Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater

Transcription

Memory, Allegory, and
Testimony in South
American Theater
Routledge Advances in Theatre
and Performance Studies
1. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires
Awam Amkpa
2. Brecht and Critical Theory
Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics
Sean Carney
3. Science and the Stanislavsky
Tradition of Acting
Jonathan Pitches
4. Performance and Cognition
Theatre Studies after the Cognitive Turn
Edited by Bruce McConachie and
F. Elizabeth Hart
5. Theatre and Performance in
Digital Culture
From Simulation to Embeddedness
Matthew Causey
6. The Politics of New Media Theatre
Life®™
Gabriella Giannachi
7. Ritual and Event
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Mark Franko
8. Memory, Allegory, and Testimony
in South American Theater
Upstaging Dictatorship
Ana Elena Puga
Memory, Allegory, and
Testimony in South
American Theater
Upstaging Dictatorship
Ana Elena Puga
New York London
First published 2008
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Puga, Ana Elena.
Memory, allegory, and testimony in South American theater : upstaging dictatorship /
by Ana Elena Puga.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-415-96119-6
ISBN-10: 0-415-96119-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-203-89554-2
ISBN-10: 0-203-89554-1
1. Theater—Political aspects—South America. 2. Theater--South America—History—
20th century. I. Title.
PN2445.P84 2008
792.098'0904—dc22
2007049009
Portions of Chapter One were previously published in the Latin American Theatre
Review. Portions of Chapter Three were previously published in Theater Journal. Portions
of Chapter Four were previously in my introduction to Finished from the Start and Other
Plays by Juan Radrigán, published by Northwestern University Press.
ISBN 0-203-89554-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-96119-X (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-89554-1 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-96119-6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-89554-2 (ebk)
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
vii
ix
1
1
Carlos Manuel Varela and the Duty to Remember
17
2
Boal and Guarnieri: Historical Allegory and the Duty to Inspire
68
3
Griselda Gambaro: Abstract Allegory and the Duty to Conceal
138
4
Juan Radrigán and the Duty to Tell
194
Epilogue
232
Notes
References
Index
241
259
277
List of Figures
0.1 Eles não usam black-tie— São Paulo.
115
1.1 Alfonso y Clotilde—Montevideo.
115
1.2 Cuentos del Final—one.
116
1.3 Cuentos del Final—two.
117
1.4 Palabras en la Arena.
118
1.5 Elsinore—Eslabon—one.
119
1.6 Elsinore—Eslabon—two.
120
1.7 Crónica.
121
2.1 Arena conta Zumbi—one.
122
2.2 Arena conta Zumbi—two.
122
2.3 Arena conta Zumbi—three.
123
2.4 Arena conta Tiradentes—one.
123
2.5 Arena conta Tiradentes—two.
124
2.6 Program for Revolução na América do sul.
125
2.7 Teatro de Arena, São Paulo.
126
3.1 La malasangre poster.
127
3.2 La malasangre poster.
128
3.3 Antígona—one.
129
3.4 Antígona—two.
130
3.5 Antígona —three.
131
3.6 Antígona—four.
132
4.1 La contienda humana.
133
viii
List of Figures
4.2 Las Brutas—one.
133
4.3 Las Brutas—two.
134
4.4 Hechos consumados—one.
134
4.5 Hechos consumados—two.
135
4.6 Pueblo del mal amor.
136
5.1 Alfonso y Clotilde (Italy)—one.
136
5.2 Alfonso y Clotilde (Italy)—two.
137
5.3 La malasangre (Repertorio Español, New York).
137
Acknowledgments
The playwrights I write about here were also my teachers, guiding me
through a labyrinth of material, introducing me to other theater people
in their countries, and responding to my endless questions with patience
and kindness.
In Uruguay, Carlos Manuel Varela introduced me to several key sources
and opened his personal telephone book to me, leading me to many people
who went out of their way to further my research. Theater scholar Roger
Mirza, set designer Carlos Pirelli, director Marcelino Duffau, and the staff
at the Comedia Nacional were exceptionally helpful.
Marcelo Marchese, owner of the fabulous Babilonia used bookstore,
1591 Tristán Narvaja in Montevideo, tracked down all sorts of useful
materials for me and proffered his own memories of dictatorship.
In Brazil, unfortunately, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri died before I could
meet him, but his wife Vânya Sant’Anna gave me a sense of the theater
person, political activist, writer, and performer that he was. Guarnieri’s
collaborator on Arena conta Zumbi and Arena conta Tiradentes, Augusto
Boal, very kindly responded to e-mail questions.
During my very fi rst interview in São Paulo, with Izaías Almada and
Marília Medalha, Bernadette Figueiredo not only interpreted, but she
also lent me her tape recorder when mine broke down. Izaías gave some
extremely helpful suggestions for further research; Bernadette put me in
touch with another interpreter who became a buddy and intrepid guide to
São Paulo, Juliana Fagundes.
Besides sharing his detailed recollections of his performances with
Teatro Arena, David José Lessa took me to the theater building, which still
stands in São Paulo, and helped me imagine the neighborhood as it was for
the many students who lived and worked there during the 1960s.
Historian and friend Silvia Hunold Lara, of the State University of
Campinas, very usefully commented on the Zumbi and Tiradentes sections
of Chapter 2, suggesting some further readings that led me to reshape and
refi ne my arguments.
x
Acknowledgments
Librarian Mónica Aliseris, at the Museu Lazar Segall library in São
Paulo, tracked down a recording of the music to Arena conta Zumbi and
was good enough to mail it to me in the United States.
In Rio, Leslie Damasceno pointed out some fruitful avenues for research
and opened her home to me.
Two librarians in Rio’s government arts library, Fundação Nacional de
Arte (FUNARTE), hunted down all kinds of materials, from current telephone numbers of performers to play scripts that were thought to be lost.
My thanks to Márcia Cláudia Figueiredo and Paulo César Carvalho Torquato.
In Argentina, Griselda Gambaro met with me a couple of times for
long chats in smoky cafés on Buenos Aires’s historic Corrientes Avenue,
chats that opened a window into her world. Another playwright, Eduardo
Rovner, paved the way for me at the Teatro San Martín archives and helped
me navigate Buenos Aires.
When I suddenly needed an eye doctor, Annamaría Lascano calmed me
down and helped me fi nd one.
In Chile, Juan Radrigán and Silvia Marín helped me realize how much
I had missed in the 1980s and how much I needed to learn. The staff at
the national library in Santiago ably assisted in that process of education.
Yet, actually, the learning began in graduate school at the Yale School of
Drama, while reading Radrigán’s plays with Mónica Núñez-Parra at the
Book Trader café on Chapel Street in New Haven.
At Yale, Joseph Roach encouraged me to work on this project when it
was just a half-baked idea for a doctoral dissertation and put me in touch
with Diana Taylor, who has been a dissertation advisor and much more
over the years. Moira Fradinger, in Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature, helped me work and rework much of the writing, patiently hanging in there with me through various drafts, from early dissertation to late
manuscript.
Here at the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University, Susan
Manning has been everything one could want in a colleague, mentor, and
friend: She read the entire manuscript, and not only made invaluable suggestions for improvement, but also laced the constructive criticism with so
much encouragement that I felt motivated to work harder. She and many
other colleagues here, especially my pal Harvey Young, make this a terrific
place to work.
My department chair, Rives B. Collins, was unfailingly supportive and
protective of my writing time; my dean, Barbara O’Keefe, provided time
and funding for research. Two university research grants also supported
research in South America.
My thanks to historian Steve J. Stern, of the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, and independent scholar Beatriz J. Rizk, who offered comments
on a draft of Chapter 4 that helped me correct some factual mistakes and
gain much-needed perspective. And thanks also to Paola Hernández, in the
Acknowledgments xi
Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, for
her friendship and for reading Chapter 1 of the manuscript for Routledge.
The introduction benefitted enormously from Javier Villa-Flores’s comments. And the epilogue could not have been written without assistance in
interviewing and translation conducted in Rome by Raffaele Furno.
The intelligence, enthusiasm, and good humor of two research assistants, Christina McMahon, mostly at the beginning, and Brett J. Janecek,
in the middle and end stages, helped keep me on track and on schedule.
In far too many ways to recount here, my parents Marta and William,
my sisters Maria Teresa and Laura, my niece Anna Maria, my nephews
Robert Thomas and Hunter, and my Víctor helped keep me sane. I dedicate
this book to all of you.
Introduction
Pinochet once yelled at me. I was a journalist at the time, and somehow
managed to wriggle through the crowd to get in close to the dictator during his performance of “democracy,” as he deposited his ballot into a box
with great fanfare on December 14, 1989, an election day he had only
grudgingly allowed after almost seventeen years in power. Given the crush
of cameras and tape recorder-wielding reporters, I hadn’t expected to fi nd
myself standing at arm’s-length in front of the man of the hour himself.
An inane question popped out of my mouth: “Who did you vote for?” (He
most likely voted for the candidate he had backed in the election, his former
fi nance minister, Hernán Büchi.) Pinochet responded with a long, loud,
and surprisingly high-pitched for such a large man, reprimand posed as a
series of counterquestions accusing me of meddling in the internal affairs of
Chile. The tirade climaxed: “What are you doing here? And where are you
from? Why are you meddling here? This is our affair. You are an intruder!”
My initial shock and alarm soon turned into elation at the realization that I
had stumbled on what might later pass for an interview, or at least provide
some good quotes for an election-day article highlighting for my U.S. readers the xenophobic side of a man who still enjoyed substantial support both
inside Chile and among the international community (Puga, “Pinochet”).
My tiny part in the drama of the general’s reluctant, extremely gradual
relinquishment of power was one of many events that have led me to reflect
upon how performances collide and compete—sometimes accidentally and
with unexpected results. What seems like an innocuous bit role can suddenly blossom into an opportunity for attempted subversion.
The performances I spotlight from here on in were much more consciously
crafted than my impromptu performance in the media circus that day, and
their impact was far greater. I do, however, write here about performances
in competition with one another. While my focus is on analysis of selected
performances by five South American playwrights that took place inside of
theaters between 1965 and 1991, I contend that those performances competed with larger performances of state power outside of theaters, encouraging spectators to reinterpret displays of dictatorial authority and ally
themselves with nontheatrical, as well as theatrical, dissident performance.
2
Thus when I analyze productions in traditional theatrical venues, I often
juxtapose those performances with two different kinds of off-stage performances, the performances they attempted to upstage (official, hegemonic
performances) and the performances with which they collaborated (other
counterhegemonic performances).
For my purposes, I would simply defi ne off-stage performances as attention-grabbing spectacles crafted so as to capture public attention and create a particular effect in the spectator.1 This defi nition is broad enough to
apply to spectacles that reinforce dominant ideologies as well as those that
attempt to contest them or that unintentionally both contest and reinforce.
As numerous journalists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, scholars
of performance, and others have shown, state spectacles under dictatorship are often intended to produce fear, passivity, and conformity. 2 Such
authoritarian performances run the gamut from mildly intimidating—military parades and commemorative ceremonies—to truly terrifying: searching people’s homes for “subversive” material, selecting bus passengers at
random to cart off to jail for a night of torture, publishing photos of assassinated leftists who supposedly attempted to escape, kidnapping people
from their homes and places of work, assassinating people on the street in
broad daylight. The off-stage performances that attempt to overcome fear,
passivity, and conformity also take many forms, from individual acts such
as making an antidictatorship speech in what remains of the legislature or
throwing a Molotov cocktail at a tank rolling through the neighborhood to
collective activities such as marches and demonstrations, or even inserting
imaginative new manifestations of nonconformity into conformist rituals,
like the Uruguayans who would suddenly shout when they got to the lyrics “tiranos temblad!” [tyrants tremble] as they sang the national anthem
in public. Such performers overcome their fears, demonstrate unity with
like-minded resistors, and hope that their behavior might inspire other outbursts of dissent.
The playwrights discussed here—Carlos Manuel Varela (Uruguay),
Augusto Boal and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri (Brazil), Griselda Gambaro
(Argentina), and Juan Radrigán (Chile)—wrote in solidarity with off-stage
dissidents and in defiance of performances of state power. It is a shame
that many English-speaking theatergoers are not familiar with their works
and the works of many other equally fi ne Latin American playwrights. In
earlier attempts to help bring those works to larger audiences, I have translated some of them and staged others, another form of translation, with
my collaborators in LaMicro Theater. 3 Now I “translate” in yet another
way, offering new readings of plays and performances to scholars of Latin
American theater who may already know these playwrights, and also perhaps introducing these works to a wider readership in Latin American
Studies and to English-language readers in theater studies. Under dictatorship, South American artists from different countries remained for the most
part isolated from each other.4 A comparative project such as this considers
Introduction
3
what each of these playwrights has to tell us, not only about his or her own
work in the context of his or her own nation, but also in relationship to
each other, to the entire Southern Cone, and, more generally, to all of Latin
America during its unfortunate historical moment as Cold War pawn.
My focus on these particular playwrights is and is not arbitrary. Besides
striking my fancy and arousing my admiration, they give me the chance to
analyze how a particular intersection of politics and aesthetics can develop
into a distinct voice of protest. In the wake of the supposed death of the
author, studies of individual writers, complete with close readings, have
come to seem rather quaint. Yet it seems worthwhile to me to study how
playwrights return again and again to certain genres, themes, and signature gestures that defi ne their individual styles. Like musicians manipulating a melody, they will often repeat and revise in each subsequent drama,
thus creating a body of work that is both cohesive and varied. In moments
of grandiose fantasy I imagine that my analyses of these particular “melodies” are compelling enough to inspire hordes of readers to seek out the
works themselves. My studies with such masters of formalist analysis as
Helen Vendler and Marc Robinson, and the excitement that they inspired
in me about this or that poet or playwright, have no doubt influenced my
approach.
Yet I have also been influenced by performance studies scholars Joseph
Roach and Diana Taylor, who many years ago introduced me to the revelatory concept that performance is not just something that happens on stage. 5
Another reason for my focus on these playwrights, then, is my hypothesis
that their works countered, even at times upstaged, the competing performances of state terror that were going on all around them. Part of my task
has been to identify how these plays in performance prod spectators to
remember, speak, lament their inability to speak, meditate on their communal loss, laugh at the absurdities of authoritarianism, decipher covert
messages of resistance, reconstruct collective memories, and devise their
own covert ways to communicate.
Relegated to the margins of a dangerous political arena, these theater
practitioners nevertheless occasionally managed to steal the limelight. In
Uruguay, Carlos Manuel Varela was the fi rst playwright to stage a character that had been kidnapped and tortured for political reasons, a risk that
could easily have led to his own torture. He didn’t know that later that
year, 1980, voters would stage their own counterperformance to state terror by voting to reject the military’s proposed constitution. In Brazil, Boal
and Guarnieri took advantage of the brief window of opportunity before a
military crackdown in 1968 to create theatrical alternatives to the heroes
consecrated by the military in official photos, school lessons, parades, commemorations, and other official festivities. In Argentina, Gambaro returned
from exile to stage a 1982 counterperformance against state terror that in
turn inspired a counter-counterperformance, as supporters of the dictatorship interrupted the theatrical event, pulled out guns, and threatened to
4
attack the performers. In Chile, Radrigán took advantage of the government’s laissez-faire attitude toward non-mass-media artistic expression to
begin to let the poor, which included him, speak for themselves, not only on
formal stages but also in performances in churchyards and town squares.
Delineating a pattern of competition between on-stage and off-stage
performances thrusts one into a set of theoretical debates that date back
at least as far as post-World War II soul searching about the defeat of communism by fascism and continue today in post-Cold War soul searching
about the defeat of socialism by capitalism. Theodor Adorno articulates an
inescapable dilemma relevant to the consideration of any art that subverts,
or proposes to subvert, political evil.6 At his darkest, Adorno suggests
not only that resistance is impossible but that any attempt to create resistant art necessarily exploits the suffering of the victims of disaster. “All
post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage” (367),
he wrote in an oft-cited 1949 essay, “Meditations on Metaphysics.”7 Yet
on the other hand, Adorno condemns silence as equally untenable. “In
silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more defrauding truth into a lie” (367). (Adorno
himself chose to continue writing until his death in 1969.) A 1962 essay,
“Commitment,” while repeating his most dramatic cries of despair, in fact
further clarifies that Adorno’s stance is not as nihilistic as it might seem.
