The desire to create autonomous theatre in Argentina led to a new form, the ‘creole-grotesque’. As in the teatro gauchesco, the urban sainetes and the work of Florencio Sánchez, the main conflict in the creole-grotesque is between the individual and society. The form arose out of the work of two Argentine playwrights – Francisco Defilippis Novoa and Armando Discépolo. Both were influenced by a mixture of anarchist thought and the promise of Christian mercy. Their definition of the ‘grotesque’ can be described as the discrepancy between a character’s inner self and his outer mask. The dramatists heightened this tension by calling for exaggerated sets, lighting, costumes, and makeup, and by the use of deforming mirrors and masks. Nevertheless, both writers encouraged ways of overcoming ‘grotesque’ human traits: Discépolo called on society to reject hypocrisy and to show greater compassion for the struggling individual, particularly the immigrant; while, in contrast, Defilippis Novoa suggested that redemption was in the hands of the individual and could only be achieved by accepting God. His Christian fable, I Have Seen God (He Visto a Dios, 1930), which illustrates this hope, is the story of a cruel and dishonest pawnbroker, Carmelo, who loses the one thing he loves, his son Chico. Carmelo gets drunk and is tricked by his assistant, Victorio, disguised as a vision of God, into handing over his money. When Chico’s pregnant girlfriend also attempts to rob him, Carmelo’s Bible-selling tenant intervenes to save him: sober again, Carmelo forgives all, gives away his business and leaves to find God in himself.
Discépolo and Defilippis Novoa have had a significant influence on Griselda Gambaro’s work. This period of Argentine theatre also produced a precursor for, if not a direct influence on, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, in the form of the playwright and novelist Roberto Arlt. Arlt was inspired by literary works like Don Quijote and by the paintings of Goya, Brueghel and Dürer. In plays such as Saverio the Cruel (Saverio el cruel, 1935) and The Desert Island (La Isla Desierta, 1937) conventional reality is combined with the world of dreams – dimensions which are similarly interwoven in Mistress of Desires and Orchids in the Moonlight.
1940-1959
During this period there was a temporary lull in the debate among Latin American theatre practitioners about whether or not a truly national drama should reject European cultural influences. The Cuban writer Fernando Ortiz suggested that ideas borrowed from another culture set off a complex process of ‘transculturation’, leading to the creation of entirely new cultural phenomena: such a view made the question of influences largely redundant. At the same time there was a growing awareness of the need for better financed theatre companies and for training. Governments throughout the region responded by setting up drama colleges and national theatres and by funding independent groups. The Cuban Academia de Artes Dramáticas was founded in 1941 to provide actor training, and in 1949 Havana University set up the Teatro Experimental to encourage the development of national playwrights through an awareness of international theatre traditions. In Mexico, many new theatre companies were formed in the 1940s. The Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes was created in 1947 to train actors, maintain repertory theatres and organise annual drama festivals. Meanwhile, two important new institutions were established in Peru: a national theatre company, the Compañía Nacional de Comedias, and a national drama college, the Escuela Nacional de Arte Escénica.
In this supportive environment play-writing thrived. In Mexico, actor, translator, producer, teacher and playwright Rodolfo Usigli emerged as the bright new star of the national theatre. Although his plays are deeply Mexican in their passionately critical exploration of the national psyche, Usigli admired European dramatists and ‘acculturated’ some of their formal techniques, especially those of his friend George Bernard Shaw. Usigli’s best-known play is The Impostor (El Gesticulador, 1947), a complex satire of social hypocrisy and deception revolving around a history professor who distorts Mexican history for his own political ends. The play caused a scandal when it was published, provoking a cabinet crisis, and it remained unproduced for ten years. Since then, it has been performed regularly and successfully throughout the Americas and Europe. Usigli’s influence on Mexican theatre is difficult to over-estimate. His plays showed audiences how Latin America represented the ‘Other’ to Europe’s ‘Self’. Playwright Luisa Josefina Hernández whose profound characterisations and unusual story-telling talent is best shown in the collection of dialogues called Big Deal Street (La Calle de la Gran Ocasión, 1962), acknowledges him as her mentor.
In Argentina, the search for a national drama remained intense, as shown in the plays of Osvaldo Dragún, a leading writer of ‘autonomous theatre’ of this period. Like Usigli, he sought to expose the hypocrisy of politicians and the middle classes. He was deeply concerned with the social injustices that Peronism had failed to address. The political content of Dragún’s work is well illustrated in The Plague Comes from Melos (La Peste Viene de Melos, 1956), which, though set in Ancient Greece, is an implicit critique of the USA for the way its ostensibly anti-Communist foreign policies masked darker imperialist ambitions. It had particular resonance in the wake of the CIA-backed coup which overthrew Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Dragún also experimented with formal techniques: in Stories to Be Told (Historias para ser contados, 1957) he used songs, dialogue and mime in a succession of one-act plays to explore the dehumanising effects of materialism. During successful productions in the USA and Europe, critics compared him to Brecht and his theatre conventions to the commedia del arte; but Dragún’s work is essentially Argentine, rooted in the urban sainete and the creole-grotesque.
