfits, right?” This is how the extravagant teacher who stars in this comic introduces himself to the ten students who make up his peculiar theatrical group. Lonely and strange characters. Through them, Nick Drnaso brilliantly portrays the alienation of our time. Acting class (Salamandra Graphic) is published in Spanish, with a translation by Carlos Mayor, and in Catalan, with the title of Taller d’interpretació (Finestres) and translation by Montserrat Meneses Vilar.
Drnaso proposes an ambitious, courageous and absolutely contemporary work, open to many readings due to its ability to suggest, which makes it both intriguing and inexhaustible in its possible interpretations. It is not an easy read, but in return it is a difficult book to forget because a part of reading it stays installed within us as only happens with works of great depth. And this is it. With all its strangeness. With its hieratic vignettes in brown colors that parade throughout 267 pages of slow and slow cadence.
The theater is a game of mirrors and the amateur actors of Acting Class play the role of being us. The stage is a metaphor for our world. It embodies today’s United States, post-Donald Trump America, with its paranoia, its contradictions and its obscurantism; but he also and by extension personifies our society and our time, no matter where we live. The isolation, loneliness and fears of these characters are ours. The farce of this theater reveals the real world to us with stark frankness.
With this his third comic, Nick Drnaso confirms himself as a very personal voice within the graphic novel, a style that stems from clear influences such as Chris Ware, Seth or even Daniel Clowes or Adrian Tomine. But also from filmmakers like David Lynch. From these references, Drnaso has known how to take his own path and this Acting Class becomes part of the titles that certify the thematic and formal ambition of the contemporary graphic novel.
It is a huge challenge to transfer to comics something that is initially as far removed from the medium as a theatrical rehearsal, with a stripped environment and characters talking nonstop. In Acting Class there are many vignettes with an almost unchanged drawing, which produce a paradoxical effect of non-acting, of non-interpretation, because the characters barely gesticulate and many vignettes resemble each other to the point of being confused. Drnaso seems to want to make a comic against comic conventions because he knows that only by playing with the limits of his language from within is it possible to expand the expressive richness of the comic.
To all this we must add other daring narratives such as the passage from reality to theatrical fiction with jumps from the stage without prior notice that help to blur the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined, immersing the story in a nebula that hypnotizes us. The same goes for the characters, drawn with a constant and flat line like their lives, so schematic at times that we run the risk of confusing them. No matter. Because what is substantial is the amalgam produced by the whole, like that amalgam suggested by the very cover of this album where eleven characters become a crowd, that is, a world. Our.