As Shoshana Felman notes in “Education and Crisis,” Adorno’s view is
much more complicated than the most famous quotation from “Commitment”: “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (188). Far from
ending the discussion with that dictum, in the same essay, Adorno goes
on to complicate it by creating a paradox, or “aporia,” as he calls it: “Literature must resist this verdict” (188). In other words, though art cannot
but further violate the victims, it must nevertheless continue to try not to
repeat the crime it condemns. Far from calling for artistic silence, Adorno
distinguishes between self-congratulatory “committed” work that reassures the consumers of their moral righteousness and work (by artists he
admires such as Kafka and Beckett) that “compels the change of attitude
which committed works merely demand” (Commitment 191).8
As if building only on Adorno’s most pessimistic pronouncements,
much postmodern theory sets the resistance bar so high that it is difficult to imagine that any theatrical work could ever reach it. Theorists
such as Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard seem best equipped
to explain why the long-awaited Marxist revolution never came to the
West and exploitation has instead evolved to the stage often referred to as
“late capitalism.” While there are significant differences between the two
theorists, both Jameson and Lyotard build on Michel Foucault’s concept
of power being so dispersed that it is difficult to fi nd an exterior position
from which to wield a lever. Surpassing Foucault’s bleak outlook, in “The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson describes the “capacity to
act and struggle” in the realm of multinational capital, as “neutralized”
Introduction
5
(54).9 One can also discern in much postmodern analysis the influence of
Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, or the way in which subordinate
groups supposedly accept their repression as natural or inevitable. Despite
what he views as the breakup of grand narratives, for instance, in The
Postmodern Condition, Lyotard nevertheless argues that a mysterious
“system” provides “regulatory mechanisms” that keep us all in line (15).10
Within this system, language operates like a chess match in which no matter how one moves, the rules of the game are inescapable (10).
Looking for a window in the prison house of language, some critics
have embraced the work of Michel de Certeau, who offers a glimmer of
hope with his concept of “oppositional practices.” He describes these
practices, which he also calls “tactics,” in The Practice of Everyday Life
(1984), as “clever tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the
‘strong,’ an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf,
hunter’s tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and
warlike discoveries” (40). Yet de Certeau concludes that ultimately, the
tricks of the weak do little or nothing to upset the established order. While
walking through a city, for instance, one might take short cuts through
buildings, pressing private spaces into public service. One might sleep in
the park and urinate in a fountain, both practices that subvert the original design of the urban public spaces, but such deviousness will not alter
the fundamental urban structures. By defi nition, tactics are employed by
the “powerless,” in other words, the vast majority of people, who negotiate daily life in constant friction with organizations that literally and
metaphorically control their space—businesses, institutions, armies, cities—and over which they have almost no control. Manipulation of these
socioeconomic and political structures, according to de Certeau, is always
a temporary infringement of space controlled by the “strong,” which tend
to be organizations rather than individuals, and involves exerting some
influence over time rather than space. For instance, one of his often-cited
examples of the tactics of the weak is the worker who squanders company
time on his own projects. He steals some time, but the workplace is still
controlled by the business. Like Lyotard, de Certeau posits a system that
no one can elude:
The system in which they [consumers] move is too vast to be able to
fi x them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able
to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an
elsewhere. (40)
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein: There is no there anywhere.
Although some prominent postmodernists (such as Jameson) and poststructuralists (such as Foucault, before his death) are themselves leftists,
and support progressive, radical change, their writings have nevertheless spawned a skepticism about the possibility for such change that has
6
infested much analysis of literature, drama, and performance. I would like
to briefly recount one case in point: Ross Chambers’s Room for Maneuver (1991). When Chambers applies de Certeau’s idea of “oppositional
practices” to the world of Latin American literature, he argues that some
works of fiction can go so far as to create a space, a “room for maneuver,”
between the evils of repression and cooptation (5). The process of reading
an “oppositional” work, in Chambers’s view, can lead to a shift in the
reader’s conception of him- or herself: Rather than conceiving of oneself
as the passive subject of a discourse of power, through an encounter with
the oppositional text, one can begin to recognize the “constructed” character of the discourse of power and to a slight extent separate oneself from
it (18). Though Chambers never mentions the theatrical theories of Bertolt
Brecht, his analysis of the act of reading is very similar to Brecht’s sense
of “alienation,” or the separation between performer and character that
should ideally spur reflection in a spectator (Brecht, Brecht 37). Chambers
and Brecht see the estrangement between reader/text and spectator/performance, respectively, as the key to disturbing the established order.
Brecht described alienation effects as “combative” and believed that
epic theater could rouse spectators to the extent that they would overturn
that order (277); Chambers, by contrast, stresses that the oppositional
falls far short of resistance. Resistance, in Chambers’s view, must involve
violence: “[Resistance] challenges the legitimacy of a given power-system
and, perceiving it therefore not as ‘power’ but as force, seeks to overturn
it by counterforce. Revolution would be a case of resistance in this sense”
(xv). Because it resorts to the same violence that keeps the power structure
in place, resistance is tainted by the same illegitimate methods of the original power structure. Given Chambers’s defi nition, a literary or theatrical
work that does not advocate the violent overthrow of a political system
falls short of constituting resistance, which is not necessarily desirable in
any case, since resistance, according to him, only leads to the fl ipping of
more-or-less equivalent power structures. While on the one hand dismissing violent resistance as a pyrrhic victory, Chambers on the other hand relegates everything less than violence to the realm of the almost irrelevant.
Whatever change oppositional reading may engender, and Chambers is
unclear about just how far this change can go, he draws on the postmodernists’ grim image of language (and hence politics, which like language
employs a system of symbols) as a closed system with no way out to conclude that “oppositional practices do not really work against prevailing
systems but, to the contrary, strengthen them by making them livable”
(7). Hence the works of the Latin American writers he analyzes, including
Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, and Manuel Puig, constitute
just so much “graffiti on the prison wall” : The literature protests, but the
prison wall is not pierced, much less broken down (175).
Much postmodernist pessimism appears to stem from the politics of
the Western developed world. Indeed, Chambers prefaces his book with
Introduction
7
an acknowledgment that the events in France in May 1968, when the
government came tantalizingly close (for some) to collapse yet managed
to survive, led him to the paradoxical proposition that “there are no hegemonies so absolute or systems of control so strict that they are not vulnerable to disturbance, and that, conversely, the disturbance in such systems
cannot be so radical as to break with them” (xx). In Chambers’s view
oppositional literature walks a tightrope on which, without ultimately
challenging the legitimacy of a system, a work might at least allows the
reader to perceive the system as system. Some readers, or spectators,
indeed go no further than to acknowledge their own captivity. But one
must not fail to take into account the actions of countless others, both artists and readers/spectators, who have refused to accept their supposedly
limited room for maneuver, even under conditions of extreme repression.
Instead of looking back at France in 1968, I look at South America
today. Chambers, oddly enough, never attempts to square his theoretical
readings of Latin American works with Latin American political events.
Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, for instance, is discussed without reference to the Argentine historical circumstances under which the
novel was produced.11 The South American dramas to be discussed here
are deeply rooted in their essentialist convictions about the rights and
wrongs of their national histories. Despite Auschwitz, despite the failure
of the would-be second French revolution in 1968, despite the pattern of
atrocities in their own countries, they share with Vaclav Havel the morally essentialist conviction that:
The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In
everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for
moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existences. Yet, at the same time, each person
is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living
with the lie. (38)
Writing in Eastern Europe in 1985, in The Power of the Powerless, Havel
subscribes to the theory of ideology as a flawed, morally corrupt worldview. Using terms such as “truth” and “lie” without embarrassment,
Havel defi nes “resistance” as the dangerous process of “living within the
truth.” In Havel’s universe, ideology is a fragile fiction: “Everyone who
steps out of line denies it [ideology] in principle and threatens it in its
entirety” [emphasis Havel’s] (40).
Given the progress being made by dissident movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland at that time, Havel had reason to feel hopeful, even elated,
about the role of resistance in promoting political change. His sense of
a system threatened to its foundations by the slightest gesture of protest
counters the concept of the endlessly flexible system imagined by postmodern theorists who were perhaps looking West rather than East, or South.
8
The events of 1990 proved Havel’s optimism justified in that what began
as graffiti on the Berlin Wall eventually led to cracks, then breaches, that
caused that particular ideological prison to come tumbling down.
Although for Havel the very act of exposure presents a threat to the
legitimacy of the system and thus constitutes resistance, for Chambers,
the act of exposure and the would-be threat to the system are two separate things. As Havel tells the old story of the Emperor’s new clothes, the
very second that the child points out the emperor’s nakedness, the regent’s
legitimacy is called into question (40). In a Chambers version of the same
story, one imagines, the regent simply goes home, gets dressed, and carries on, temporarily humiliated but ultimately perhaps even strengthened
in his rule by the experience. This is important in considering how something as puny as a theatrical work might threaten a well-armed repressive
regime. Although Chambers’s ironic paradox of the would-be resistant
work always backfi ring and aiding the system it seeks to subvert is not
persuasive in the face of Latin American historical reality, neither does
Havel’s equation of exposure with instant impact seem totally convincing about every individual work of would-be resistant theater, no matter
how marginal. What if the crowd in the emperor’s tale looked the other
way while the child was taken away by security forces, never to be seen
or heard from again?
Juxtaposing theorists who see ample possibilities for dissidence with
those who see extremely limited opportunities for artistic resistance is
helpful in clarifying my own position. My own particular historical perspective leads me to feel more attraction to theorists who are also activists, rather than to postmodern theorists and critics, who seem to provide
the opportunity to rationalize political apathy. The four South American
dictatorships during which these plays were written had all been voted
out of office by 1990. The governments that replaced them, although
far from examples of radical democracies, are generally acknowledged
to employ less violence against their own citizens. In the realm of human
rights, many analysts agree, South America is doing much better today
than it was under dictatorship.12 First, although police and prison violence
remains a problem, particularly in Brazil, torture and disappearance are
no longer systematic government practice. Second, democracy has been
reestablished, at least to the extent that democracy involves the ability to
elect representatives. In fact, as of this writing, nominally leftist leaders
are in power in all four Southern Cone countries: Tabaré Vásquez in Uruguay; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil; Néstor Kirchner in Argentina;
and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Repressive regimes were in fact replaced
by others more open to acts of individual and collective agency, which has
expressed itself not only in formal political participation but also in new
grass-roots social movements. Political protest, artistic expression, and
other activities within civil society have all flourished. It seems to me that
at least within the limited context of the Southern Cone in the last two
Introduction
9
decades or so, the capacity to act and struggle was not neutralized: Societies have been able to use language to imagine alternative realities that
allowed them to break out of ideological prisons. The modernist ideal of
historical progress, within certain clearly defi ned boundaries, was in fact
exemplified by the Southern Cone experience.
Although military leaders have never been completely held accountable
for their crimes, progress has been made in bringing some assassins and
torturers to justice: arrests, trials, even actual prison time served for a few
of the most egregious offenders. In Argentina, the only country to entirely
overturn its amnesty, hundreds of military officials have been charged with
human rights offenses and the now elderly junta leaders General Jorge
Rafaél Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera are living out their old age
under house arrest. General Augusto Pinochet, who died in 2006 at the
age of 91, also spent his last days under house arrest, though his popularity
with some Chileans only seriously began to wane after it came to light that
he and his family had millions of dollars hidden in secret bank accounts
abroad (“Augusto Pinochet” 89). In Uruguay, courts have begun to reinterpret amnesty laws so as to exclude many offenses, thus making them
subject to prosecution. And in Brazil, although Lula’s government has not
been willing to revisit or reinterpret amnesty, it did support the publication
of a 500-page report acknowledging the military’s human rights offenses
in great detail.13
The bad news from the perspective of the Left, familiar to anyone who
follows Latin American politics, is that in the wake of the fall of the former
Soviet states, the dream of actual socialist economic transformation has
receded beyond the horizon of what seems possible. In that sense, Uncle
Sam, in cahoots with the CIA, the likes of Henry Kissinger, and the ruthless military regimes he supported, succeeded in making Latin America
safe for global capitalism. Despite a spate of alarmist articles in the popular press about the supposed resurgence of the Latin American Left that
make it sound as if half a dozen Che Guevaras are about to bring the longawaited socialist revolution to the continent, despite boogeyman depictions
of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez by the right, despite canonization
of Mexico’s Zapatista movement by the Left, and despite Fidel Castro’s
apparent immortality, Latin America remains fi rmly in the palm of transnational corporations.14 For many subsistence-level poor, life has not have
changed all that much since the return of democracy: Even when countries
enjoyed economic growth, income inequality often remained the same or
increased.15 The right to cast one’s ballot for this or that candidate pales
in comparison to the still-missing rights to food, housing, health care,
and education. Leftist theorists, meanwhile, are struggling to reformulate
traditional Marxist class analysis and/or search for alternative models to
account for Latin America’s reality today, a reality that includes a rise in
social movements that cannot be entirely defi ned by class or party affiliations. Some theorists ignore or deny the validity of postmodern critique
10
altogether; others attempt to incorporate it into anti-neoliberal political
and economic theory.16
As an analyst of political performance, I am most troubled by how
postmodernism’s radical constructivism leads to radical relativism. If all
moral judgments are suspect, if there are no essential categories such as
“good” and “evil” or “truth” and “lies,” then how can any system can be
proven to be better than any other system? If every worldview is a social
construction rather than the product of some essential Truth, then all
worldviews are more-or-less equally valid. In a post-ideological world,
there is nothing to resist and resistance is meaningless.17 And how can art
expose and subvert political evil if it has no access to any sort of essential,
universal Truth about the nature of goodness? Can there be absolute evil
without absolute goodness? While the nature of goodness and Truth is
far beyond the scope of this endeavor, I do however assume that artistic
endeavors can illuminate how certain political practices constitute absolute wrong, which I would defi ne as an absence of respect for human
life. Thus I am reluctant to slide down the slippery slope into a complete
relativism in which any ideological position can be construed as just as
valid as any other.
Luckily, leftist theory has recently reinvigorated the idea of some sort
of universal. Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality, a collaboration
and debate among Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, concedes that universality, or at least some version of universality (the particulars are up for debate), can be defended as crucial to a leftist project.
The three theorists agree that no universals are just as bad for leftist
practice as the kind of false universals that excluded subordinate groups
from its purview. Thus they reconceptualize the universal as an entity
permanently under construction, as a “horizon,” to use Laclau’s word,
expressed through the particular (211). The new universal, or universals,
plural, Butler suggests, involves constant competition and “cultural translation” to create “an opening toward alternative versions of universality”
that would include those who have been previously excluded as a condition for the establishment of a universal and would also contest the role
of the state in legitimizing the universal (178–179). At the very least, then,
artistic resistance could question the validity of a dominant ideology as
part of a struggle toward the construction of a truth, one that includes the
worldview of the artist and those with whom he or she identifies. Resistant performances that succeed in contesting official performances would
not simply play a part in replacing the dominant ideology with their own,
in an alternation of power, but would challenge the mechanisms of power
by which the universal is established.
How does a work of art help achieve such a significant shift in power
structures? Turning from poststructuralist to Marxist theory, I look to
Raymond Williams to describe the general process by which hegemony
may be challenged:
Introduction
11
It would be wrong to overlook the importance of works and ideas
which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at
least in part significant breaks beyond them, which may again in part
be neutralized, reduced, or incorporated, but which in their most active elements nevertheless come through as independent and original.
(Marxism and Literature 114)
The South American playwrights analyzed here exercised independence
and originality, both in their self-expression and in fi nding ways to communicate with spectators. They held no false consciousness about the value
of authoritarian regimes; among people they trusted; they all openly voiced
their abhorrence of dictatorship. Yet their works had to perform a delicate
balancing act between saying too much and saying too little, between what
James C. Scott calls “reproducing hegemonic appearances,” or appearing to
comply with the rules dictatorship established for them, and openly defying
those rules (203). In creating counterhegemonic performances, Gambaro
and Boal attracted the attention of the authorities and were forced to leave
their home countries. Although Varela, Radrigán, and Guarnieri were
not necessarily any less bold, the authorities chose only to harass rather
than persecute them. Considering the theatrical performances within each
nation’s historical circumstances, I make an argument for how even spectators already opposed to dictatorship could plausibly have been pushed a
little farther along, in their thoughts, in their feelings, perhaps even in their
actions.
It was impossible for me to determine, and perhaps impossible for
anyone to determine with certainty, to what extent a significant number of
spectators were moved, or unmoved, by these theatrical productions, and
to what extent the experience of spectatorship translated into a concrete
difference in thought and/or action outside the theater. Do dissident plays
change people’s minds and even behavior, or do they at best provide comfort
to the already converted? I do not pretend to answer that eternal question.
But what I do demonstrate is that spectators to these productions were given
ample opportunity to absorb performances that questioned the validity
of the ideologies reinforced by the state’s spectacles. Resistant theatrical
performances formed alliances subtly, not taking the same risks, or rather,
taking a different kind of risk than someone who put up barricades in the
street or fi led a petition for habeas corpus on behalf of a missing person.
