Latin American Plays

by Sebastian Doggart

  SD: You once criticised the ‘artifice of English acting’. How would you advise British performers to prepare for these roles?

  CF: The play has a great degree of artificiality built into it because of the nature of the two women, who are artifice incarnate. But there are ways of being artificial. This is a very baroque artifice. Baroque means horror of the vacuum, filling in the vacuum, desperation, abundance born of necessity, of not having anything, and having to invent the abundance. This plays into the ambiguity of the play, of the question: who are these women? Are they really two film actresses who are recreating their lives? Are they two fans, admirers of these women, who throughout their lives have wanted to take on the role of the two women they admire? This ambiguity has to play throughout, so that the ambiguity becomes the nature of the play; it becomes the natural and truthful aspect of the play, whereby any artificiality, baroqueness, or caricatured aspects of the play are finally dissolved in the ambiguity which is nurturing the play. As long as the ambiguous fluid is there, bathing the play and the actresses, I think it works. If that is lost, if you see it as a realistic play, then it fails. If it’s purely a cartoon, it doesn’t work either.

  SD: How do the performers communicate the oneiric, or dreamlike, quality to the audience?

  CF: It is established right from the first moment, when Dolores points at the audience which is there and is not there, saying ‘they are not looking at us’, when the audience is doing nothing else, of course. That is an invitation to accept what is going to happen as a dream world, as an unreality in a naturalistic sense, but as a reality on its own terms, that is, the reality of dreaming. So the opening moments of the play are very important. The audience must be shocked, made to feel uncomfortable because of the length of time in silence. At the same time, they must be drawn into the play while being alienated from it, in a Brechtian sense. This is difficult to achieve, but it is what I had in mind.

  SD: How would you describe the relationship between the two women?

  CF: I think they are almost on a desert island. Any two people on a desert island are going to have to be many things to each other: sisters, lovers certainly, and there will be a master-slave relationship as well. They will run the gamut of relationships. Nevertheless, what is important is the relationship between two individuals – man and woman, two men, two women – which clamours to be so many things. This always gives us the dimension of absence, of the absence of someone else, of a third party, another eye. Who’s watching us? Is it their mother? Her nature I think you can play with, and come up with an approximation of your own. I really don’t know who la mamá is? But she is the absent one, the dimension of absence that you inevitably get in a claustrophobic relationship in which two persons are everything to each other, they interpret every single role, every single possibility of relationship between two individuals; yet no matter how fulfilling or exhausting it is, inevitably there is the question of the other, the absent one, our Arab, our Jew, our God, whatever. That, for me, has always been the mystery of the play.

  SD: Did you have any specific real-life figures in mind when you were writing the characters?

  CF: Yes. Any screen goddesses could have done the roles. You could have multiplied them into a maze of mirrors, with each part being played successively by another actress. At a certain stage in history, the image of the sex goddess is interchangeable. It is a mould and you can shuffle them easily. In the 1930s and the 1940s it is very easy to play with many other names of other actresses. In this play, there is the added element, which is that they come from a poor, underdeveloped country. They aspire to reach a metropolis, which is Hollywood or Paris; I don’t think Dietrich or Garbo ever wanted to reach Mexico.

  SD: Maria Félix once described you as a mujerujo, a man with a woman’s heart. You’ve had a mysterious relationship with her, haven’t you?

  CF: Yes. We were very close friends. I have a novel in which she is the principal character, Holy Place. Then I told her about the play at a dinner party and she was very amused and thought it was great. I told her I would send it to her when I had finished it, and did so, asking her what she thought about it. She never gave me an answer. I got an indirect answer through Dolores del Rio who was already rehearsing it and wanted to do it for Mexican television, but then she died. Maria Félix banned me and started saying I was a horrible individual for writing this, that I had smeared her. Which isn’t true: it’s a homage to a myth, a goddess, which goes beyond biography. She didn’t take it that way. She made some comments about me in Vanity Fair. She would not mention me by name, calling me ‘Mr. X’. She said my only unhappiness about our relationship was that I never went to bed with her. Then she invented the word mujerujo, and called me it on television. I find that very flattering, almost a description of Flaubert: Madame Bovary, c’est moi. You have to be a woman when you’re writing about a woman. I had to become María Félix to write this play. It makes me unhappy, because I had no intention of offending her. I like her very much.

  SD: Your father has been a great influence on your theatre, hasn’t he?

  CF: My father was my educator in a very broad sense. He took me to the theatre at a very early age. One of the first plays I saw was in 1937 when I went to see Helen Hayes and Vincent Price in Maxwell Anderson’s Victoria Regina. In my father’s home in Vera Cruz, there was a large gymnasium and he and his brother and their friends would stage and invent plays, and do The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. This gave him great joy. When he was 18, he fled home and joined a theatrical troupe in Mexico, was picked up by my grandfather at the next railway station where the troupe went. He always had an enormous sensitivity and love for the theatre which he handed down to me.

  SD: What playwrights have influenced you?