Another playwright who used classical settings to explore local reality was Virgilio Piñera. He vividly exposed the fear behind Cuba’s cheerful facade. His first work, Electra Garrigó (1948), was an absurdist parody of Sophocles’ Electra, reinterpreted in a vein of black humour. A flavour of Piñera’s wit can be gained from a summary of the plot of Jesús (1950) in which a barber named Jesus Barcia, son of Joseph and Mary, is rumoured to be the Messiah, despite his protestations to the contrary, and is eventually stabbed to death for refusing to work miracles. (Both the grotesque humour and the hairdresser’s setting are echoed in this volume in Gambaro’s Saying Yes.)
Peru emerged from 50 years of theatrical stagnation in these years with some fine new playwrights. Sebastián Salazar Bondy wrote with nationalist intent and met with international acclaim. He experimented with forms ranging from satirical farce, as in Love, the Great Labyrinth (Amor, gran laberinto, 1947), to historical drama, with Flora Tristrán (1958). Salazar Bondy was also a noted poet, and shared with many Latin American dramatists since Sor Juana the ability to combine theatrical work with poetry and prose fiction. Such creative breadth is of special relevance to our understanding of the theatre of Octavio Paz, Fuentes and Vargas Llosa, who are not generally identified primarily as playwrights.
Poet, essayist, teacher, editor, diplomat, and Nobel laureate, Paz is a central figure in contemporary Latin American literature. He was born in 1914 in Mexico City, where he grew up. He fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and moved to the USA in 1943. In 1945 he joined the Mexican diplomatic service, which led to extensive travel. In 1950, Paz shot to international literary fame with his essay on Mexican character and culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude. Five years later, he published a seminal essay on poetics, The Bow and the Lyre, and in 1956 turned his attention to an exploration of the role of poetry in the theatre. He gathered together Mexican writers and artists, including the painter Leonora Carrington, and set up the experimental theatre group Poetry Out Loud (Poesía en Alta Voz). The group rejected realism, instead defining theatre as a kind of game, and produced eight programmes of plays, ranging from Greek and Spanish classics to modern Mexican works, the most notable of which was Rappaccini’s Daughter, the only play written by Paz. Poetry Out Loud also gave Elena Garro her big career break, by producing her play The Lady on Her Balcony (La Señora en Su Balcón, 1963), a poetic and disturbing portr
ayal of an elderly woman haunted by the illusions of her past. Garro’s imaginative use of physical images to depict external realities made her a leading Mexican dramatist of the 1960s and 1970s.
The symbiosis of prose fiction and theatre is best illustrated by the work of Guatemalan-born Miguel Angel Asturias. Winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature, he is best known for his novels Mr. President and Men of Maize, and for his anthropological study of Guatemalan legends; but he also wrote four plays in which he combined fantasy and psychology, the modern and the mythical. Soluna (1955), for example, is a dream play which starts as a naturalistic drama, and is then transformed by masks, music and dance into a ritual spectacle of pre-Columbian magic.
1959-1980
These were the most fertile years thus far in Latin American theatre, marked by unprecedented achievements in both quality and volume. The number of locally written plays produced increased sharply during this period: for example, while only 40 Cuban plays were put on in Havana between 1952 and 1958, 281 were staged in 1967 alone. All over the region new playwrights were seeing their work produced and were attracting international critical and public acclaim. These plays grew out of a period of confrontation and transition. The 1959 Cuban revolution encouraged people throughout the region to believe that political transformation could overcome social inequalities, corruption, and US imperialism. The Catholic Church gave its support to social change, and Gustavo Gutierrez and his ‘theology of liberation’ inspired Paulo Freire and others to set up ‘base communities’ to transform society from the grass roots. But aspirations for a region-wide revolution died with Ché Guevara, and public expressions of political opposition were met with violence. Authoritarian governments took control in Argentina and Peru, the Cuban revolution ossified, the USA implemented neurotic anti-Communist policies, and the Vatican retreated into the ultra-conservatism of John Paul II’s papacy. Against this turbulent backdrop, the theatre often provided the only place where people could freely express their hopes for change.
José Triana ranks among the most significant writers of Latin American autonomous theatre. Triana was born in Bayamo in 1932, studied in Cuba, and was inspired by José Martí as a student. He became a friend of Virgilio Piñera, who encouraged him to publish his poems in Cuban literary magazines. Triana took an active stance against the Batista government and, following a number of failed rebellions, was forced into exile in Spain, where he became involved in the theatre, saw many plays, and started writing his own. He returned to Cuba after the revolution and, inspired by Piñera’s Electra Garrigó, completed Medea in the Mirror (Medea en el espejo, 1960), which placed classical tragedy figures in a humble Cuban setting. His fifth play, Night of the Assassins is, in social and political terms, undoubtedly the most significant work of the period. Writing started in 1957 and the play had its Havana premiere in 1965. It won the prestigious Casa de las Américas award, and was subsequently performed throughout the Americas and Europe. It is an unsettling and complex work, which elicited many interpretations: some took its 1950s setting as an attack on pre-revolutionary society under Batista, others picked up on Lalo’s last lines to argue that the play was a clarion call for the redemptive power of Love, while the Cuban Ministry of Culture interpreted the play as a direct attack on the incompetence and complacency of Fidel Castro’s government. This was indeed one of Triana’s intentions and he was to suffer dearly for it. The Ministry judged him to be “outside the revolution”, denied him the resources to stage plays like War Ceremonial (Ceremonial de Guerra, 1968-73) and Frolic on the Battle Field (Revolico en el campo de marte, 1971), and marginalised him from active cultural life. In 1980, Triana emigrated with his wife to Paris.