A reference to birds that no longer sing (Radrigán’s Isabel Banished in
Isabel) or the image of a bloody melon (Gambaro’s La Malasangre) would
do to establish solidarity under circumstances in which a more obvious
approach might have invited repression. Whenever possible, I have done
more than explicate the text of the play, pulling together other evidence—
reviews, programs, photographs, video, sound tracks, designers’ drawings,
directors’ notes, interviews with practitioners who worked on the shows
and spectators who saw them performed—to make a case for how the
12
production helped undermine authoritarian ideologies, or, in a few cases,
how it unintentionally reinforced them.
What exactly do I mean by authoritarian ideologies? I use the term “ideologies,” plural, to indicate that I do not conceive of dictatorial ideology
as a monolithic entity. In everyday language, I mean the official stories, the
many ways in which South American dictators explained to themselves and
others why they were justified in seizing power, exercising it with disregard
for human life, and holding on to it for as long as they did. (I subscribe to
the idea of ideology as inevitable, in which ideology means something like
worldview, and we all have one, or more. Yet, like many people, I think
some ideologies, often mine, are better than others.) Ideologies of dictatorship were dominant and appeared hegemonic, I believe, not because every
citizen subscribed to them, or not even necessarily because a majority of
citizens from any particular class subscribed to them, but because the vast
majority of people were afraid to publicly contradict those who had the
power to kill them, or to make their life a living hell.18 There was not one
dictator, there were many in each country, because even in Chile, where
Pinochet had the upper hand, he ruled as part of a junta composed of the
leaders of all the armed forces. Over time, the composition of the juntas
would vary. There were divisions between different branches of the armed
forces, splits within each branch, splits between the armed forces and the
secret police apparatuses and the civilian politicians who supported the
military rulers. Even a single individual might not offer just one justification for dictatorship but could summon several arguments in support of
military rule: the importance of preserving economic prosperity; the promotion of social order; the need to combat communism; the preservation
of Western, Christian values (a whole other ideological network); heterosexual male protection of women and children within a traditional family structure; and so forth. Within this framework of thought, the abuses
of dictatorship, from restriction of civil liberties to outright assassination,
might be either minimized or rationalized as necessary evils. No single play
I analyze here challenges every element of authoritarian ideologies—after
all, these are plays, not political treatises. Yet every play I analyze takes
on at least one, and usually more than one, tenet of a complex ideological
network.
To a limited extent, I try to show how these theatrical works fit into a
broader collage of oppositional efforts that include both other arts such as
music and fi lm, as well as other dissidence in the realm of politics proper.
To give a sense of the breadth of this collage, endnotes include suggestions for further reading on other areas of resistance, as well as references
to some of the many other significant playwrights that I could have written about but didn’t. Rather than focus on the psychological impact of a
single work on the individual conscience, then, this study examines South
American theater as a collective experience that creates a community of
resistance. I often point out the similarities between the language, images,
Introduction
13
and ideas that were being espoused by forces of resistance inside and outside the theater in a particular country at a particular time. For instance,
when I show how a play by Gambaro and a demonstration by the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo, in very different ways, say similar things about the
government’s responsibility for the fate of the disappeared, I hope not to
reduce Gambaro’s work to a political slogan. My aim is rather to explore
how the theatrical work fits into a collage of oppositional performances
intended to undermine ideologies of dictatorship.
Yet another category currently under theoretical scrutiny, the nation,
remains central to these profoundly nationalistic works. The concept of
the nation, and of how it should be led, at times, particularly in certain
aspects of Boal and Guarnieri’s theater, unquestioningly incorporates elements of the dominant ideology, namely, the heroic ideal of a strong male
military leader. To a lesser extent, Varela and Radrigán both lament the
fates of their respective nations with a modernist passion. Dying for one’s
country was an ultimate sacrifice exalted by both the military rulers and
their most radical opponents. Only Gambaro, among these playwrights,
questions the value of dying for one’s country, particularly when one’s
country has become what she depicts in some plays as a kind of concentration camp.
The most transformative political dramas, I would argue, are also
transformative on an aesthetic level. To engage, challenge, prod, or assail
the political status quo one needs art that engages, challenges, prods, or
assails the aesthetic status quo. Alternative aesthetic strategies often distinguish the truly resistant theatrical work from a propaganda pamphlet
or a political demonstration. Adorno was perhaps thinking of this when
he dismissed “officially committed works” as “pantomimes” (“Commitment” 191).19 On the other hand, one can also imagine a powerful work
that exploits a traditional form or a restaging of a traditional work (such
as Fuenteovejuna) that gains urgency from the cultural context in which
it is presented. Rather than mere innovation, then, artistic integrity must
characterize the resistant work. Seamus Heaney’s description of political
poetry with artistic integrity applies as well to drama: The work cannot
simplify reality but “its projections and inventions should be a match
for the complex reality which surrounds it and out of which it is generated” (6). The impact that Heaney describes upon reading a poem of high
artistic integrity is just as true of reading or seeing any one of the plays
discussed here: “to experience something bracing and memorable, something capable of increasing in value over the whole course of a life” (8).
To summarize, I contend that these five playwrights upstaged dictatorship because they (1) offered compelling alternatives to official stories and
official performances, (2) had some arguable impact on readers and/or
spectators, if only as deduced from the juxtaposition of competing performances, and (3) created alternative performances with aesthetic strategies
that involve innovations in form or revitalization of traditional forms.
14
The chapter titles characterize the ethical impulse behind the writing and performance of these nineteen plays. Chapter 1 builds directly
on Paul Ricoeur’s call for an ethics of memory, which includes a “duty
to remember” and “a duty to tell.” Though Ricoeur directs himself to
historians, he also seems to me to speak to what South American artists
working under conditions of repression in the 1970s and 1980s managed
to achieve. At the core of duty, as Ricoeur uses the term, is not the meaning of obedience to tradition or authority that connotes everything from
Sunday visits to grandparents to soldiers following through on orders,
but instead a sense of a debt to the past born from an emotional reaction
to atrocity: horror. Although horror alone (experienced as an unsettling
blend of shock, fear, disbelief, disgust, and outrage) blinds and paralyzes,
changing nothing, Ricoeur reminds us that “Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep” (Time and Narrative 3:188). A
sense of duty, as I understand it, is the next move after horror (and perhaps after a sense of guilt and impotence), the impulse to do something
about the injustice acknowledged, a feeling of responsibility, a desire to
pay that debt to the victims of history that Ricoeur posits (189). The fulfi llment of duty is the step that many of us never take, the address of the
injustice (full redress is impossible), whether through artistic expression,
intellectual activity, or social activism.
To the duties to remember and to tell, I add, in Chapters 2 and 3, two
further obligations: a duty to inspire and a duty to conceal. Yet the titles
are also possibly misleading because they suggest that I consider these
four duties as discrete entities. In fact, they are inextricable. Though I
focus on one duty in each of the four chapters, and create a narrative
through-line with a somewhat artificial progression, shifting the emphasis from one duty to the next, in every chapter I also investigate relationships among the duties, how they at times overlap, how one precedes or
succeeds another, how one might at times even confl ict with or impede
another. Finally, I consider how the fulfi llment of one duty or another
might become more urgent under certain historical and political circumstances. Each playwright’s theatrical style, in other words, responds to
the style of authoritarianism he or she is attempting to combat. In order
to upstage dictatorial performances of power, to better craft one’s own
performance, one must be aware of how competing performances appeal
to, or repulse, the spectator.
Chapter 1 considers how five plays by Varela both fulfill the duty to
remember and inspire spectators to ethical memory, countering state performances peculiar to Uruguay that encouraged collective amnesia, defi ned
as the willingness to believe that dictatorship had not much altered daily
life. To create and preserve genuine memory, Varela’s work reminds us,
one must avoid the lure of false memory, nostalgia. As one might expect,
allegory, a useful strategy for fulfilling the duty to conceal, figures more
prominently in his earlier works, staged before the dictatorship had ended,
Introduction
15
and testimony comes to the fore in the plays staged after the return of civilian rule.
Chapter 2 analyzes Boal and Guarnieri’s use of historical allegory as an
attempt to inspire would-be heroes modeled on Che Guevara. Teatro de Arena’s re-creations and reappropriations of three historical figures—Zumbi,
Tiradentes, and Bolívar—subvert some elements of military ideology while
reinforcing others, particularly those concerning race and gender. At the
same time, I argue that their allegorical imagination challenges unquestioning respect for traditional military heroes.
Chapter 3 delineates what I call abstract allegory, which, in contrast to
historical allegory’s one-to-one correspondences, deploys ambiguous, fragmented, multiple levels of meaning often concealed one inside of another.
Gambaro’s work, although superficially similar to postmodernist pastiche,
dismembers plots, characters, and language not to create an emotionless surface but to suspend reminders of the nation’s troubled history and
equally troubled present within the same allegorical web, a web reminiscent of abstract paintings such as Picasso’s Guernica, which while not easily interpretable are nevertheless fi lled with passionate protest. Gambaro’s
innovations in allegorical form, I argue, honor a duty to conceal, an obligation to hide the full import of her work in order to protect from state
persecution herself, those close to her, and her spectators.
Chapter 4 argues that Radrigán’s plays, though fictional, should be considered testimonios along with nonfictional fi rst-person accounts of political persecution. The classification of his work matters because it serves
to describe the strategies by which Radrigán fulfi lls the duty to tell of the
disaster Pinochet visited upon Chile’s poor. Among the most significant of
these strategies, I argue, building on the work of James C. Scott, is Radrigán’s revelation of “hidden transcripts.” At the same time, I show how
some of Radrigán’s testimonios are stronger, both aesthetically and politically, for how they combine testimony with allegory.
My transition from foreign correspondent to translator of plays, theater
practitioner, and scholar of theater/performance began with my admiration for courageous performances that call attention to abuses of authority. Indeed, according to Ricoeur, the inverse of horror is veneration, or
admiration (Time and Narrative 3:188). Thinking back on it now, I realize
that as a journalist I was drawn to the theatricality of public protest, a
theatricality that stems in part from the risks assumed by the protesters/
performers. Later, as a graduate student, the playwrights that attracted me
had something in common with those people who would take to the streets
despite the risk of being water-cannoned, tear-gassed, or shot to death. At
the same time, I realized that the risk takers were in the minority. In fact,
much Latin American theater exposes a dynamic that all too often governs
the majority: on the one hand, a human propensity for casual cruelty, and
on the other, a pathetic tendency toward hopeful subservience to authority. Though I am attempting to ally myself with the risk takers rather than
16 Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater
the dominating or the docile, I realize that by positioning myself as the
worthy scribe of heroic resistors I run the risk of falling into what anthropologist Michael F. Brown has chastised as a form of “moral self-validation” common to researchers of resistance (733). Instead, I would prefer
to self-identify as a “metiche,” as Pinochet called me, or “preguntona,” as
one playwright who shall remain nameless playfully dubbed me, bringing
up questions about the possibilities, and limits, of performance to resist
dictatorship.
1
Carlos Manuel Varela and the
Duty to Remember
The Uruguayan political prisoners may not talk without permission
. . . nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars or birds. One Sunday, Didasko Perez, school
teacher, tortured and jailed “for having ideological ideas,” is visited by
his daughter Milay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The
guards destroy it at the entrance to the jail. On the following Sunday,
Milay brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden, and the
drawing gets through. Didasko praises her works and asks about the
colored circles scattered in the treeptops, many small circles half-hidden among the branches: “Are they oranges? What fruit is it?”
The child puts a fi nger on his mouth. “Sssshhh.”
And she whispers in his ear: “Silly! Don’t you see they’re the eyes?
They’re the eyes of the birds that I’ve smuggled in for you.”
(Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire III: Century of the Wind)
Galeano’s anecdote might reassure one with the thought that even a clever
five-year-old is capable of artistic resistance. All it takes to circumvent
political repression is a bit of wiliness and artistic imagination, the story
seems to say. But is that really all it takes? Just exactly how does one build the
capacity to resist? During and after Uruguay’s dictatorship, the playwright
Carlos Manuel Varela explores a potentially powerful weapon for the
subversion of authority: memory. In half a dozen plays written between 1980
and 1986, Varela improvises on the theme of memory, creating a series of
theatrical visions that upstage dictatorship by countering the authoritarian
regime’s off-stage performances, designed to instill terror and amnesia,
with on-stage performances intended to inspire courage and remembrance.
Considered in relationship to the political circumstances that shaped them
and which they shaped, these plays reveal a strategy for the use of memory
that constitutes both an aesthetic and a political achievement. On the one
hand, Varela manipulates traditional dramatic forms, such as parody,
tragedy, and epic, to sculpt the overwhelming and often contradictory
emotions commonly experienced by victims of dictatorship. Within these
forms, a theatrical imagery rich in symbol, allusion, metaphor, and allegory
poetically compresses a wide range of emotions, including grief, nostalgia,
terror, rage, yearning for safety, desire for escape. On the other hand,
the same poetic tropes sometimes also code his language and disguise a
dangerous political struggle to create an alternative worldview. Besides
fighting the totalitarian tendency toward collective amnesia, Varela’s theater
implicitly invites spectators to join in that fight, and reminds them that
such an effort is an ethical imperative, what Paul Ricoeur calls “the duty
to remember.”1 Varela’s aesthetic choices, I argue, encourage an ethical use
of memory, ethical in that it avoids the pitfalls of distortion and nostalgia,
building instead a dialectical relationship between individual and collective
consciousness in order to create a stronger sense of community among
dissident spectators. 2
This raises several broad theoretical questions: What is “collective
amnesia” and how was it provoked by the dictatorship? How does memory-in-performance negotiate the border between the private and public,
individual and collective? And fi nally, what is an ethical, as opposed to
an unethical, use of memory? Exploration of these questions, fi rst in the
abstract, then through close readings of Varela’s plays, illuminates the
intersection between the formal elements of his theater and its political
import.
Recourse to collective memory, and its opposite, collective amnesia,
must be understood in the uniquely Uruguayan context. Uruguay’s military
tended to favor imprisonment, torture, and exile, as opposed to outright
assassination. The fear of pain, they discovered, could be just as effective
as actual punishment to keep the tiny nation’s population of less than three
million people in terrorized conformity. There was no need, as occurred
during Chile’s coup, to bomb the presidential palace; no need, as in Argentina, to “disappear” as many as thirty thousand people. Instead, there was
what historians describe as a slow-motion slide into dictatorship, with
the cooperation of two successive right-wing civilian governments, led by
presidents Jorge Pacheco Areco (1967–1972) and Juan María Bordaberry
(1972–1976), who gradually curtailed a host of civil rights, culminating in
the dissolution of parliament on June 27, 1973 (Martínez 12–13; Nahum
118–127). The Uruguayan military attempted to emulate the apparent success of its Brazilian counterpart, which had wiped out its fledgling guerrilla movement and enjoyed international recognition for its neo liberal
“economic miracle.” 3 Yet the Uruguayan economy never reached a level of
success comparable to Brazil’s (Fagen 66). And although the Uruguayan
military arguably quashed its guerilla movement months before Bordaberry’s auto-coup, it continued to persecute alleged subversives among nonviolent center and left-wing sectors of the population (Fagen 47–8). During
the next eleven years of dictatorship, some fi fty thousand people (out of a
population of less than three million) were detained for political reasons,
and some two hundred were reported to have disappeared or died under
torture.4 For both political and economic reasons, more than a tenth of the
population left the country (Weschler 87–88). Nevertheless, the transition
19
into totalitarianism happened slowly, with a superficial order and minimal
public violence, creating an atmosphere in which one could almost forget
that things had ever been different.
Within Uruguayan political life, collective amnesia might be defi ned as
the willingness to believe, or to try to believe, that life had not changed
all that much under dictatorship. This amnesia could never be total and
required a degree of collaboration between the government and its citizens. For instance, the government imposed censorship, which banned
media use of certain words, such as Tupamaro, guerrilla, and libertad
[liberty]. The citizenry responded with at least overt compliance with the
new rule of law and with a tendency to retreat into a private realm that
required a willed forgetfulness of external reality. Some people went so
far as to pretend that their imprisoned Tupamaro relatives did not exist
and cut off contact from them (Sedano Arias). 5 Others, including Varela,
merely avoided public places, burned banned books and magazines, and,
if they could afford it, sent their children to private schools, where there
was less risk that a student’s family might end up the subject of an official
investigation.