  CF: The two most influential plays in my education were Life is a Dream by Calderón and The Prince of Homburg by Kleist. Those are the two plays which I would have liked to have written and I come back to them constantly. They are dream plays and they speak very deeply about imagination, and the possibilities of words, and the hidden invisible reality that art finally reveals, that no other medium can reveal. I have also been greatly influenced by the dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age, and of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. Those plays are very Latin American, I think, because of the atrocious and extremely violent things that happen on stage.

  SD: You once confessed that you were really only a frustrated actor. What appealed to you about acting?

  CF: I really loved character parts. I greatly admired character actresses. When I acted, I was very small and imitated Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt. I even have a novel dedicated to the four character actors in Casablanca. That is what I would have loved to done, if I had been an actor. I couldn’t stand romantic leads.

  SD: Latin American theatre is almost unknown in Britain and the USA. Why do you think that is?

  CF: It is very mysterious and difficult to understand the stages of literary development in any given country. Why didn’t we have good novels until the 1930s and 1940s, whereas we have had a long, uninterrupted and continuous brilliance of lyric poetry? There have been lyric poets writing in Latin America since colonial days: Sandoval y Zapata or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. We have never ceased to have great poets. But we did not have great novelists or narrators until Borges, Asturias, Carpentier, Onetti and Rulfo appeared on the scene in the 1940s. Why haven’t we had good theatre? Well, I think one thing grows out of another but it takes time. We the novelists grew out of the poetry of Latin America. We finally assimilated the poetical culture of Latin America and therefore we could write novels. I don’t know if future dramatists will have to assimilate the novels and the poetry in order to write really first-class theatre. There are very good individual dramatists in Latin America in almost every country. What there is not is a general movement of brilliance comparable to that of poetry or the novel. I have sometimes wondered if this has something to d
o with political life, with the nature of political language, with the rhetoric that has characterised the political language of Latin America. Poetry is a way of breaking away from that language. The novel became great, too, when it discovered it could get away from the rhetoric of politics and of official language and create its own language. But the theatre is very difficult because it shares with political language the fact that it is said out loud, in the public square, under the sun, like María Félix’s bullfighter in the play. There the competition is much greater. When you are writing for a secret audience which will read in silence, that is one thing. When you are writing to declaim in public, it’s another. What is happening is that films have finally been able to break through the artificiality – the pomposity, the rhetoric, the melodramatic stance – that identified politics with the theatre in Latin America. We are now hearing dialogues which are spontaneous, natural, well-said in very good films from Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and Chile. This gives me heart that finally this breakthrough in film will lead quickly to a real renaissance in theatre. Or rather a ‘naissance’ because it would be the first time that we have had a full-blown theatrical movement.

  SD: Do you see any particular proponents of this movement?

  CF: There is a history of modern Latin American theatre, probably beginning with Florencio Sánchez, the Uruguayan dramatist. Usigli is another important figure there. And then you have a number of younger people like Emilio Carballido in Mexico, the novelist Luis Rafael Sánchez in Puerto Rico, who would be very worth putting on. But these are isolated figures, and do not form part of a movement the way we form part of a movement with Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez and José Donoso.

  SD: Do you see any shared characteristics between the prominent dramatists?

  CF: All of them identify themselves as Latin American, but I see no strong current, no structured movement which you could identify as a Latin American theatre.

  SD: What social function has the theatre had in Latin America over recent years?

  CF: There is a form of theatre which has had an enormous social function which is satirical theatre: skits, the teatro de carpas as we call it in Mexico and from which Cantinflas arose, what Pinti does in Buenos Aires. Pinti does a one-man show, a tour de force which has being going on non-stop every day for several years, in which he furiously comments on all the foibles of Argentina. A fantastic monologue. There is this immediate satirical function, and you can gauge a country by how much it respects that kind of theatre. But it’s very specialised and it provokes an immediate cathartic response from anyone who sees it. It’s not the same as Molière or Shakespeare.

  SD: It’s very ephemeral?

  CF: Very ephemeral. It’s not written down, it’s improvised, based on daily occurrences. Nobody knows a year later what was said. There are no scripts, it’s a jam session, which makes it very beautiful and interesting but it goes with the wind. There are political plays which are important such as Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden. This was a play that curiously flopped in Chile and then had a big success outside the country. I saw a play in Santiago called Pablo Neruda is Flying Towards Us and one in Mexico City called Sexo, Pudor y Lágrimas which is very funny, frank, and liberating. But they seem to be isolated instances. They haven’t linked into a significant chain like poetry and the novel have been able to do. And the greatest social effect has been this kind of theatre, but sometimes when you get political theatre going beyond the burlesque, the skit, the cathartic experience, the everyday commentary with something like Dorfman, then the local audiences will not accept it. Dorfman’s play had to get a showing outside. In Chile, it proved too irritating, too offensive. It didn’t work. There you have the case of a play which finds an international audience because it deals with a political subject, yet cannot find a national audience for that very reason. So the question is: are there no audiences for theatre in Latin America? Is that the reason we have to continue addressing our audiences in silence, through the medium of the book, the written word?

