For about a year or so, my days have been becoming shorter and shorter. Last year, during a therapy session, I said that every day was turning into a Sunday. Not because of its quietness or late rising, but because of that sensation of transition, a pendulum movement where nothing actually happens, but I am always expecting something to happen.
It is hard to say it, but I am becoming a spectator of my own life.
Confronted by less writing, less reading, more cellphone time, and no exercise, I received an invitation to cover Manual de Autoayuda (Self-Help Manual), a Chilean production coming to IATI Theater for three performances: tonight, Thursday, August 13, at 7:00 p.m.; Friday, August 14, at 7:00 p.m.; and Saturday, August 15, at 3:00 p.m. Performances take place at IATI Theater, 64 E. 4th St., New York, NY. Tickets are $20, and the sixty-minute production is performed in Spanish with English supertitles.
I accepted the invitation to write about the play. But I didn’t decide then whether I would interview its creator, director, and performer, Nicolás Venegas, or simply write an article about it.
I wanted to write the article last week, but my hesitation—and that Sunday mentality that drags my days—made me put off the day of writing it.
Even without having seen the play, I knew that Manual de Autoayuda was a critique of the culture of self-help. The production begins with a performer confessing his inability to be happy and turning to self-help books, coaching, and other strategies that promise to overcome dissatisfaction. Through theater, performance, autofiction, audiovisual media, and dark comedy, the play questions the contemporary pursuit of happiness and whether happiness can even exist as a permanent state.
In an interview for Medios Rojos, Nicolás Venegas said that the play is a reflection about the meaning of happiness in a society that understands happiness as a consumer good.
I don’t know what happiness means.
What I feel right now is that my existence is shrinking.
I believe in a self that does things: swimming at Brighton Beach during the summer, having coffee while reading a book, writing a poem, going to court as a lawyer. Maybe that consumerist ideology is so ingrained in my brain that I just can’t see it. It’s not that I’m not happy. It is that I feel I am losing myself.
Is this happiness?
Well, Nicolás, you have already achieved your objective. I’m here thinking about it.
But the play is more than that. Nicolás, as a performer, becomes a kind of coach who invites audience participation, asking people to share their experiences of trying to find themselves and find happiness. Participation is voluntary, according to the production, but it is incorporated throughout the performance.
I myself have looked into coaching. I watch reels that give advice and suggest body exercises, although I haven’t read a self-help book in decades.
So I imagine myself sitting there tonight and sharing what I’m doing right now to get out of the hole.
“AI,” I would say.
This is what I’m doing. I report to AI my tasks and my projects and ask it to allocate appropriate time for them. This article, for example, was supposed to be written in an hour, and as I write this sentence, I don’t think I can finish it in the three minutes I have left.
For me, the push, the time constraint, helps. It pushes me.
But how would telling all of that help others? Would they laugh about it? Or, on the contrary, would the whole play transform into one big therapy session where the way you achieve happiness is not as important as the way you tell the story of trying to achieve it?
That is probably part of what Nicolás is doing by incorporating elements of his own biography into the play. Manual de Autoayuda uses autofiction to move between the deeply personal and the political. It was developed during a 2023 artistic residency at Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral (GAM), premiered in 2024 at Teatro del Puente, and has since been presented in Chile and Argentina. Now, for three performances, that conversation comes to New York.
Well, I’m going there tonight.
I may not be cured. I don’t expect to be.
But at least I moved forward. I wrote this article. I will leave my apartment. I will go to the theater. And maybe someone there will listen to the story I have now with AI and how I pretend, through these small acts, to leave a fingerprint—even though it may be only a fingerprint on the sand that eventually will blow away.
Manual de Autoayuda (Self-Help Manual)
Thursday, August 13, 7:00 p.m.
Friday, August 14, 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, August 15, 3:00 p.m.
IATI Theater
64 E. 4th St., New York, NY
Running time: 60 minutes
Spanish with English supertitles
General admission: $20