The Uruguayan tradition of respect for the rule of law, which one might
think would promote rather than hinder democracy, oddly enough seems
instead to have contributed to the collective amnesia. Under the early
twentieth-century rule of José Batlle y Ordóñez, Uruguay had developed
a progressive legal system that guaranteed civil rights and created a thick
social welfare cushion. Respect for the rule of law became a national
habit. Thus when the slow slide into dictatorship began, civil rights were
curtailed one by one, legally, without overt violence, by executive decrees
accepted by a supine legislative branch (Nahum 118–127). The legality
of the repression created a false sense of security among some citizens,
disguising the shifting political terrain with a veneer of civility and giving a deceptive appearance of moral legitimacy to what some have called
a “culture of fear” (Perelli and Rial). For instance, during legal searches
of buses, supposedly carried out in the name of national security, soldiers would check the identity documents of every passenger, and under
another law, any passenger whose documents were out of date could be
rounded up and sent to the police station for the night. It was also entirely
legal for the soldiers to search and arrest anyone who for whatever reason
struck them as “suspicious.”6 The daily repetition of these performances
of power eventually substituted a new collective memory for the old,
making it seem as if searches and roundups had always been part of the
social landscape. As Joseph Roach has noted, improvisation, if repeated
without revision, can make itself appear part of a timeless, natural ritual,
erasing traces of its own disruption: “The present stabilizes the past by
representing itself as the inevitable consummation of deliberate steps, but
to do this it must smooth over the unbidden eruptions necessary to its
own creation” (“Kinship” 222).
20
The dictatorship’s manner of fomenting collective amnesia reframed
radical change as continuity, trying to make it appear that the new postcoup rule of law would help preserve the Uruguayan way of life rather
than destroy it. In fact, the fi rst decree issued by the executive branch after
the June 1973 coup, paradoxically, both dissolved congress and prohibited any media description of the new government as a dictatorship. In
a brilliant flash of irony, the literary newsweekly Marcha published the
text of the decree under the headline: “No es dictadura” [Not Dictatorship] (Martínez 19). The decree tried to justify the dissolution of congress
as an essentially conservative move that cleansed the governing body of
“una acción subversiva” [a subversive movement] that would undermine
the Uruguayan constitution and “paradójicamente pretende, explotando
nuestra natural preocupación por la legalidad, escudarse ahora en esa
legalidad cuya destrucción persiguió y persigue” [paradoxically attempt,
exploiting our natural concern for legality, to shield itself with that legality
whose destruction it sought and seeks] (Martínez 18). The decree pretends
to identify an existing paradox in order to create a confusing mirror- image
paradox of its own: Because the members of congress were hiding behind
the law in order to destroy the law, then what might seem like the destruction of the law is actually a defense of the law. What might look like a dictatorship is actually a democracy. What might seem like a radical swerve
toward totalitarianism and a betrayal of democratic traditions is actually
an extension of those traditions. What looked and felt like radical change
was not really change at all. The decree offers a glimpse into how societies forget, a process touched upon by Paul Connerton in his study of the
opposite phenomenon, How Societies Remember. Connerton’s description
of the fate of the Czech people just as accurately describes Uruguay under
dictatorship:
The mental enslavement of the subjects of a totalitarian regime begins
when their memories are taken away. When a large power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness, it uses the method
of organised forgetting . . . Contemporary writers are proscribed, historians are dismissed from their posts, and the people who have been
silenced and removed from their jobs become invisible and forgotten.
What is horrifying in totalitarian regimes is not only the violation of
human dignity but the fear that there might remain nobody who could
ever again properly bear witness to the past. (14–15)
As the years of the dictatorship extended throughout a decade, what
sometimes required effortful forgetting for an older generation became
simple ignorance for a younger generation that grew up under dictatorship.
Uruguayan sociologist Carina Perelli’s observation about the power of
silencing as an attempt “not just to deny reality but to make it vanish”
became a psychological fact in some cases (Power 153). One Montevideo
21
bookstore owner, for instance, recalls that it was only after civilian rule
was reestablished, when he was fi fteen years old, in 1985, that he truly
became aware that he had been living under a dictatorship. Educated in
private schools, with access only to the government-controlled media, he
had somehow failed to hear the rumors, failed to notice the few scattered
protests denouncing torture and “disappearances.”7 One day on a bus he
began to read a pamphlet describing the standard tortures used under
dictatorship and was so shocked by the revelation that when he got off at
his stop, he vomited his lunch (Marchese personal interview).
One reason why collective amnesia is so pernicious is that memory
plays a crucial role in the construction of identity, on both the individual
and collective levels.8 Loss of memory implies loss of identity. Maurice
Halbwachs argues that all memory is almost entirely collective: “The
mind reconstructs its memories under the pressure of society” (51).9 For
Halbwachs, the act of distancing ourselves from present sensory experience in order to summon up the past is only possible because of the social
framework—family, neighbors, friends, fellow workers, religious affi liations, etc.—that has shaped our ability to reflect upon ourselves (67).
In a persuasive response to Halbwachs, however, Ricoeur balances the
sociological approach against the psychological/phenomenological idea
of memory as “the cohesion of the states of consciousness of the individual ego,” and persuasively argues for a “rapprochement” that gives
individuals agency in the construction and self-appropriation of memory
(Memory 124–128). For Ricoeur, the use of language and construction
of narrative, when we tell ourselves or others what we remember, is the
key to the work of memory as a determinant of individual identity. For
instance, he notes that though speaking is a social activity, our speech
is rife with the use of proper names, of the fi rst-person “I,” and of possessives such as “my” and “mine”—all markers of individual identity
(Memory 120–132).
In the wake of historical trauma, Ricoeur argues, memory serves to
preserve identity on both individual and collective levels. He describes
this preservation as the duty of the “conscientious historian,” who initiates a critique of power by “opening up the archive [and] retrieving traces
which the dominant ideological forces attempted to suppress” (Imagination 16). Theatrical performance, however, has the advantage of being
able to retrieve and re-create memory even before its traces have been
relegated to an archive. At the moment of performance, aesthetics and
politics are intimately linked: Language combined with corporal movement and gesture—integrated with sound, lights, and set—allows the
actor and spectator to become co-archivists of a psychosocial archive,
cocreators of memories that may serve to defy quotidian reality. Thanks
to the interplay between performers and spectators, theater may become,
to use Pierre Nora’s oft-cited term, a “lieux de memoire,” or a site that
propagates communal and individual memories.
22
The process by which theater activates memory and consequently shapes
identity, it seems to me, is a dialectical one. Spectators prompted to remember by what they experience in the theater synthesize their experiences up
until that moment with the new experience of the performance and the
memories it conjures. After leaving the theater, subsequent experiences will
in turn be fi ltered through the lens of the fused old-and-new memories. Of
course, as Borges taught with the protagonist disabled by memory overload
in “Funes el memorioso” [Funes the Memorious], not everything can or
should be remembered. The process of piling up memories is thus not a
pure dialectic in the Hegelian or Marxist sense of steady accumulation
and progress toward an eventual utopia, but instead resembles the process
of transculturation, in which elements of a new culture are gained but elements of the old are unavoidably lost.10
What is lost when theater triggers memory? First, as memory begins to
take shape, the wealth of detail involved in direct sensory experience is lost.
As Michael Schudson puts it succinctly in his study of collective memory:
“Narratives simplify” (355). Furthermore, if memory is the raw material
for the narrative we tell ourselves about ourselves, or in other words for our
identity, then the loss of certain memories involved in the shaping of a new
narrative also implies a loss of certain elements of the old identity. During
that process of identity modification, we may lose a sense of security, a
sense of innocence, a sense of faith in certain beliefs or, to use Gramsci’s
term, “hegemonic ideologies.” As Brecht preached, what once seemed “natural” may be alienated, denaturalized, and questioned.
Among the things that may be gained, when theater effectively employs
memory as a form of resistance to political repression, are a sense of oneself as a participant in a struggle, a greater feeling of solidarity with others
involved in the same struggle, and if not the need or ability to change the
world, at least a greater awareness of one’s inability to change it. For example, Tito Prieto, an Uruguayan actor who attended a Varela play about torture, Interrogation in Elsinore, in 1984, during the midst of the transition
to democracy, recalled that because he had witnessed the arrest of an aunt
who was “disappeared,” he had to overcome a fear of re-living her arrest in
order to get himself to go see the play. In fact, as he had feared, the performance did trigger memories of his aunt’s arrest and horrific images of her
imagined fate. He realized even more acutely how powerless he felt to take
any action on her behalf: “As I left the theater and went out into the streets,
I felt like screaming. I felt like doing something. But I also felt that that was
very dangerous, that even though the dictatorship was supposedly ending,
who knew if the new government would last? Any little move outside of the
established order still seemed dangerous” (personal interview).
One key element of memory’s dialectical dynamic is what Connerton
calls “acts of transfer.” These acts, which include commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices, play a crucial role in reconstructing and conveying memory from individual to individual down through generations (39).
23
Acts of transfer, I would add, also function across the same generation,
conveying memory horizontally from private to pubic realms. Both dictatorships and dissidents engage in competing ceremonies and practices that
build and rebuild memory. Though the emphasis here is on resistance to
totalitarianism, it is important to keep in mind that the substitution of
new rituals and bodily practices for older ones took place on both sides,
sometimes in a mutually constitutive fashion. For example, the dictatorship
instituted the practice of sending a censor to monitor theatrical rehearsals
and performances. This in turn led actors and spectators to moderate their
postures, gestures, and movements. Rather than look any particular audience member in the eye, for instance, actors began to aim their monologues
to a “safer space,” such as the rear of the theater, above the heads of the
spectators (Aguilera personal interview). Spectators, in response, rather
than shout out or applaud, might simply smile or exchange glances or subtle elbow jabs at potentially subversive moments during the performance
(Mirza personal interview). Another example, from the realm of ritual: At
many public events, authorities would mandate the singing of the national
anthem; opponents of the dictatorship would conform but then burst into
a shout when they got to the phrase in the lyrics, “tremble tyrants!” [¡tiranos temblad!], thus transforming the attempted ceremony of national unity
into a demonstration of discontent with the regime (Martínez 21; Perelli,
“Youth” 229). After those performances, for many Uruguayans, the memory of their national anthem would never be the same.
Connerton’s notion of “bodily practices” (or “incorporating practices,”
which he uses interchangeably with “bodily practices”) as acts that transmit cultural memory is useful for analyzing how kinetic memory helped
transmit fear in Uruguay. Connerton elucidates how postures, gestures,
and corporal movement express what he calls “the choreography of authority” (74). Bodily activity can convey messages that through repetition may
become habit, “a remembering in the hands and in the body” (72–73). As a
habit grows widespread, the kinetic memories advance from the individual
to a collective level, spreading emotions, attitudes, and opinions. Applying this insight to Uruguay under dictatorship one can identify a series of
bodily practices that were fi rst imposed on political prisoners by the military authorities, then, oddly enough, to a certain degree self-replicated by
citizens outside of prisons, and fi nally, even incorporated by theater practitioners attempting to resist the military. Among these practices, which
reinforced the hierarchy between a powerful military and powerless civilians, are maintaining silence, occluding vision, and protecting the body
from assault.
Silence in prisons was imposed on political prisoners by routinely placing
them in solitary confi nement and forbidding them to communicate in any
way with their cellmates (Rosencof). Outside, on the streets, especially on
public transportation, where roundups were common, citizens maintained
a self-imposed, self-protective silence, trying to say only the minimum
necessary to function (Rial, “Fear” 100). Theater practitioners who
remained in the country quickly learned a particular variety of silence:
never to question why a show was closed down at the last minute or why
their cast lists had to be submitted to the local police station for approval or
why a certain actor was suddenly banned from performing the night before
the show was to open. Director Marcelino Duffau snorted when asked if
he had inquired as to the rationale for closing down his 1980 production of
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt after only a single performance: “I may be crazy, but I’m
not that crazy” (personal interview). Fear was a survival mechanism that
self-imposed the silence necessary for survival.
In prison, inmates were often kept hooded for days and weeks at a time
with a heavy, scratchy wool “capucha” that covered the face and made it
difficult to breathe, while supposedly keeping the prisoner from recognizing his torturers (Rosencof and Fernández Huidobro). On the outside, civilians looked around to see if anyone was following or eavesdropping, while
scrupulously avoiding eye contact, hooding themselves in a metaphoric
sense: No one wanted to meet the eyes of the soldier who had boarded the
bus to round up “suspicious” civilians (Duffau, Prieto). In prison, the body
became a source of torment and humiliation: One might be kept standing for days at a time until one collapsed; one might be denied access to
a bathroom until one soiled oneself. The parts of the body most sensitive
to pain—the eyes, the fingernails, the toenails, the nipples, the genitals,
the anus—were likely to be assaulted. On the streets, people self-policed
behavior to cover up and shrink the body, to walk and talk and stand and
sit as unobtrusively as possible. In part due to military mandates, young
people’s dress became more conservative (Perelli, “Youth” 228). The most
extreme example of self-protection of the body was to go into hiding or
leave the country. Though torturers and their victims, or potential victims,
were engaged in oppositional bodily practices—assault versus self-protection—to a certain extent, torturers looked out for the physical welfare of
their victims. One of the reasons that relatively few people died under torture in Uruguay despite its widespread practice is that doctors collaborated
with torturers to ensure that the victims could tolerate the levels of physical
torment they were experiencing (Weschler 126–128).
Although some bodily practices were purely self-reminders of danger,
others engendered both memory and forgetting. For instance, in response
to the threat of being spied upon and denounced as “subversive,” many
people in public spaces would draw near to one’s interlocutor and speak
only in hushed tones—a subtle form of resistance. This improvisation
simultaneously reinforces the memory of danger and yet, through repetition,
may eventually efface that memory. Several Uruguayan theater practitioners
recalled that even after they left Uruguay to live abroad, they continued to
lower their voices to a whisper in restaurants and cafés, sometimes to the
amusement of their foreign companions, who would remind them that there
was no longer any danger in speaking up (Pirelli, Duffau, Jones personal
25
interviews). The individual kinetic memory here, when transposed to an
environment with a different collective memory, appeared unnecessarily
self-protective, even comically “paranoid.”
Given the role of memory in transmitting fear, it at fi rst seems difficult to imagine how memory could also serve as a guide to ethical action
that resists dictatorship. Yet fear and resistance are not mutually exclusive.
Despite their fears, a few theater practitioners hid dissidents in their homes,
maintained safety deposit boxes for opponents of the regime, staged or
performed in works that they suspected would at best end their careers and
at worst end in their own torture or exile (personal interviews Amoretti,
Sawer). Ricoeur juxtaposes “abuses” of memory—blocked, forced (compulsive repetition), or manipulated (by ideology) memory—to ethical memory, that is, a memory aimed at fulfi lling a duty to the victims, justice,
without vengeance (Memory 56–92). Ricoeur writes: “The duty of memory
is the duty to do justice, through memories, to another than the self” (89).
During the early, most repressive period of the dictatorship, from 1973
to 1978, Uruguayan theater could do little more than hint at the duty to
remember, primarily through allegorical stagings of foreign works (Mirza
Cronología 106–129). But starting in 1979, memory began to serve theater
practitioners as a guide to understanding what had happened to their culture, learning how to function in the present, and considering what course
to take in the future. What Francine A’Ness has eloquently written about
the Peruvian theater collective Yuyachkani is also true of Varela’s work:
Only in the present can the past be experienced and the future imagined . . . In the present, memories are formed and make sense, and
there they compete for the coveted role of shaping the future. The
stage, then, becomes a living canvas upon which the contested past can
be re-presented and assessed from new perspectives, and where futures
can be imagined, envisioned, and rehearsed. (402)
Varela’s theater reconfigures material from the past in order to construct
memories. This process of memory-building is well captured by the common Spanish-language expression “hacer memoria,” literally “to make
memory,” as in “Voy a hacer memoria” [I’m going to make memory],
uttered as one attempts to recollect.
Nostalgia, by contrast, is almost always depicted by Varela as a destructive attempt to retreat into a fantasy world, an idealization of the past that
paralyzes one in the present. The defi nition of nostalgia as “a myth functioning as a memory” proposed by Raymond Williams in a very different
context—his analysis of the literary yearning for rural England—nevertheless vividly describes the Uruguayan longing for the past: “An idealization,
based on a temporary situation and on a deep desire for stability, served to
cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time” (45). In
Varela plays, characters mired in nostalgia often suffer tragic fates.
26
Varela’s theater maintains that those who triumph, or at least survive,
take only temporary refuge in memory’s private, individual, and psychological dimensions—until the time is right to reveal memory as public, collective, and social. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau
counts memory among the devious types of resistance to which the disenfranchised may resort, an “art of the weak” (37). Though Nora and
Gaston Bachelard eloquently expound upon memory’s connection to place,
De Certeau rightly notes that in a space dominated by an outside force,
memory can nevertheless thrive through its reliance on time. Within another’s domain, memory offers “recourse to a different world, from which
can, must, come the blow that will change the established order” (86). As
long as one’s memories remain unexpressed, they are free from persecution:
They cannot be used as evidence of sedition, or confiscated, or destroyed.