  SD: What could audiences find particularly attractive in Latin American theatre?

  CF: The same that they are finding in films. They see imagination, real people, real language, real conversation. This is the way you start a theatre. At the same time, even the success of the films is because they are in the dark, because they are not live. The presence of a live stage production, of a live actor is impressive. It invades you, it takes over your life, it forces you into something very direct, material, and corporeal. That is what people are afraid of. It’s like being afraid of touching someone’s hand. I find there is a reticence in the Latin American audience which can only express itself bestially, in a burlesque show where you have naked women and they can scream their heads off in a bestial manner. Or they fall back on the convent and they want to be absolutely quiet, intangible and holy: nothing shall touch me and I shall touch nothing. So there are these two extremes and I think theatre exists between the two of them. In its extremity, it is the brothel or the convent.

  This verbal interview was conducted in English, in London in July 1992.

  MISTRESS OF DESIRES

  by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Truth is rarely pure and never simple.

  Oscar Wilde

  Author’s Note

  The plot of this play can be summed up in a few sentences. The action takes places in a small bar near the Stadium in Piura, a city surrounded by sand in northern Peru. The bar is run by La Chunga and is frequented by the poor and the shady. One night, one of the regulars, Josefino, comes in with his latest conquest, Meche, a young woman of strong and attractive features. La Chunga takes an immediate fancy to her. Josefino goads Meche to provoke La Chunga in order to amuse himself and his friends, a group of layabouts who call themselves the Boys. In the course of the evening, Josefino loses all his money at dice. To carry on playing, he hires out Meche to La Chunga. The two women spend the rest of the night together in La Chunga’s little room next to the bar. After that night, Meche disappears and nothing has been heard of her since. So what happened between the two women? The play begins a long time after that episode. At the same table in the bar, still playing dice, the Boys try in vain to persuade La Chunga to reveal her secret. As she won’t tell, they invent. Each Boy’s fantasies materialise on stage. They are, perhaps, fleeting images of the truth. Above all the Boys reveal their most secret desires. In La Chunga’s house, truth and lies, the past and the present co-exist, as they do in the human soul.

  The play develops or touches upon several distinct themes as the story develops: love, desire, taboos, the relationship between man and woman, the fashions and customs of a particular sector of society, the status of women in a primitive and male-dominated society and the way that all of these objective factors are reflected in the realm of fantasy. I think that the play shows that real life does not condition and enslave desire; on the contrary, even the simplest man can use his imagination and his desires to break the bars of the prison that confines his body.

  As in my two earlier plays, The Young Lady from Tacna and Kathie and the Hippopotamus, I have tried in Mistress of Desires to project through dramatic fiction the human totality of acts and dreams, facts and fantasies. The characters in the play are both themselves and their fantasies. They are creatures of flesh and blood whose destinies are conditioned by precise limitations – of being poor, marginalised, uneducated etc. In spite of their coarseness and the monotony of their existence, they have souls which can always escape to the relative freedom offered by man’s greatest gift: fantasy.

  I use the expression ‘human totality’ to underline the obvious fact that man is an unbreakable unity of acts and desires; also, because this unity ought to be shown in performance, confronting the spectator with an integrated world, in which the man who speaks and the man who fantasises – he who is and he who imagines he is – make up an uninterrupted continuum, an obverse and an inverse which are easily confused, like those garmen
ts which can be worn either way round, making it impossible to tell which is the right side out.

  I do not see why the theatre cannot be a suitable medium to represent the marriage, or rather the wedding, of human objectivity and subjectivity. Through stubborn prejudice, however, people tend to consider that a world which is ambiguous, evanescent, made up of sudden, timeless and arbitrary shades and movements, revolving around the imagination, and driven by desire cannot co-exist on stage with the world of objective life without creating insuperable difficulties for the director. I do not think that there is any explanation for this scepticism other than laziness and a fear of taking risks, that same fear which cripples any creative endeavour.

  It is simply a question of creating theatre that plays deeply on theatricality and people’s aptitude for pretending and for multiplying themselves through situations and personalities different from their own. In the scenes in which the characters live out their dreams, they must indulge themselves, embody themselves, make a double of themselves like actors do when they go on stage, or as men and women do when they call on their imagination to enrich their existence, illusorily enacting what real life forbids or denies them.

  Finding a technique of theatrical expression for this universally shared activity – enriching life through the creation of images and fictions – should be a stimulating challenge for those who want to renovate the theatre and explore new avenues, rather than continue cacophonously reworking the three canonical models of modern theatre which are starting to show signs of sclerosis: Brecht’s epic didacticism; the amusements of the theatre of the absurd; and the threats posed by the happenings and other variants on the text-bereft show. Theatre is, I am sure, a genre whose imagery is exceptionally good at portraying the disturbing labyrinth of angels, demons, and marvels in which our desires abide.