Another seminal writer of autonomous theatre to emerge during this period was Griselda Gambaro. Born in Buenos Aires in 1928, she worked in accounting and business until she got married and, in her words, her husband ‘emancipated’ her. She wrote her first play aged 24, since when there have been over 30 further plays, as well as several novels. Gambaro’s work paints a deformed and unnerving portrait of a tragic period in Argentine history. Starting with the military coup that ousted Perón in 1955, these years were marked by an uneasy succession of military and constitutional regimes. Perón’s return to power in 1973 was short-lived, and his death in 1974 unleashed a rash of political violence from left-wing guerrilla groups and right-wing death squads. In 1976 the ruling military junta vowed to rid the country of ‘subversion’ and instigated the ‘Dirty War’, during which the army crushed both the guerrilla movements and its civilian opponents. Gambaro herself was forced to flee to Spain after her novel Earning Death (Ganarse la Muerte, 1976) was banned as ‘subversive, amoral and harmful to the family’, and after she had received death threats. Her nightmarish portrayals of abductions in The Walls (Las Paredes, 1963) and fascist excesses in The Camp (El Campo, 1967) grimly predicted the summary executions and torture which were to ‘disappear’ an estimated 15,000 Argentines. In The Blunder (El Desatino, 1965) she exposes the passive compliance with which many accepted military repression. In later plays like Antígona Furiosa (1986) female characters take on more central roles and often take bold steps to resist patriarchal oppression. Gambaro’s work mines a human propensity to victimise others, and is directly descended from the creole-grotesque dramatists of the 1920s. Gambaro’s language is an extraordinary hybrid of Argentine slang, the encoded dialects of tyrannised people, and diverse cultural references: in her promenade play Information for Foreigners (Información para Extranjeros, 1973), for example, she seamlessly interweaves porteño jokes with a lullaby from Lorca’s Blood Wedding, an account of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on the human capacity for violence, and extracts from Othello.
A very different form of autonomous theatre to have a big impact between 1960 and 1980 was ‘New Theatre’. Pioneered by Enrique Buenaventura’s Teatro Experimental de Cali in Colombia, and rooted in the base groups of liberation theology and a version of Brechtian epic theatre, New Theatre’s ideological objective was to create a radical alternative to ‘bourgeois’ drama. New Theatre was to be based on five principles. First, it would be the product of collective work rather than the imagination of an individual author; although there would be one overseeing director, an egalitarian structure would be established so that every participant would be simultaneously actor, writer, researcher and technician. Second, New Theatre would perform theatre for, and to, communities unfamiliar with the theatre. Third, whereas the messages of bourgeois theatre were passively received by the public, the audiences of New Theatre would be invited to participate actively in the performances; in this way, a play would be rewritten at each performance. Fourth, New Theatre would seek to transform reality not just to interpret it, not to preach ideas but to set up dialectical situations and then engage audiences in debating them. Fifth and finally, whereas bourgeois drama valued the cultured, the eternal and the universal, New Theatre sought the immediate and the popular: plays would use local colour, language and music, and would be a theatre of theatricality rather than of staged literary texts.
These principles were rigorously applied by Cuba’s Teatro Escambray, set up by director Sergio Corrieri in 1968 as ‘an effective weapon at the service of the Revolution’. The production of The Judgment (El Juicio, 1973) was inspired by a real-life counter-revolutionary insurrection in a small mountain community where the group had settled. Interview data was collected from the area, with questions concentrated on how society should treat an individual opposed to the revolution. Corrieri then developed a script with the actors through improvisations. The actual performance was in the form of a trial, with the audience seated in a semi-circle. Before the start of the show, six members of the audience were chosen as a ‘jury’ and came on stage to listen to witnesses and to ‘judge’ a man accused of counter-revolutionary activities. After the hearing, the ‘jury’ met backstage to decide his fate and deliver its ‘verdict’.
There have been numerous variations of New
Theatre, the most notable by the Brazilian Augusto Boal and the Nicaraguan Alan Bolt. But New Theatre and ‘collective creation’ techniques have been attacked on many grounds. A common criticism (and one which Mario Vargas Llosa voices in his interview in this volume) is that neglect of the text produces an ephemerality in the work that impoverishes the theatre. A second criticism has been that egalitarianism within groups rarely existed, since the ‘power’ that was wrested from the writer was merely transferred to the director. Alienation from the community/ audience was a further problem, in that most of the dramatised situations were chosen and set up by groups with their own agendas in mind. Such criticisms significantly weakened the New Theatre movement during the 1980s.
Latin American Plays Page 2