And as long as they remain uncensored, inner memories may contradict
exterior behavior that obeys authority.
Memory-as-resistance, however, must eventually involve revelation,
communication among those who would build a movement, or even stage a
single resistant performance. Although a play in performance may between
the lines urge private, individual remembrance as a safer course of action
than public defiance, the performance itself, due to its very public and collective nature of theater, no matter how densely coded, requires exposure
of the “hidden transcript,” James C. Scott’s term for private disagreement,
anger, frustration, and hatred toward dominant elites despite a public
appearance of compliance with authority. The evanescence of performance
serves as a double-edged sword, offering some protection from would-be
repressors, yet also requiring either repetition or documentation in order
to maintain its effectiveness. And both repetition and documentation,
unavoidably, heighten the risk of repression. Aware of this dilemma, Varela
developed his own coded language to subvert, yet also function within, the
restrictions imposed by the dictatorship.
***
Born in 1940, the only son of a prominent radio and stage actor, Violeta
Amoretti, Varela began writing plays in his late twenties while working
as a teacher of literature in a Montevideo high school. His earliest efforts,
The Game Has a Name [El juego tiene nombre] (1968), Happening?
(1970), and The Vine [La enredadera] (1972), were all quickly produced,
welcomed by the public, and praised as innovative portraits of “alienation
and isolation” by the prominent critic Laura Escalante (377). The Vine,
in which a middle-class mother confronts her son with his transformation
into a left-wing guerrilla, encapsulated some of the earliest signs that the
nation, often hailed as the “Switzerland of South America,” was entering
an era of social convulsion. The Tupamaro guerrillas were gaining momentum among the young, whom they attracted with a combination of daring
27
political crimes—robberies, kidnappings, assassinations—and a utopian
vision of an economically just society.11 Reactions to Varela’s play included
telephoned death threats from anonymous individuals who thought his portrayal of the guerrilla youth was too sympathetic to the revolutionary cause
(Varela, “Teatro del Exilio” 5). The death threats presaged in microcosm
what would soon happen to the country, as economic difficulties led the
government to gradually abandon the democratic traditions of the welfare
state established in the early 1900s—with extensive protections for urban
workers, excellent health care, and strong educational benefits—and move
toward the authoritarian regime that would dominate the second half of
the century (Weinstein 83).
After the 1973 coup, Varela’s career, as both a playwright and teacher
of dramatic literature in a public high school, was abruptly derailed when
he was fi red from his job. Like many Uruguayans, he was never given a
clear reason for his dismissal, but was simply informed that in order to
reapply for his position, or to hold any state job, he would need to sign
a so-called “Certificate of Democratic Faith.”12 Moreover, positions in
state institutions, such as public schools, would only be granted to who
had earned an “A” or a “B” in the military’s new system of classification.
Under the system, every Uruguayan adult would be labeled “A,” “B,”
or “C,” depending on their supposed degree of political trustworthiness
(Díaz 197). Although the authorities never publicly disclosed anyone’s
classification, Varela suspected that he was a “C,” based on the fact that
he had signed some petitions in favor of civil rights and written theater
reviews for a left-wing newspaper. Reapplying for his teaching job was
therefore risky, because it might draw unfavorable attention from the
authorities. Instead, he remained unemployed for several years, relying
on his wife, Alicia Cabeza, and on both their families to help support
their three young sons. He began to make plans to leave the country
for Mexico, but was fi nally able to fi nd teaching work at Montevideo’s
only university-level theater conservatory, a private school, the Escuela
Municipal de Arte Dramático Margarita Xirgu. He decided to stay until
he was fi red, which he thought inevitable. But the dreaded dismissal never
came.13
Although he considered himself fortunate to have escaped torture,
imprisonment, or exile, Varela suffered from what he and other Uruguayans have called a sense of “insile,” or exile within the boundaries of one’s
own country, characterized by feelings of isolation, nostalgia for the past,
and impotence in the present (Perelli, “Youth” 213–214):
En ese periodo los dramaturgos estábamos muy solos, apenas nos
podíamos reunir, y cuando lo hacíamos en algún café o en una casa
de familia éramos pocos; había que evitar las reuniones numerosas.
Recuerdo que caminaba por la calle y volvía la cabeza para constatar si
me seguían. Eran tiempos muy dificiles, de requisa y quema de libros,
28
de ocultamiento de ideas, de tristeza y soledad. (Varela, “El teatro del
exilio” 1).14
[During that period, we playwrights were very isolated, we could hardly
meet, and when we did so in some café or in someone’s home, we were
few; large meetings had to be avoided. I remember that I would walk
along the street and turn my head to see if I was being followed. They
were very difficult times, of seizing and burning of books, of hiding of
ideas, of sadness and loneliness.]
For five years, Varela wrote nothing and staged nothing.
During those five years, 1973–1978, the military harshly repressed any
artistic activity deemed potentially subversive, including most theater. One
of the country’s best-known novelists and playwrights, Mauricio Rosencof,
exposed as a leader of the left-wing guerrillas known as the Tupamaros,
was promptly imprisoned and tortured relentlessly for nine months; his
solitary confi nement was to last eleven years, and his total time in prison
totaled more than thirteen years. Another Tupamaro playwright and novelist Hiber Conteris who had years earlier severed his links with the guerrilla
group was nevertheless detained in 1976, imprisoned for nine years, and
tortured so badly that he suffered permanent hearing loss. The renowned
novelists Mario Benedetti and Juan Carlos Onetti were forced to leave the
country (Mirza, “Cronología” 107–129).
Those who remained behind found that avoiding political activity did
not necessarily guarantee freedom from persecution. The literary critic José
Pedro Díaz eloquently describes the experience of realizing that for some
unknown reason, he had begun to be considered an enemy of the state:
In my case, it was never clear when they began to consider me “guilty.”
Perhaps all they needed were certain friendships, along with a few articles I had written some time before and my correspondence, which
they scrutinized openly (it would sometimes arrive with only part of
the contents missing). What had they taken out of the envelope? How
far would they go in demanding an explanation? What would the interrogation be like? (198)
A prominent theater scholar who belonged to the centrist Christian Democratic Party, Roger Mirza, recalls how by the time his house was meticulously searched for six hours by about a dozen soldiers, he thought he had
already burned all his “subversive” materials. But he had forgotten one
issue of a banned weekly newspaper, Marcha, which the soldiers found.
For what seemed like an eternity, while the soldiers discussed what to do
with him, he feared that he might be hauled off to prison, with its routine
horror of interrogation under torture: One of his brothers would serve
three months for a participating in peaceful sit-in; the other would serve
29
six years for collaborating with the Tupamaros. To Mirza’s relief, however, it turned out that one of the soldiers was a former university student
of his who was willing, and able, to intervene on his behalf (personal
interview).
Marcha was permanently closed in 1974 for publishing a short story,
“The Bodyguard” [El guardaespaldas], by Nelson Marra, that censors
found objectionable. Censors also scrutinized dramatic texts and attended
theatrical rehearsals, in order to ban any potentially dissident production.
Local police chiefs or city government bureaucrats could shut down a
show by simply “recommending” to the director that he abandon the production (Videla personal interview).15 These so-called recommendations
usually came at the last minute before the show opened, in order to cause
the most possible economic harm to the theater company, which by then
had fully invested time and money in the production. In 1976, the country’s largest and most established theater, El Galpón, was closed down,
its assets confi scated, its fi les destroyed, and its members imprisoned,
then sent into exile, where they regrouped in Mexico City (Mirza, “Cronología” 133). The company did not return to Montevideo until 1985, the
same year that Rosencof and Conteris were released from prison under an
amnesty accord. Conteris left the country; Rosencof stayed.
In 1979, as the level of repression eased, Varela returned to writing
with Las gaviotas no beben petróleo [Seagulls Don’t Drink Oil], in which
a domineering mother and her passive son serve as allusions to the repressive state and its, for the most part, impotent citizens. The five works
considered in detail here soon followed, at the rate of almost one per
year, between 1980 and 1986. Alfonso y Clotilde [Alfonso and Clotilde]
(1980) was the fi rst Uruguayan play to clearly allude to torture and political kidnapping, suggesting in an indirect but powerful manner that only
recourse to memory could keep individual and collective identity intact in
the face of atrocity. Los cuentos del fi nal [Stories of the End] (1981) uses
the image of a crumbling mansion, and a physically and mentally deteriorating old matriarch, as a metaphor for the military government’s eroding base of support. The matriarch’s misuse of memory, her nostalgia for
a false past, functions as a synecdoche for Uruguay’s crumbling uppermiddle class aristocracy, among the strongest supporters of the military
government. In Palabras en la arena [Words in the Sand] (1982), memory
takes the classic form of a ghost, a “disappeared” man who comes back to
haunt his playwright friend into writing dramas that question the established order. Interrogatorio en Elsinore: después de La ratonera [Interrogation in Elsinore: After the Mousetrap] (1983) employs metatheatrical
techniques to show how performance can create and reinforce memories that counter the official story. Chronicle of The Wait [Crónica de la
espera] (1986) uses cinematic techniques to stage the anguished search
for the disappeared and the tragedy of a generation lost except for how it
might live in the memory of a future generation.
30
ALFONSO Y CLOTILDE [ALFONSO AND CLOTILDE] 1980
Alfonso y Clotilde begins cheerfully, like a lighthearted domestic farce, as a
well-heeled couple has apparently run out of gas while out for a picnic and
bickers about who is to blame for their predicament. When a dismembered
hand surfaces, however, Alfonso and Clotilde’s chatter about country clubs
and dinner parties acquires a bizarre incongruity. The sudden appearance
of a naked, obviously tortured and mutilated man, who turns out to be
Paco, Alfonso’s former factory employee, forces the couple into grotesquely
funny attempts to minimize and rationalize the situation. As the horrors
accumulate—Paco dies, other bodies surface, the rescue the couple awaits
proves illusory, and they suffer a total loss of memory—the comedic veneer
cracks, revealing more and more ugliness behind it. Black humor, apparent “absurdism,” and touches of “surrealism” serve to mask Varela’s staging of the confl ict between the lure of amnesia and the ethical imperative
to remember. The farcical tone also helps conceal the drama’s call for a
middle road between open rebellion, which it depicts as too dangerous
(Paco’s mutilation), and willing conformity, as epitomized by Alfonso and
Clotilde’s unattractive fate: the complete loss of memory and consequent
disintegration of identity. That middle road, the drama suggests, involves
retaining one’s memory for use, as de Certeau writes, as “an art of the
weak.”
The play opened on May 14, 1980 at the Teatro del Centro, a Montevideo theater-in-the-round that seats about 200 people. The set, designed
by Carlos Pirelli, consisted of a large sand-colored cotton quilt fi lled with
rice husks that covered the entire floor of the stage. Each pocket of the
quilt was only about three-quarters full of the husks, so that as the actors
walked upon it, the shifting husks made a whispering sound that recalled
the scraping of sand or the hiss of the sea in the wind. Footlights trained on
the quilt created a hot sun by “day” and a ghostly blue by “night”; an eerie
play of shadows flickered over the undulating surface as the actors moved
around the space (Pirelli personal interview). According to the director,
Carlos Aguilera, the scenic design, coupled with mysterious lights (Walter
Reyno) and anxiety-provoking music (Elbio Rodriguez Barilari), created
the sensation that one was observing a “a vast, empty, magical desert, like
something out of Beckett” (personal interview).
Aguilera worked with the actors during rehearsals to create a quick,
comic performance rhythm at the start of the play that gradually slowed
and darkened until the fi nal halting syllables spoken by the characters suffering from amnesia. The actor who played Alfonso, the late Juan Alberto
Sobrino, Aguilera recalls, had to make an effort to tone down his natural
strength of character to incarnate the good-hearted but timid middle manager. Alfonso’s wife Clotilde was played by the late Leonor Álvarez, who
strove to capture the character’s confl icting desires: to belong to a privileged class and yet to give of herself to others. The fact that Álvarez had
31
been a member of the communist party, before it was banned, added to the
personal risk she assumed by performing in a play that might be deemed
subversive. For spectators familiar with her politics, that risk no doubt also
added to the power of her performance. As Clotilde, when Álvarez held the
dying Paco (Daniel Videla) in her arms, she wept copious real tears that
would fall like rain on his face (Videla personal interview). As Paco, Videla
appeared on stage nude, his body smeared with mud and red clay that simulated blood, dragging himself as if he had been tortured almost to death.
During the scenes with Paco, many spectators exchanged shocked glances
(Mirza personal interview). Afterward, some went backstage to congratulate the cast and wondered aloud how long the play would be allowed to
run before being closed down by government censors. Others, perhaps out
of fear, said “no entendi mucho” [I didn’t understand much] (Videla). Yet
the play was not closed down and ran for several months to full houses.
Attending the production became an act of political defiance, a defiance
that was demonstrated again at the polls later that year when a solid majority of the Uruguayan public voted “no” in a plebiscite on the new constitution proposed by the military government, a clear expression of discontent
with military rule. The allure of amnesia prevailed later, however, in 1989,
when voters ratified the 1986 Ley de Caducidad guaranteeing amnesty for
military and police who had committed human rights abuses.16
Alfonso and Clotilde embody at least three different types of forgetfulness: a clean slate, a false past, and a psychological emptiness. The clean
slate and the false past might also be described as contradictory impulses
toward “exile” and “insile.” The barren landscape surrounding them is a
liminal space, neither home nor exile, which the characters inhabit as if in a
limbo between memory and fantasy. It could be a dream world, or a nightmare, from a Goya or a Dalí painting. Caught between home and exile,
the characters oscillate between fantasies of each. In their imaginary exile
there is no uprooting, no sense of loss or alienation, because all memory of
what came before has vanished. Moreover, because the couple is comically
oblivious to the impossibility of avoiding change, their fantasies about the
nature of their new life are identical to how they describe their old life,
down to the style of furniture they plan to buy and the Picasso reproductions Clotilde wants to hang on the walls once again (163). Alfonso wonders for a moment whether it might not be time for a change, but quickly
succumbs to the vision of a future identical to a fantasy past they never
really had. The change they most fear, however, is not in home décor but in
physical safety: Specifically, they fear torture. Others, they enviously surmise, somehow managed to fi nd the magic key to safe passage into another
space and time free from persecution:
CLOTILDE. Llegaron y fueron felices. Dijeron: empezamos de nuevo.
Y algunos elijieron un lugar donde morir, libremente, sin apuro, con
una sonrisa. (Al borde de la histeria.) Se murieron con sus manos
32
intactas, con todos los dedos, con sus dos testículos, con el cuerpo
agradecido. (160)
[CLOTILDE. They made it and they were happy. They said: Let’s start
again. And some picked a spot in which to die, freely, without worries,
with a smile. (On the verge of hysteria.) They died with their hands
intact, with all their fi ngers, with both their testicles, with a grateful
body.]
Yet only seconds into Alfonso and Clotilde’s mimed “escape,” an imaginary bird splatters across their imaginary windshield, bringing with it the
memory of the blood and violence they are trying to flee (162).
If exile is no solution, insile, or the sense of being exiled within one’s
own country, an experience characterized by alienation, frustration, and
impotence, proves equally unsatisfactory.
Uruguayan social scientists Carina Perelli and Juan Rial argue that insile
bred passivity in a large sector of the middle class during the dictatorship:
El tiempo cronológico seguia transcurriendo, pero ese tiempo que se
valora, estaba suspendido. Lo que se buscaba era esperar en el refugio
privado, en la evocación nostalgica, en la búsqueda de la restauración”
(Perelli y Rial 31–32).
[Chronological time continued to flow, but the time that was valued
was suspended. What was sought was to wait in a private refuge, in the
nostalgic evocation, in the search for restoration.]
Alfonso and Clotilde repeatedly attempt just such a self-protective retreat
into a swirl of false memories, a nostalgic reverie that makes them spectators rather than actors in their own lives, as Alfonso puts it: Una especie de
película adentro de uno mismo (152) [A kind of fi lm inside oneself]. As the
couple sits in their imaginary car, pretending to drive to a place where the
clock of history will stop ticking, every nostalgic evocation ends in disillusion. Their Saturday night sex, at fi rst recalled as a great pleasure, turns
out to have been empty and routine, at least for Clotilde (169). Within her
escapist memory of home lies another escapist fantasy: the superhero world
of television’s Capitain Joe, who can deal with any challenge, unlike her
all-too-human husband. As for Alfonso, his initially cheery memories of
country club friendships soon sour into unpleasant recollections of trying
to keep up appearances despite his sexual impotence, his insomnia, and
his frantic attempts to navigate between the demands of the bosses and the
workers at his factory (170). The deeper they delve into the memories of the
old home, the more hollow its supposed pleasures ring. Long before they
left, or were expelled from, home, they were already exiles of a sort.
