Latin American Plays

by Sebastian Doggart

  The ‘boom’ in Latin American novels during this period gave new impetus to the cross-fertilisation between theatre and other literary genres. Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967, was the first of a series of worldwide successes for novelists like Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. It sent shock-waves throughout Latin American culture, which had shown itself capable of competing independently on a world stage. ‘Magic realism’ managed to touch nerves that were both universal and specifically Latin American, and became an inspiration for painters and film-makers. Theatrical adaptations of novels and short stories were produced throughout the region, as playwrights and directors sought to appropriate the language, images and structures of prose fiction.

  Poetry continued to influence the theatre, often through the collective-creation methods applied by the New Theatre groups. Experimental and university groups used techniques ranging from ballet to Stanislavski’s system to devise adaptations of works by popular Latin American poets like Gabriela Mistral and Nicolas Guillén. This was also the time when poet Pablo Neruda’s only play The Gleam and Death of Joaquín Murieta (El Fulgor y Muerte de Joaquín Murieta, 1966) was first produced. It tells the story of a Chilean folk hero who travels to California in the late 19th-century Gold Rush. The ‘Yankees’ mistreat Joaquín in the mines and rape and murder his beloved wife, Teresa. Joaquín becomes a bandit and with his gang steals the Yankees’ gold. Joaquín is ambushed and shot when he visits Teresa’s grave. The Yankees then charge the public a fee to gaze at his decapitated body. This story is told in six scenes through a mixture of verse narration, choral interludes, prose dialogue, and song. Joaquín only appears once in the play, after his death, when his head begs Pablo Neruda to sing for him. In his preface, Neruda says: ‘This is a tragedy, but it is also partly written as a joke. It seeks to be a melodrama, an opera and a pantomime.’ Neruda says the inspiration for the play was a funeral scene he saw in a Noh play, adding: ‘I never had any idea what that Japanese play was about. I hope the same thing happens to the audience of this tragedy.’

  1980-1996

  Most of Latin America embraced liberal democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, and by 1996 only Cuba remained outside this political fold. Some theatre practitioners could not cope with the new pluralism after years of rigid regulation. Those who had harboured hopes of popular revolutions despaired as socialism crumbled in Eastern Europe. Other dramatists used the changes and actively supported democratisation, usually by turning theatrical spotlights onto the horrors of past military dictatorships, a trend exemplified in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (La Muerte y La Doncella, 1991), a film version of which was directed by Roman Polanski in 1994.

  Thematic concerns shifted with the times. Issues such as class conflict, military oppression, revolution, and US imperialism no longer excited dramatists as they had done in the 1960s and 1970s. The focus moved from the socio-political to the inter-personal, concentrating on themes of sexuality, gender, personal identity, and the influence of the mass media, as reflected in the plays by Fuentes and Vargas Llosa in this volume.

  Carlos Fuentes was born in Mexico City in 1929, grew up in Washington DC and studied at universities in Mexico and Switzerland. He is an extraordinary polymath: a highly acclaimed novelist, writer of screenplays, editor, historian, political thinker, teacher and ambassador for his country. The first of his three plays, All the Cats Are Lame (Todos los gatos son pardos, 1970), is a complex socio-historical portrayal of the Spanish invasion of Mexico, revolving around the conflict between the Aztec leader Montezuma II and Hernán Cortés. The Blind Man is King (El Tuerto es rey, 1970) concerns a blind lady and her blind servant, who await the return of the lady’s husband, both of them terrified that the other has sight. The third play, Orchids in the Moonlight, is a stunning portrait of the intricacies of human fantasy and the impact of the moving image.

  Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru in 1936. He spent his first ten years in Bolivia where his grandfather was a diplomat, and later studied law at the University of San Marcos in Lima. Like Paz and Fuentes, he has many professional identities: novelist, critic, essayist, TV journalist, and Peruvian presidential candidate. He has written five plays to date. No copy survives of El Inca, his first play which he wrote while studying in Peru. His second, written some 25 years later, is The Young Lady from Tacna (La Señorita de Tacna, 1981), a dramatisation of the process of storytelling. It was followed by Kathie and the Hippopotamus (Kathie y el Hipopótamo, 1983), a comedy about a Parisian housewife who hires a writer to record her invented memories. Mistress of Desires was written two years later. Finally, The Madman of the Balconies (El Loco de los Balcones, 1993) tells the story of an old professor whose obsession with preserving the colonial balconies of Lima drives his beloved daughter to desert him – an interesting parallel to the storyline of Paz’s Rappaccini’s Daughter.

  The self-searching that preoccupied dramatists like Vargas Llosa and Fuentes in the 1980s and 1990s marked a change in the nature of ‘autonomous theatre’. The use of anthropology as a method of exploring both personal and cultural identity proved to be a rich new source of inspiration. This was encouraged by the activities of three European-based institutions: Eugenio Barba’s International School of Theatre Anthropology which was founded in Denmark; Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre in Poland; and Peter Brook’s International Centre of Theatre Research in France. Many Latin Americans read about, or worked at, these establishments, and then developed their own related ideas. The Cuban theatre group Teatro Buendía places anthropology at the centre of its rehearsal method. During its investigation of the Afro-Cuban religion of santería, the group found that the rhythms of the batá drums, which santería believers consider to be the intermediaries between the human and the divine, can induce a state of trance. The group now uses trance as a preparation technique for creating a form of theatre that is both in close contact with its own cultural roots and which can communicate successfully across national boundaries, as demonstrated in the critical and public acclaim that greeted its tours in Europe and the Far East in the 1990s.

  A few of these anthropological projects have resulted in written texts. The Mexican Compañía Nacional de Teatro collaborated with the playwright Sergio Magaña to record The Enemies (Los Enemigos, 1990). This extraordinary text portrays the attempts of the 19th-century priest Charles Brasseur to stage the Rabinal Achí. The story begins just after Brasseur’s first transcription of the piece from oral tradition. Proud of his work, Brasseur wants to see the play staged in an ‘authentic’ way, as opposed to the folkloric representations of the time. The Indians refuse to participate until he agrees to pay them and to allow the performance to be staged in the nave of the local church. The Indians then perform an ‘authentic’ version of the Rabinal Achí, which ends in the actual sacrifice of the actor playing the Quiché Warrior on the church altar. Appalled by what he has done, Brasseur flees the village while the locals honour the sacrificed actor. The production was based on extensive anthropological research into the dress, music, dance and gestural languages both of the 19th century and of the Rabinal Achí itself, and on European understanding and portrayal of the Mayans. The story was told through the eyes of Brasseur, a European, so that the rituals took on an exotic and primitive quality. For the mainly Mexican audience, it was only ‘authentic’ in the sense that it depicted the ways Europeans perceived indigenous cultures.

  Some of the work that has come out of anthropological research can be properly described as ‘post-modern’. Post-modernism, according to Jean-François Lyotard who coined the term, means a sceptical attitude towards overarching explanations of the world. In the theatre, this scepticism is directed at any universalising theories of drama, such as the Christian or socialist suggestions that theatre should be used as a tool for social change, or the Aristotelian notion that effective drama can only be produced if the unities of time, place and action are maintained. Post-modernis
m is also characterised by linguistic playfulness and by referentiality, which tends to mean multiple quotations from other texts, genres, and from the works themselves. A good example of a post-modern Latin American play is Timeball (1991) by the Cuban Joel Cano. This mosaic-like work shows radical scepticism towards theatrical norms. Instead of a logical narrative progression, there are 52 scenes which must be ‘shuffled’ before each performance, so that they will always be presented in a different order. Cano describes this genre as ‘theatrical fortune-telling’. The play contains many cultural references, including ‘appearances’ by Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon, Lenin, and Marilyn Monroe. Cano also expresses an ironic attitude towards the dramatic unities, setting the play in 1933, 1970 and ‘no time’, and alternating the action between a stable, a park, a circus and a stadium.