Memory as a collective experience and memory as an individual process dovetail in the play’s tragic climax, when Alfonso and Clotilde lose
33
both. The characters’ dark fate underscores the impossibility of erecting an
impermeable boundary between public and private memory. Like victims
of advanced Alzheimer’s, the characters become shells of themselves, as
basic facts essential to their identities begin to escape them. Alfonso tries
to hang on to what he calls the “unforgettable dates”:
CLOTILDE. Fechas?
ALFONSO. Nos casamos un dos de junio.
CLOTILDE. Nací un diez de octubre. (Después de una pausa.
Trémula.) Dos fechas. Nada más que dos fechas.
ALFONSO. ¡Y montones de cosas!
CLOTILDE. Que cosas? Que paso entre esas dos fechas? Y después?
(178–179)
[CLOTILDE. Dates?
ALFONSO. We were married on the second of June.
CLOTILDE. I was born on October tenth. (After a pause, shakily.)
Two dates. Only two dates.
ALFONSO. And tons of things!
CLOTILDE. What things? What happened in between those two
dates? And afterward?]
The dates progress from a social ceremony, marriage, to what is generally
considered a more individual event, birth, to the great mass of incidents—
public and private—that take place between those two life markers. The
sequence, from public to private to public and private, spurs reflection on
how even the most social event is in a sense personal and even the most
individual of moments is inextricable from collective experience. The only
way Alfonso and Clotilde can truly begin again without a past, Varela
shows, is to undergo a kind of self-lobotomy almost as frightening as any
torture. If you erase your collective memory, the play suggests, you ultimately destroy what you might mistakenly think of as your individual self,
sheltered from the collective.
The ability to remember is linked to the ability to speak, which the play
represents as an ethical obligation, recalling Ricoeur’s injunctions to the
historian: the duty to remember and the duty to tell. When Alfonso yells
at Clotilde, “¡Tenés que recordar!” (175) [You must remember!], the cry
could just as easily be directed from the actor to the spectator, from the
playwright to the reader. Under dictatorship in Uruguay, it was important
to preserve at least two categories of memories: memories of what life was
like before the military seized power, and memories of atrocities committed during the regime. Clotilde seems to have forgotten the ethical norms
that prevailed before the military ideology gained ascendancy: Conformity
has become her highest value. And she complains bitterly that her conformity has gone unrewarded (176). By contrast, Alfonso recalls “palabras,
34
pensamientos . . . cosas que alguna vez dijo Papá” (172) [words, thoughts
. . . things that Dad once said], an ethical code that precedes the dictatorship and has led him to protect the union leader Paco. Alfonso’s musing
might have prodded the spectator to remember a time before the dictatorship when there was nothing to shelter people from: Labor organizing was
not prohibited. Before the dictatorship, more than two people could gather
in public without fear of attracting the police. When Varela’s spectators
reflect upon some of the differences between life before and after the coup
or mentally record an atrocity that occurs during the dictatorship, the theater becomes a space in which culture is collectively created.
Ricoeur focuses on the memory of atrocities when he speaks of the
duty to remember as “an imperative directed towards the future, which is
exactly the opposite side of the traumatic character of the humiliations and
wounds of history. It is a duty, thus, to tell” (Memory and Forgetting 10).
Meaningful speech (the duty to tell) relies upon memory, even at the most
basic level, as Alfonso shows when he can no longer recall enough of what
he has just said to proceed to the next syllable. And conversely, speech can
jog memory and spur resistance to authority. The impossibility of freely
voicing certain memories, the maiming of speech in Uruguayan society,
is metaphorically indicated by the powerful allegorical figure of Paco, the
union leader whose tongue has been cut out. At fi rst, far from wanting to
remember and tell, Alfonso and Clotilde see a dismembered hand and try
to pretend they haven’t seen it; they see Paco and try to pretend that he is
not what he clearly is, a victim of torture and political “disappearance.”
On one level, Paco represents Varela himself, who wrote nothing during
the fi rst five years of the dictatorship, yet more generally, he also symbolizes the artist, the political leader, the violently silenced dissident from any
walk of life. Of the variety of competing voices in the play, Paco’s voiceless
“voice” signals most loudly to the audience that the author cannot speak
too openly, that the audience must carefully listen between the lines. Paco
is what Roach calls an “effigy,” a substitute, “created by the absence of
an original” that keeps open a place in memory in order to perpetuate a
community (Roach, Cities 36–37). Paco’s silent presence substitutes for
both the silenced artist and the disappeared, those who could not speak
for themselves.
Because Paco, like the mythical figure of Philomela, has been robbed
of speech by those who would also rob him of the ability to denounce the
crime, Alfonso and Clotilde become the only (on-stage) witnesses to his
suffering. Their reaction, however, mirrors the reaction of many Uruguayans to torture. Rather than assume the responsibility of witnessing, they
distance themselves, refuse to see the torture, refuse to recognize it as their
own possible fate. They joke about the marks on Paco’s back and even suggest that he may have wandered off from a nudist colony. Ironically, despite
their efforts to distance themselves, they eventually end up just like him, as
their own memory and speech degenerates. In the meantime, Paco serves
35
as a spur to genuine memory (as distinguished from the false memories of
nostalgia), triggering Clotilde’s acknowledgment of the emptiness of life at
home (167). Clotilde’s confession, in turn, triggers Alfonso’s recognition
that his experience at home was actually far less than idyllic (169–170).
Paco’s corpse then becomes a lieux de memoire for the couple, a site that
recreates and embodies their community’s memories. In a poignant reversal
of roles, as if Paco could substitute for Clotilde’s own silenced voice, she
pleads with him: “Hablá Paco. Gritá mucho mientras nos guiás y sobre
todo, disimulá, tratándonos como a tus compañeros. Decí que hay otro
lugar y que sólo tenemos que llegar allá y maldecir el pasado” (178). [Speak,
Paco. Shout a lot as you guide us and most important, pretend, treat us as
if we were your fellow workers. Say that there’s another place and that we
only have to get there and curse the past.] But Paco’s mute presence stubbornly testifies to the persistence of the past in the present.
The drama’s central irony is that though Alfonso and Clotilde are forced
out of their home because of the power of words; in fact, they never meant to
wield that power. The conservative Clotilde’s innocent remark about Picasso
was unintentionally charged with symbolism of resistance. Her husband’s
boss hears her admire Picasso’s paintings and asks whether she also admires
his “ideas.” Though Varela never explicitly states what those ideas are, there
are at least two that he might be asking the spectator to recall: opposition
to military rule, and the capacity of art to resist such rule. Varela’s audience
must remember (understanding any allusion requires memory) that Picasso
was not only the artist who painted “La maternidad” [Motherhood], the
painting Clotilde admires, but also the artist who painted “Guernica,” and
who in 1937 announced his “abhorrence of the military caste which has
sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death” (Frascina 134). Embedded in
the joke about Clotilde’s blunder may be a second joke, between Varela and
his audience, about the stupidity of censors who persecute the innocent and
sometimes miss the “guilty,” such as the playwright, who at the height of the
dictatorship manages to stage a condemnation of apathy to political repression and an exhortation to cultivate speech and memory.
The omnipresent danger of the production being censored or shut down,
however, made it necessary for the message urging cautious resistance to
itself be delivered with caution. After the dictatorship, looking back at his
drama of that era, Varela writes that he tried to hold up a “fractured mirror”
that would oblige the spectators to piece together the meaning of the work.
He resorts to this style of writing primarily to elude censorship, but the result
is also a break with realism that proves to be aesthetically adventurous:
En Uruguay, durante la dictadura military, el escritor teatral no pudo
seguir ejerciendo su tarea de comunicador, de acuerdo con la tradición.
Fue necesario fracturar el espejo y recurrir a un lenguaje “enmascarado.” Fue entonces que los criticos comenzaron a señalar elementos
caracterizadores de las obras de este período, detectatron un “realismo
36
alucinado,” una creciente simbología del teatro uruguayo. (Varela,
“Teatro uruguayo” 381)
[In Uruguay, during the military dictatorship, the dramatist could no
longer continue to follow the traditional exercise of the task of communication. It was necessary to fracture the mirror and resort to a
“masked” language. It was then that the critics began to point out
elements that characterized the works of this period; they detected a
“hallucinogenic realism,” a growing system of symbols in Uruguayan
theater.]
In order to fracture his mirror, Varela fi nds a new use for techniques that
had long tradition in both European and Latin American theater: the grotesque, the surreal, and the absurd. Instead of creating “hallucinogenic
realism,” however, I would argue, these techniques departed from realism altogether, underscoring the paradox that Uruguayan social reality had
become unbelievably nightmarish.
The grotesque influenced Latin American theater through at least two
important figures in European drama, the Italian Luigi Pirandello (1867–
1936) and the Spaniard Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936). In the River
Plate region, the grotesco criollo, as it was called in South America, was epitomized by the works of Armando Discépolo (1887–1971), who used black
humor to portray Italian immigrants whose dreams of success in the new
world have been betrayed. Varela’s work, however, seems closer in spirit to
that of the Spanish grotesque, in particular Valle-Inclán and his esperpentos,
which mock hypocritical pretensions to conventional morality:
This is the way I have wanted to create the Esperpento, basing myself
in a lack of adaptation of tragic themes to characters who turn out to
be ridiculous before them . . . We are lost in the great sin of the world.
Men are confronted by great situations and appear then in all their
smallness. (Valle-Inclán, El Castellano, October 23, 1925, quoted in
Lyon 123)
Much of Alfonso and Clotilde’s humor derives from precisely the characters’ insufficiency in the face of the “great situation” posed by dictatorship
and the pressure to forget, or ignore, its atrocities. The unseemly alacrity
with which the couple tries to minimize atrocity is both funny and horrifying. For example, they search for the most ridiculous explanations for
Paco’s condition: He wandered away from a nudist colony, his fellow workers beat him up, etc. Then after his death, Alfonso concludes: “Bueno,
echamos unos puñaditos simbólicos, te rezás un padre nuestro y que se
considere sepultado” (173). [Well, we’ll throw on a few symbolic handfuls, you say an “Our Father,” and let him consider himself buried.] The
utter lack of sentimentality, the detached irony of the playwright toward
37
his characters, combined with the exposure of their weakness, is typical of
the esperpento.
The grotesque world of the play is further colored by touches of the
absurd and the surreal. The opening stage directions describe the bleak
setting as “un espacio despoblado” [a deserted space], which, especially
when body parts begin to appear, even surpasses the sadness of Beckett’s
single forlorn tree in Waiting for Godot. The endless wait for rescue, as
Jorge Dubatti notes, also recalls Godot. Other absurdist elements, according to Dubatti, include the parody of the middle class, the games that the
characters play, the lack of spatial and temporal cohesion, the occasional
lack of logic in the dialogue, and the linguistic disintegration at the conclusion (254). The absurdist elements blend with the incongruous juxtapositions of the surreal: a picnic in the country and a slaughtered bird, a
knitting project and a dismembered hand, a dying man and a last meal of
toothpaste. Dreamlike images surface and fade: Alfonso’s wish that the car
would grow wings and fly, the intrusion of a ravenous lion into his bedtime
sheep-counting, the sudden, unexplained appearance of severed body parts,
Clotilde’s poetic rebuke, that he is always “empujando al barranco amatistas y amapolas” (154) [tossing amethysts and marigolds into the ravine].
Unlike the surrealists, however, Varela did not employ any techniques of
automatic writing, nor was he concerned with exploring the unconscious;
on the contrary, he consciously strove to code his response to sociopolitical
circumstances (personal interview).
Although absurdist and surrealist elements can be embedded in the text,
another strategy for disguising the call to resist requires the collaboration of the performers: decontextualization. Varela uses at least two kinds
of decontextualization that might throw off the spectator or reader who
only considers the superficial meaning of the text: (1) A charged admonition appears to concern an innocuous subject and (2) such an admonition is directed away from its actual intended recipient. For instance, when
Alfonso blames Clotilde for failing to check the gas tank, the stage directions mandate that her response, “No hay exactamente un culpable, sino
muchos” [It’s not just one guilty person, there are many], be delivered while
“señalando hacia el foro, molesta” (152) [Gesturing toward the audience,
annoyed]. Why would a character in a play blame the audience for running
out of gas? Upon reflection, it becomes clear that the real subject under discussion is not the gas tank but the political situation, a subject too charged
to address directly. The same technique is repeated and layered with a second level of disguise when Alfonso and Clotilde mime having sex after discovering a hand in the sand. Clotilde says: “Hay que luchar juntos, pegar
puñetazos, negar, moverse así, salpicar con nuestro sudor. Que sepan que
no tenemos miedo” (159) [We have to fight together, throw punches, say
‘no,’ move like this, work up a sweat. So they know that we aren’t afraid.]
This time the discussion edges closer to the real concern, struggle against
political repression, but almost as if to compensate for that, the speech is
38
addressed to Alfonso rather than to the audience. Though it might have
been more powerful for Clotilde to urge the audience to fight and to say
“no,” it might also have been, from an aesthetic point of view, too obvious, and from a pragmatic perspective, too likely to trigger censors. The
message’s import is disguised by directing it to a “safer” recipient.
Besides taxing the spectator’s memory, then, the play also asks that the
spectators use their imaginations to fill in the purposeful gaps in the text.
“You must remember” leads to “You must imagine.”
LOS CUENTOS DEL FINAL [THE
STORIES OF THE END] 1981
Encouraged by the success of Alfonso y Clotilde, and by the sense that the
country would eventually return to democracy, Varela next wrote his most
widely anthologized play, Los cuentos del fi nal, a portrait of a decaying
aristocratic family and its defiant servants, who are quickly usurping their
employers’ privileged place in the world. Though Stories ostensibly adopts
the style of psychological realism, with none of the surrealist or absurdist
touches that marked Varela’s previous works, its symbolic imagery similarly serves to cloak and deliver a political critique. Although Cuentos’
somber tone is at the other extreme from Alfonso y Clotilde’s determinedly
cheerful façade, the later play nevertheless expands and elaborates on the
same caution to the middle class: A yearning for a false past can only lead
to paralysis and stagnation. And although Alfonso y Clotilde depicted both
destructive and constructive uses of memory, for the characters in Cuentos
memory almost always takes the perverted form of nostalgia. Cuentos aims
its critique at a social class higher on the economic ladder than Alfonso
and Clotilde, the upper-middle-class sector of the Uruguayan public that
longed to recover the supposed Golden Age of post-World War II economic
plenty, cultural excellence, and athletic glory.17 According to Uruguayan
sociologist Juan Rial, middle-class social stability was maintained by a
foundational myth of mediocrity, in which inertia and passive consumption
of welfare state benefits, without the exercise of ambition or leadership,
would guarantee a secure status quo (Rial, Social Imaginary 64–65). In
Cuentos, Varela mocks that mediocrity and exposes it as the offspring of a
crippling collective nostalgia that as Rial says “made it difficult to advance
beyond surrender” (72).
Nostalgia is defi ned by Uruguayan social scientist Carina Perelli as
“a recollection of emotional and essentially subjective elements which
acknowledges what we lived through but seeks refuge in the past-past and
makes it the key to understanding the present” (Power 151). Although
accurate as far as it goes, this defi nition does not adequately stress the
pernicious idealization and stagnation that may accompany nostalgia, a
phenomenon Varela vividly depicts. In Cuentos, nostalgia plays a large
39
part in the deteriorating mental life of an old matriarch ironically named
“Pilar” [pillar], who spends her days sitting in an armchair. As her mansion
crumbles around her, she does little but long for her salad days. Her son
Agustín epitomizes how nostalgia breeds mediocrity: Increasingly paralyzed by his eroding faith in his profession, he cannot bring himself to work
hard enough to bring clients into the failing law fi rm he inherited from his
father. Agustín’s wife, Leonor, rejects nostalgia as a way of life and refuses
to have children by a man she no longer respects. Instead, she develops an
intense attraction for the pregnant maid’s sexy ruffian of a boyfriend, Rulo,
who takes advantage of her with a ruthlessness reminiscent of the male
antagonist in Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Rulo at fi rst runs off with Leonor but
then abandons her to come back to the servant, Chela, and take her away
from the house. Agustín’s fi nal letter to a friend refers to the house as a
metaphor for his mother, thus signaling to the spectator the existence of
other, unarticulated, symbolic possibilities of the edifice:
La casa se parece cada vez más a mama. Gime algunos días, escupe ladrillos y revoque, pero nunca se derrumba totalmente. Ahora escucho
ruidos . . . creo que una pared del garaje se está viniendo abajo. Pienso
que esto no va a durar mucho más. Mamá y la casa son una misma
cosa. Leo ya no está con nosotros. Es una larga historia que algún
día te contaré. Creo que poco a poco estamos empezando a ser libres.