  In the 1990s Latin America once again flourishes as a rich seedbed for exciting new plays; but the region’s theatre also faces enormous problems. As in most parts of the world, no problem is more acute than the shortage of funding. In the 1980s and 1990s, governments cut back finance for the theatre, especially for training. It is difficult for a Latin American playwright to make a living as runs are short, and revenues divided many ways. Financial temptations lure many good writers into television and to richer pastures in Europe or the USA. In addition, Latin American audiences remain generally conservative in their tastes, and a playwright devoted to non-commercial or ‘autonomous’ theatre always risks alienating the very people whose material support he depends on. Economic self-censorship has, at the end of the 20th century, taken the place of the almost extinct direct political censorship of the theatre.

  Selecting and Translating the Plays

  The five plays included in this book may all be described as being within the tradition of autonomous theatre. Their principal characters express a desire for freedom and a spirit of resistance to oppressive authority: Lalo in Night of the Assassins and Beatrice in Rappaccini’s Daughter share a yearning for a life outside the suffocating confines of their homes; La Chunga in Mistress of Desires and Dolores in Orchids in the Moonlight bravely search for dignity in the face of violent male chauvinism; and the Man in Saying Yes strives to overcome his cowardice and passivity and to confront the hairdresser’s callousness. Although the characters often fail tragically in their bids for freedom, they encourage the belief that we are all capable of changing our lives for the better if we overcome fear.

  The playwrights make bold formal choices, some of them remarkably similar. They all reject straightforward naturalism, and they avoid a linear narrative in favour of broadly circular structures, so that in every play the ending mirrors the beginning in some way: the Boys repeat their ritual song at the end of Mistress of Desires, the Hairdresser is reading his magazine again in Saying Yes, the Messenger re-addresses the audience in Rappaccini’s Daughter, Beba prepares to lead a new game in Night of the Assassins, and Dolores repeats her opening complaint in Orchids in the Moonlight. Such endings resolve nothing, and the writers run the risk that their audiences will accept the ambiguities left at the end at face value; yet such ambiguities provide audiences with questions that they must try to answer for themselves in order to finish the plays: Where is Meche? Are Maria and Dolores awake or dreaming? Does the antidote kill Beatrice or release her into the outside world? Could the siblings really kill their parents? Why does the Hairdresser kill the Man? The plays also have certain images in common, particularly those of the mirror and the labyrinth. Labyrinths feature in all the plays except Saying Yes, and have fascinated Latin American writers stretching back to Sor Juana and her secular comedy Love is the Greater Labyrinth (Amor es Más Laberinto, 1688).

  The plays are also individually distinctive in many respects. Their sources, language, and action are as individual as the writers themselves. Moreover, since each play was written at a different time during the second half of the 20th century, each reflects the social and political concerns of its particular moment. Rappaccini’s Daughter mirrors the terror of technological progress and the nuclear threat that stalked the 1950s; the 1960s hope of revolution is a principal theme of Night of the Assassins; the political violence and global terrorism of the 1970s provides the dark backdrop to Saying Yes; and social scientists, writers and film-makers were exploring issues concerning personal identity and sexuality when Orchids in the Moonlight and Mistress of Desires were written.

  The starting point for translation of the plays was always the individual words, and they have been translated as transparently as possible. The translation of Spanish poetry in the plays treats the word as more significant than the rhyme or metre: this is especially reflected in Rappaccini’s Daughter and in the blank verse translation of Sandoval y Zapata’s sonnet in Orchids in the Moonlight. Words which are peculiar in the original Spanish, moreover, are translated that way into English, as in the use of ‘marmots’ in Saying Yes, or in Catholic expletives like ‘Holy Whore!’ in Mistress of Desires.