(938)
[The house is more like mother all the time. It moans some days, spits
out bricks and plaster, but it never crumbles entirely. I hear noises now
. . . I think one of the garage walls is falling down. This probably won’t
last much longer. Mother and the house are one and the same. Leo is
no longer with us. It’s a long story that I’ll tell you sometime. I think
that little by little we are beginning to be free.]
For a public eager to hear confi rmation that the days of the dictatorship
were numbered, this last speech held out great hope. The symbolism of the
house-as-dictatorship suggests that instead of feeling nostalgia for the days
of a solid edifice, celebration of its disintegration might be a more appropriate reaction.
The play opened in the Comedia Nacional’s Sala Verdi, which seats about
500 people. Photos show that the set designer (Osvaldo Reyno) created a
menacing house invaded by so much ivy that long, savage tendrils sprouted
through the cracks of the interior walls. A skylight with broken stained glass
in various shades of purples, from lilac to almost black, enhanced a lighting
design (Carlos Torres) that contributed to the eerie mood. Two parallel
playing areas—one inside the house where the aristocrats dwell, the other
the interior of a garage where the workers live—were indicated by two
separate entrance archways. The structural symmetry helped highlight the
40
play’s conceptual architecture, which consists of two interlocking emotional
triangles: Pilar, her son Agustín, and his wife Leonor inside the house; the
maid Chela, her boyfriend Rulo, and Leonor, again, outside the house, in
the garage. As Leonor moves back and forth between the house and the
garage, she bridges the two worlds. The drama’s twenty-one short scenes
often alternate abruptly between the two locations, giving a cinematic feel
to the action. The spatial divisions also echo temporal divisions embodied
by characters representing the past/the house (the old, sterile aristocrats
in decline), the future/the garage (the young, fertile working class in
ascendancy), and the present (the middle-aged couple caught between past
and future, between the house and the garage).
The yearning for Uruguay’s lost Golden Age, as embodied by the elderly
ailing mother, is depicted as a painful, fruitless endeavor. Pilar longs to
recover the unrecoverable. The frustration that such longing entails is
described by Rial, as a “counterimaginary,” counter to the foundational
myth of a “happy Uruguay” at the “height of its glory” (70):
The basic mechanism [of the counterimaginary] operated through the
feeling that a Golden Age had been lost. The essence of the problem
was how to recover it. This was the beginning of despair and of a
growing discrepancy between reality and the desires (myths) that made
possible the ordering of the symbolic universe, nourished collective
memory constantly, constituted a history, and maintained intact the
identity of Uruguayan society. (71)
Pilar’s anguish blends the physiological and psychic, corresponding to the
Uruguayan sense of collective depression spurred by a blend of dire economic
and social realities. The standard of living had fallen precipitously; the foreign debt had soared. By the 1970s, the high level of literacy, full health care
coverage, and generous pensions enjoyed by almost all Uruguayans in the
1950s could now be enjoyed only as a memory (Weinstein 83).18 Pilar wistfully recalls her rides home from school in her father’s luxury automobile, the
elegant white dress she wore to her first communion, her opulent wedding
to a successful lawyer (889, 885). With the decline of her husband’s law firm
in the hands of her less competent son, she has been reduced to reminiscing
about her glamorous past, bemoaning her grim present, and dreading her
uncertain future while waiting for death.
Pilar’s use of the past to shield herself from the present and future recalls
the nostalgic matriarchs of Tennessee Williams. In fact, some critics identified
broad affinities between Varela’s and Williams’s theater. In a review for the
major Montevideo newspaper, El Pais, Jorge Abbondanza identified several
commonalities with Williams’s “realismo poetico” [poetic realism]: a fluid,
cinematographic montage, the decadent atmosphere, the survival amidst
lost splendor, the overly possessive mother, the hints of the husband’s possible bisexuality, and the young female protagonist’s “contrariado erotismo”
41
[turbulent eroticism] (17). More specifically, Pilar recalls female protagonists
such as Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer or Amanda Wingfield in
Glass Menagerie. In Suddenly, Violet tries to coerce her niece into a lobotomy, a literal erasure of memory. Pilar’s erasure of memory involves a far less
overtly violent act—burning a photo album (significantly, the album is pink,
as in rose-colored glasses)—yet the psychological injury she inflicts on her
son is almost as serious as the injury Violet seeks to inflict on her niece. In
Menagerie, Amanda’s reveries about her long-lost whirl of glamorous social
activities fill a void in the present, making her current poverty and isolation
a little more bearable. Similarly, Pilar uses the past as a refuge from the present, clinging to rituals from bygone days of gentility such as her five o’clock
tea, elegantly served with fine china, of course (880).
The play’s only minor character, a friend of Chela’s who also works as a
maid, Lila, remarks of their employers, “por lo general tienen mala memoria” [In general they have a bad memory] (891). Though on the most superficial level, Lila is referring to how easy it is to steal from the households
where they work, because the employers don’t remember what they own
well enough to realize what they are missing, “bad memory” is also a succinct description of nostalgia, “bad” both in the sense of inaccurate and in
the sense of ethically deficient. For instance, Pilar’s memories of the white
dresses she wore to her fi rst communion and to her wedding have begun
to merge, leaving her confused about which event was which (885). More
perniciously, she uses nostalgic memories of her late husband, Agustín’s
father, to undermine her son’s confidence in himself and taunt him with
the exalted image of a man he can never live up to. When she destroys
what might have served as an aid to more accurate memory, the family
photo album, she leaves herself in sole control of family lore. She fends off
Agustín’s protest with a taunt: “ . . . mirando las fotos de tu padre no vas
a convertirte en un hombre como él” [ . . . looking at the photos of your
father isn’t going to turn you into a man like him] (898). Leonor’s sarcastic
remark, “Pilar borraba el pizarrón en la escuela en lugar de la maestra”
(897) [Pilar, not the teacher, would erase the school blackboard], captures
the essence of Pilar’s gesture: She erases memory, which she describes as
“momentos inútiles” (928) [useless moments.] In the absence of useful
memory, all that is left, as Perelli defines nostalgia, is a highly subjective
version of people and events.
Pilar’s attempts to engage the present, as Perelli’s analysis helps us see,
are invariably colored through her understanding of the past. Although
to some extent that is true of anyone exercising memory, only in certain
instances is the lens of the past is thick enough to distort present reality.
For instance, in a common symptom of nostalgia, Pilar laments that things
as they are now, from the afternoon tea to the quality of the servants,
simply aren’t as wonderful as they once were (919). Laments substitute
for any action to improve her circumstances, as she refuses to even look
outside her window to the world outside (878). Her one potential link to the
42
contemporary world, Agustín’s habit of reading to her from the newspaper,
is always depicted as an interrupted or perverted ritual. The fi rst time,
before Agustín reads a word, the scene abruptly shifts to the world of the
garage. The second time, Leonor twists the moment with a nasty joke: she
“reads” Pilar her own obituary, a reminder to her mother-in-law of her
advanced age and a tainting of the present with the future. The third and
last time that Agustín reads his mother the newspaper, it reveals to them
the possibility that Leonor has been murdered.
Besides the newspaper, another motif that repeatedly taints the present,
this time with a paralyzing dread of the future, is that of the “worms” that
Pilar claims are devouring her. The pain, real or imagined, that she repeatedly describes as worms eating away at her flesh, from her legs to her womb,
symbolizes the death-in-life of herself and her only son (919, 928). Since
Agustín has no children, both mother and son lack the comfort of seeing
their mortality reproduced in their descendents. Neither is there is a sense
of a divine afterlife. Hamlet’s godless graveyard comes to mind as Pilar’s
complaints recall death’s leveling function: Whether wealthy and powerful,
as Pilar and her husband once were, or poor and disenfranchised, like the
servants Chela and Rulo, eventually all humans will return to dust. Read
as allegorical figures of repression and resistance, the characters in Stories
remind us that whether one is powerful or powerless, a member of a dominant or a dominated class, one sooner or later comes to the same end.
The future belongs to the servants in Stories, Chela and Rulo, whose way
of life represents an alternative to nostalgia, to live in the moment and move
away from what was toward what is to come. The working-class characters
have more ambition, more energy, and are more fertile than their social
superiors. By contrast to the sterile Leonor, Chela becomes pregnant and
decides to have the child, despite her difficult economic circumstances. By
contrast to the passive Agustín, Rulo constantly wheels and deals, manipulating fi rst Chela and then Leonor to his advantage. His motorcycle underscores his dynamism and traditional heterosexual masculinity, as opposed
to the hints of Agustín’s homosexuality and impotence with his wife. Still,
the working-class abandonment of memory is in some ways depicted as
equally unethical to the upper-middle-class use of memory as a shield from
the present and the future. If the aristocracy abuses memory through nostalgia, the working class abuses memory through a series of ethically suspect actions, including lies, thefts, blackmail, and perhaps even murder. In
their hands, the future seems compromised.
Chela resorts to using memory in the service of imitation: She steals food,
clothing, and household goods from her employers in order to survive and
attempt to live as they do. Like an understudy rehearsing a role, she wears
Leonor’s skirt, dresses her boyfriend in Agustín’s sweater, drinks from her
employers’ crystal, sleeps on sheets stolen from them. Rulo openly tells
Leonor that he aspires to imitate her and Agustín (902). After Leonor flees,
Chela moves into the main house, and, as if substituting for the absent lead,
43
she adopts Leonor’s words and demeanor, usurping her previous mistress’s
position in the household. When she gives away leftover cookies to her
friend Lila, she uses patronizing phrases so similar to the ones Leonor had
used in giving away leftover clothes to them that Lila remarks with a giggle,
“Parecés la patrona ahora” (934) [You seem like the boss now]. The use
of memory in this manner leads only to the reproduction of class inequalities: When the “house” fi nally comes down, the play suggests, the edifice
erected in its stead might prove just as repressive.
An even more sinister abuse than the mimetic desire condemned by the
play is memory in the service of blackmail, an abuse that recalls the tactics of
the Tupamaro guerrillas. When the guerrillas fi rst came on the Uruguayan
scene they were admired for their imaginative exploits in the cause of redistribution of wealth: Brazen kidnappings for ransom, bank robberies, and
prison breaks were carried out with charming dramatic flair. Their actions
at fi rst seemed more like mischievous harassment of the overprivileged than
seriously violent assaults. For instance, they would break into the homes of
the wealthy, scrawl slogans on the walls, and send “souvenir” snapshots to
their victims the following day (105). Similarly, Chela’s thefts at fi rst seem
minor, but when Leonor fi nds out, and lying to deny the theft fails, Chela
tries to blackmail Leonor with her knowledge of Leonor’s sexual liaisons
(912). Rulo even more boldly blackmails Leonor with his knowledge that
she spies on Chela and him as they have sex. The actor who played Rulo
in the original 1981 production, Miguel Pinto, recalls that he modeled his
character on a Stanley Kowalski type of strong, sensual, simple man, but
tried to seem kinder and more intelligent than Williams’s character. Clad
in a muscle-T, à la Marlon Brando as Kowalski, Rulo (Pinto) would take
off the sweater his girlfriend had stolen for him from her boss and brush
it lightly across Leonor’s (Estela Medina) breasts to tease her. One night a
woman in the audience yelled out, “¡Que atrevido!” [How bold!], an indication of how shocking it was for some Uruguayans to see class hierarchies
violated (Pinto personal interview).
Director Carlos Aguilera gave the play’s last word to the working-class
characters rather than to Agustín. Adding a few lines to Varela’s text, the
couple ran through the basement of the theater, under the seats of the
spectators, shouting out their names, “¡Rulo!, ¡Rulo!, ¡Chela!, ¡Chela!”
The actors stomped and shouted up from below, like a boiling cauldron
threatening to erupt. Their cries, rather than the text of Agustín’s letter to
his friend, then became the fi nal lines of the performance (Pinto personal
interview).
Caught between past and future, struggling to engage the present, are
the characters of Agustín and Leonor. Their language is for the most part
polite, restrained, and cynical, displaying the subtle wit of the well educated. Yet they use their clever turns of phrase to wound, to taunt each
other with the impossibility of recovering their love. Agustín, more than
Leonor, embodies the myth of mediocrity that Rial deplores: His strongest
44
desire is to return to a lost past. Barring that, he clings so tenaciously to the
status quo that eventually he even neglects to bathe or change his clothes
(935). Leonor asks Agustín why he drinks so much:
LEONOR. Qué buscás?
AGUSTIN. Sentirme como antes.
LEONOR. Eso es imposible. Hasta Pilar lo comprendió cuando
quemo su album rosa.
AGUSTIN. Por que? Una noche puede producirse el milagro, whiskys mediante. No crees? Una noche puedo empezar a acariciarte y
de pronto, volver a escuchar tus gemidos como antes. Por qué no?
(916)
[LEONOR. What are you looking for?
AGUSTIN. To feel the way I did before.
LEONOR. That’s impossible. Even Pilar understood it when she
burned her pink album.
AGUSTIN. Why? One night the miracle could happen, given enough
whiskey. Don’t you think? One night I might begin to caress you
and suddenly hear your moans again like before. Why not?]
Like the middle class in insile, hoping against hope for time to stop, for
the restoration of the old social order, Agustín cannot understand change,
much less cope with it.
The use of whiskey to cope with the past, like the hints of homosexuality, recalls Tennessee Williams again, particularly the character of Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Yet while Brick drinks to erase the past, Agustín
drinks in a vain attempt to resuscitate it. Like Brick, Agustín is well-spoken, bitter, and charmingly aloof. Fertility poses a confl ict in both plays:
Brick refuses to mate with Maggie; Agustín attempts to mate with Leonor
to no avail, because unbeknownst to him, she has had herself sterilized.
While Brick’s homophobia leads him to reject his best friend’s confession of
passion, Agustín fi nally fi nds the courage to write to his best male friend, a
friend whom Leonor insinuates might have been more than a friend (907).
Finally, both men have lost their passion for their professions: Brick has
become too old to play professional football and hates the job he had as
a sports announcer, describing the game from the sidelines. Agustín is a
lawyer who no longer believes in the rule of law. While the play never says
so explicitly, and could not have said so explicitly, Agustín recalls the portion of the population disenchanted with how Uruguay’s long tradition of
governing by the rule of law had been perverted by the military’s many
executive decrees into a pseudo-legal totalitarian system. Brick’s reason
for drinking, his disgust with the “mendacity” of his family’s hypocritical Southern society, is paralleled by Agustín’s disenchantment with his
profession, and, by extension, with the social system it helped create (T.
Williams, “Cat” 79 –95).
45
Agustín remains in the house, a victim of insile trapped in the past;
Leonor moves toward the future, an exile whose fate is uncertain. She
wants to live, she tells Rulo when she begs him to take her away, yet the
play strongly hints that perhaps she dies (931). For her, sterilization brings
escape from the fear of reproducing her class’s passivity and mediocrity.
She must deny her husband and mother-in-law their futures in order to
secure her own. Unlike them, she refuses to idealize the past, refuses to
treasure any kind of memories. In fact, when her mother-in-law tries to get
her to put away her wedding dress as a cherished souvenir, Leonor taunts
her with the thought that she will give it to “worms” to eat, because worms
like to eat silk (886). The word “worms” reminds Pilar of the worms she
feels are eating her alive, and simultaneously conjures the thought of death
and of one’s fate after death, if buried. Leonor’s hyperawareness of mortality makes her need to live in the time of her life that much more poignant.
Her sterility, her lust, and her thirst for experience all recall “Maggie the
Cat.” Yet unlike Maggie, Leonor no longer looks to her husband to help
her feel alive.
Perhaps the play’s fi nal irony, in the form of poetic justice, is that while
Leonor constantly taunts Pilar with her impending death, it is Leonor and
not Pilar who disappears. Though Leonor composes a funeral announcement for Pilar, “reads” it from the newspaper, and ends with the observation that one day Pilar could open the newspaper and fi nd her own death
notice, in fact, it is Leonor’s possible death that is recorded by the newspaper. Besides its function as psychologically realistic interaction between the
characters, Leonor’s taunt serves the strategy of displacement used to cloak
political dissidence discussed in relationship to Alfonso y Clotilde. Just as
Clotilde was not only referring to running out of gas when she gestured
toward the spectators and spoke of many guilty parties, Leonor is not only
describing her mother-in-law’s obituary when she says: “Y cada día, un
nombre conocido, un amigo, un pariente” (890) [And every day, a name
we know, a friend, a relative]. Uruguay is a small enough country that
almost everyone knows someone who was arrested, and tortured, under
dictatorship (Weschler 147). Like many of the disappeared, Leonor’s fate
remains uncertain: We never learn whether the unidentified corpse wearing red shoes (Leonor wears red shoes) is in fact Leonor. Like many of the
disappeared, Leonor’s desire to live may in fact have sealed her doom. To
give just one example, the imprisoned leftist school teacher Elena Quinteros wanted so much to live that on June 28, 1976, she successfully tricked
her military captors into temporarily allowing her out of prison so that
she could lead them to her husband. Instead, she fled onto the grounds
of the Venezuelan embassy, begging for asylum. The military, however,
violated international law by following her onto embassy grounds, beating
the Venezuelan diplomats who tried to save her, and dragging Quinteros
away. Venezuela cut off diplomatic relations with Uruguay and Quinteros
was never seen again (Martínez 73–75). Though the apparently apolitical
46
Leonor is obviously not modeled on Quinteros, who was a dedicated anarchist rather than an apathetic housewife, Leonor’s thirst for life, her need
to escape, and her mysterious fate evoke the clash of performances outside
of theaters, between state authorities and the many dissident Uruguayans
who ended up disappeared or in exile abroad.