  The English versions have benefited enormously from being read and amended by the playwrights themselves, all of whom are familiar with the English language. The authors’ insights have helped ensure accurate renderings of the actual Spanish words, which also echo the intentions behind the original texts. Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, explained that the name La Chunga refers to a strong, lower-class woman in 1940s Peru; while discussions with Carlos Fuentes excavated many of the cinematic references in Orchids in the Moonlight.

  Sometimes a literal translation cannot convey a sound or rhythm essential to the original. In these cases, alternative choices have been made, retaining associations to the original. This ‘associative’ approach was taken in the translation of the Boys’ song in Mistress of Desires, and in the allusions to nursery rhymes in Night of the Assassins. The actual staging of the plays was always viewed as an integral part of the translation process, and production has enriched all these texts. Hearing the words onstage opened the way for a greater immediacy in the translation.

  Select Bibliography:

  J.J. Arrom, Historia del Teatro hispanoamericano: época colonial, Mexico, 1967; P. Beardsell, A Theatre for Cannibals: Rodolfo Usigli and the Mexican Stage, London & Toronto, 1992; W. Benjamin, Illuminations, Fontana, 1992; Raul H. Castagnino, El Teatro de Roberto Arlt, Buenos Aires, 1964; F. Colecchia & J. Matas, Selected Latin American One-Act Plays, Pittsburg, 1973; Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Obras Completas, Mexico, 1992; W.K. Jones, Behind Spanish American footlights, Austin, 1966; Latin American Theatre Review; New Theatre Quarterly; R. Leal, Breve Historia del Teatro Cubano, Havana 1980; O. Paz, Sor Juana or The Traps of Faith, Harvard, 1988; C. Solorzano, El teatro latinoamericano en el siglo XX, Mexico, 1964; D. Taylor, Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America, Kentucky, 1991; R. Unger, Poesía en alta voz in the Theatre of Mexico, Missouri, 1981; A. Versényi, Theatre in Latin America, Cambridge, 1992.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are due to numerous people for their support and assistance over this four-year project. I am especially grateful to the playwrights for their advice and collaboration on the translations and stagings.

  Many thanks also to a number of people who gave generously of their time to read and make suggestions on drafts of the text, particularly Kate Berney, Caroline Voûte, Mark Hawkins-Dady, Catherine Boyle, Montserrat Guibernau, Tilly Franklin, William Brandt, Tom Hiney, Gaye Wilkins, Jeremy White, Eliot Weinberger and Zoë Crawshaw.

  In addition, I am indebted to all the performers, designers, musicians, producers and technicians who channelled their creative energies into the staging of the plays and brought them to life in the process. I am also deeply grateful to those institutions and individuals who provided the material resources for the productions, especially Tony Doggart, the Southern Development Trust, Drama King’s, the Gertrude Kingston Fund, the Esmée Fairbairn Trust and Ann Toettcher.

  Thank you, finally, to all those who gave encouragement and inspiration of a personal nature particularly Jane Toettcher, Dad
ie Rylands, Rupert Gatti, Susan Melrose, Graham McCann, David Lehmann, Nike Doggart, Hugo Jackson, Flora Lauten, Carlos Celdrán and Natalia Gil Torner.

  This book is dedicated to my parents and grandparents.

  S.D., May 1996

  RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER

  by Octavio Paz

  La Hija de Rappaccini was written in 1956. This translation of Rappaccini’s Daughter was first performed at the Gate Theatre, London on 21 January 1996, with the following cast:1

  MESSENGER

  Gabrielle Jourdan

  ISABELA (an old servant)

  Kay D’Arcy

  RAPPACCINI (a famous scholar)

  Kevin Colson

  BEATRICE (his daughter)

  Sarah Alexander

  BAGLIONI (a university doctor)

  John O’Byrne

  GIOVANNI (a student from Naples)

  Jud Charlton

  Director Sebastian Doggart

  Designer Tom Harrison