“Todos los cuentos tienen una enseñanza” (922) [All stories have a lesson], Pilar says, indirectly inviting the spectator to both search for the play’s
lesson and scrutinize official stories, and performances, for their intended
lessons. To create a narrative, memory must be employed in the service of
selection, omission, and ordering of facts, heightening of suspense, shaping
of characters. Like Pilar’s stories, the official stories of the authorities, or
to use a more sophisticated term, the ideologies of the dictatorship covered up the facts. Among the most important truths that the ideologies of
dictatorship in Uruguay attempted to disguise was the very fact that the
dictatorship was a dictatorship, not a valiant defense of democracy against
a communist guerrilla threat. As the end of the dictatorship neared, Uruguayans began to face the problem of how to tell its story. In shaping the
narrative, what would they remember and what would they forget? Cuentos illuminates the process of forgetting, offering an example of the misuse
of memory, nostalgia, as a way of coping with the painful passage from one
era into the next.
Critics such as Roger Mirza and Jorge Pignataro Calero saw the production as a sign that the Comedia Nacional, Uruguay’s national theater, was
recovering from a long period of decline under dictatorship. A new artistic
director, Jaime Yavitz, seemed willing to take more risks than the previous
artistic director, Carlos Denis Molina, who during his tenure (1974–1981)
had chosen to stage primarily foreign plays, a safer route than staging many
Uruguayan plays, which were more likely to be deemed subversive. Cuentos ran for three months to full houses in 1981 and was restaged again the
following year for two months. Because the actors were known for their
performances in classical, canonical dramas, the production was endowed
with an air of grandeur, as if the stage family had the authority to represent
the Uruguayan national family, a synecdoche underscored by the unsmiling “family portrait” photo of the actors on the program cover: Maruja
Santullo (Pilar) sits up straight in an ornate stiff-backed chair with arm
rests; the bespectacled Delfi Galbiati (Agustín) stands behind and to her
left, lips slightly pursed; from behind the chair, Estela Medina (Leonor)
gazes wide-eyed into the distance. Like the family in the play, the theater,
and the nation, seemed to be emerging from a long, dark period.
PALABRAS EN LA ARENA [WORDS IN THE SAND] 1982
Palabras en la Arena takes another turn in Varela’s search for the uses
of memory as a way out of the darkness. Having discarded nostalgia,
47
he experiments with a device that harkens back to early modern drama,
most famously in Hamlet: the figure of a ghost who both embodies memory and urges remembrance of things past. In contemporary Uruguay,
the ghosts that haunted the living were the imprisoned and the “disappeared,” ghosts that can either destroy or inspire one, the play suggests.
Especially in comparison to the wild success that accompanied Varela’s
two previous plays, Palabras was a commercial and critical failure. Yet
because of its experimental spirit (pun intended), it nevertheless merits
at least a brief discussion of its historical interest and aesthetic boldness.
In Ghostly Matters, Avery F. Gordon puts her fi nger on the power of
ghosts as a literary symbol and a social reality: “The ghost is not simply
a dead or a missing person, but a social figure . . . Being haunted draws
us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically,
into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as
cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). Palabras urges
the spectator to acknowledge and welcome ghosts as harbingers of such
transformative recognitions.
The play premiered in Montevideo on 24 April 1982 in the Comedia Nacional’s Sala Verdi, the same theater where Cuentos del Final had
enjoyed such great success the previous year. The director, Carlos Aguilera, and set designer, Carlos Pirelli, from Cuentos went on to work on
Palabras, making expectations run high, perhaps too high.
Reviewers made invidious comparisons between Palabras and Varela’s
two previous successes. Writing for the country’s major newspaper, El
País, Jorge Abbondanza called Palabras “un tropiezo inesperado” [an
unexpected blunder]. Roger Mirza, writing for El Día, was less categorically negative. While he complained of “la vaguedad de los simbolos y
alusiones” [the vagueness of its symbols and allusions], he also noted:
. . . en medio de esa imprecisión, de las sugerencias ambiguas y las
dificultades de construcción dramticática, de la aspereza de algunos
recursos, tecnicas teatrales o lenguajes, la experiencia que subyace a
todo el montaje, sostiene el caudal de imagenes, aun cuando no aflore
con la fluidez deseable. (22)
[ . . . amid that imprecision, of ambiguous suggestions and problems
with dramatic structure, the unevenness of some of the elements, theatrical techniques or language, the experience that underlies the entire
staging sustains the river of images, even when it doesn’t flow as fluently as one might wish.]
Writing under dictatorship for a censored press, Mirza alluded only in the
most cautious terms to the authenticity of “the experience” underlying the
staging. That experience was, of course, the experience of the dictatorship,
which was to continue, albeit with declining vigor, for another two years,
48
through the end of 1984. Meanwhile, even a review criticizing a play for
being too vague in its allusions, itself had to be written in vague, coded
language alluding to an unspecified powerful “experience” shared by the
spectators, the actors, the production team, and the playwright.
The protagonists of Palabras, Lucas and his wife Diana, are both literally and figuratively haunted by the death of their friend Juan, with whom
they shared a politically activist past. When the play opens, it has been
three months since Juan’s body was found washed up on the shore near
their beach house, where the couple has holed up in retreat from the world.
Though the newspapers have reported the incident as a common crime, the
couple is not so sure: Juan had continued political work long after Lucas
and Diana had withdrawn from activism and grown distant from him;
his body showed signs of torture. Over the years, Lucas, a playwright,
has turned away from writing serious dramas in order to churn out more
profitable commercial plays. After the discovery of the body, Juan’s ghost
takes to visiting Lucas every evening and encouraging him to return to
writing plays that question the established order. An evil counterweight to
Juan’s goodness is posed by another phantasmal presence, one of Lucas’s
patrons, Eva, a mysterious wealthy middle-aged woman, always accompanied by three bodyguards wearing bird-head masks, who commissions
light comedies for her amateur theater company. Lucas eventually violently
attacks Eva, an attack that the stage directions indicate may take place only
in Lucas’s mind. Meanwhile, Diana, distraught about Juan’s death, displays few interests other than drinking and taking sleeping pills. She dies
of an overdose, which conveniently allows for a neighbor named Sara who
is pregnant by Juan to strike up a romance with Lucas. Sara’s boyfriend,
Osvaldo, good-naturedly gives her up.19
Under Aguilera’s direction, a clattering typewriter (sound design by
Alfredo Coedo) at the beginning and at the end of the production provided
a metatheatric frame, suggesting that some or all of the action took place
only in Lucas’s imagination. This conceit made for a surprise finale, in
which spectators were suddenly told that what they might have up until that
moment supposed to be a fairly naturalistic (notwithstanding the ghost and
the bird-men bodyguards) universe might in fact be Lucas’s fantastical theatrical rendering of his autobiography. The set designer, Pirelli, furthered the
dream-like quality of the production by lavishly draping the ceiling, floor,
walls, and all the furniture with linen, so as to suggest that the characters
dwelled in sand dunes.
Three of the six main characters were played by Comedia Nacional actors
who had also starred in Cuentos del Final—Delfi Galbiati (Agustín in Cuentos, Lucas in Palabras), Maruja Santullo (Pilar in Cuentos, Eva in Palabras),
and Miguel Pinto (Rulo in Cuentos, Osvaldo in Palabras)—making comparisons even more inevitable. The other three main roles were played by three
then relatively unknown actors who are now major figures in Uruguayan
theater: Gloria Demassi (Diana), Claudia Rossi (Sara), and Levón (Juan).
49
According to Aguilera, Levón played the ghostly Juan in an entirely naturalistic manner: He was costumed and spoke as if he were simply another
human being, who happened to be dead. He exhibited no supernatural
powers such as walking through walls or proving invisible to some and
visible to others; he was visible to every character in any scene in which
he appeared. When he touched people, they felt it. In fact, during his fi rst
appearance, in an attempt to get Lucas to wake up from his moral slumber,
he grabs him by the lapels, shakes him, and starts a fistfight with him.
Juan’s naturalistic style of behavior, juxtaposed to his metatheatricality as
a character in the play-within-a-play that we see Lucas bang out at his typewriter, calls attention to the theatricality of the other characters. In the end,
all the characters except Lucas acquire a ghostly dimension similar to the
Pirandellian presence of fictional characters in any writer’s life. Although,
unlike Pirandello’s six characters, they never openly acknowledge their status as characters in a play, that status is nevertheless highlighted by Juan
and by the other obviously nonrealistic character, Eva.
Despite his earthy physicality, Juan also assumes an ethereal presence.
As the voice of Lucas’s conscience, he serves as a spur to ethical memory.
Without ever mentioning political activism or dictatorship, which was still
taboo at the time the play was staged, Juan forces Lucas to remember “diez
años de locura en aquel altillo lleno de humo, de ideales compartidos que
también fueron convirtiéndose en humo” (11) [ten years of craziness in
that smoke-fi lled attic, of shared ideals that also went up in smoke]. Interestingly, though he was murdered, unlike many literary ghosts, Juan never
urges revenge or even legal justice. Instead, he simply asks: “Te animás a
destruir tus fantasmas, a mirar adentro tuyo y empezar a rescatar al Lucas
que yo conocí?” (12) [Can you bring yourself to destroy your ghosts, to
look inside yourself and begin to rescue the Lucas I knew?]. The ghost figures the role of memory in the artist’s responsibility to the victims of repression. And the artist’s agency only extends to depicting the truth about that
repression, a truth that must be disguised with heavy symbolism. Anticipating the solution that several countries, not only in Latin America, but
also most famously in South Africa, were to hit upon, testimonies that
guarantee amnesty in exchange for a complete account of atrocities, the
play suggests that learning, remembering, and telling the complete story of
what happened to the disappeared is all that can be hoped for. Even in a
fictional world, nothing more can be expected.
The opposite road to discovering and acknowledging the truth is epitomized in the character of Diana, a once-strong woman now destroyed
by Juan’s death. Her drug-addled perceptions exemplify the distortions of
memory, the difficulty of disentangling fact from fantasy. One moment
she claims she was assaulted by fishermen (the official story of what happened to Juan); the next, she dismisses her own account as a dream (20).
Fear also leads her to distort her memories of Juan’s death. Like many
Uruguayans confronted with torture, despite evidence to the contrary, she
50
wants to believe in the least horrific version of her friend’s fate: He was
killed in a common crime; he committed suicide. The military sometimes
helped foster civilian illusions of justified killings, staging false attempts at
escape and even supposed battles against alleged guerrillas, long after the
guerrillas had in fact been captured (Martínez 25; Weschler 131). Unable
to reconcile herself to the loss of her friend, Diana tries to block out memories of his fate, which leads to her self-destruction. Again, complete loss of
memory equals annihilation.
The most grotesque symbols in Palabras are the three silent bird-men
who guard Eva and murder Juan. In production, the actors were clad in
black leather pants and shirts, wore masks with razor-sharp bird beaks,
and carried long iron weapons. The cover of the original program, illustrated by a cartoonist who called himself “Marchisio,” depicted a murderous eagle clawing its way out of the top of a human skull, brains dripping
in long tendrils from its beak. The armed bird-men could be read in at least
two ways, as a symbol of the Uruguayan military and/or as a symbol of the
United States military influence in Latin America. It is significant that they
sometimes escort Eva, the flamboyant wealthy woman who tries to tempt
Lucas into producing light comedies starring her as “Evabuena,” a fairytale
princess. The symbolism could function here either to highlight the connection between the Uruguayan junta leaders and their supporters, who
tended to represent the wealthier sectors of society, or to underscore the
link between the United States government and the Uruguayan privileged
class. In the fi rst case, the bodyguard function of the bird-men symbolizes
how the military looked after the interests of the moneyed classes, instituting economic policies that favored speculators, bankers, and multinational
corporations at the expense of the working class. 20 In the second case, the
bird-men are connected by association with the wealthy Eva to the eagle as
a symbol of the United States. The long tendrils dripping from the mouth
of the eagle on the program cover recall the eagle on U.S. currency, which
holds in its beak the ribbon reading “e pluribus unum.”21 In either reading,
Eva symbolizes capitalistic avarice and the potential for economic corruption of artists, as personified by Lucas.
The bird motif comes up again, in a context not directly related to Eva,
at the beginning and the end of the play. At the beginning, Diana dreams of
a giant eagle pecking at her neck; at the end, as Lucas types feverishly, the
bird-men attack Juan, beating him to death with beak-shaped hooks and
sticks. The suggestion is that while Diana unconsciously suspects the truth,
only Lucas fi nally fi nds the courage to acknowledge and dramatize the true
story of his friend’s death. Lucas tells Diana:
Lo torturaron antes de matarlo . . . y no fue pescadores. Si no lo hubiéramos abandonado, hoy estaríamos como él . . . con las manos rotas quemaduras de cigarrillos, despedazados cerca de la orilla o en el
fondo del mar. (37)
51
[They tortured him before killing him . . . and it wasn’t fishermen. If
we hadn’t abandoned him, today we would be like him . . . with our
hands broken and burned by cigarettes, mangled near the shore or at
the bottom of the sea.]
Whether foreign or domestic, the bird-men clearly epitomize torturers.
Their invasion of dreams functions like memories of actual horrors that
infi ltrate the subconscious mind and linger there in even more distorted,
grotesque versions of themselves.
One element of the play’s original script that was not honored by the
production might have strengthened the juxtaposition between fantasy and
fact, between distorted and accurate memory: a series of projections of
photos called for at four different points in the script. The fi rst two of the
four series of photographic images described in the stage directions provide
flashbacks to the happier days of the three main characters, grounding in
them in a photo-album-like world of carefree student life. The fourth series
of photos depicts Diana’s death. These photos, whether depicting happiness
or tragedy, appear to accurately preserve memories. By contrast, the third
of the series of photos employs the technique of distortion, showing how
imagination may play tricks on memory. The photos are of Eva’s abode,
an eerie castle: “imágines nocturnas del Castillo que aparece con proporciones gigantescas y luego va reduciéndose en las tomas siguientes” (26)
[nocturnal images of the Castle, which appears in giant proportions then
progressively shrinks in subsequent shots]. One can imagine a production
that would effectively employ the projections to show how memory-plusimagination makes us fear malevolence perhaps even more than we should:
A projected image of Eva’s home might start out in the monstrous proportions of a haunted fairytale castle full of supernatural evil, then shrink to
the size and shape of an ordinary, large upper-middle-class dwelling. Lucas
tells Diana: “Ya no sabés distinguir las cosas reales de las imaginarias” (7)
[You no longer know how to tell the difference between the real and the
imaginary]. Though Palabras, as staged in 1982, may not have succeeded
in making the importance of that distinction clear to spectators, if nothing
else, its attempt to delineate constructive versus destructive uses of memory
constitutes a noble failure in the history of Uruguayan theater.
INTERROGATORIO EN ELSINORE: DESPUÉS
DE LA RATONERA [INTERROGATION IN
ELSINORE: AFTER THE MOUSETRAP] 1983
The long one-act Interrogatorio shows more faith than any other Varela
drama in the power of performance to rekindle memory and put it to ethical use. In Alfonso y Clotilde and Palabras, memory provides an alternative reality to a present evil and thus helps establish an alternative ethical
52
system. An even more metatheatrical play than its predecessors, Interrogatorio shows how performance can encode and repeat that alternative perspective: The performing body reproduces and re-creates collective memory
in a process that Roach calls “surrogation.”22 Though each repetition differs however slightly from the last, making performance the memory of a
memory ad infi nitum, corporeal movement also imbues the memory with
new life, keeping it from growing fainter as time passes. A performed memory can depict a truth that might otherwise remain unexpressed, expose an
evil, maintain a condemnation of that evil in the public mind, and threaten
the established order. The threat posed by a performance, in turn, may
bring repression from authorities attempting to keep a fi rm hold on illegitimately obtained power. Elsinore then depicts performance as a doubleedged sword: valuable yet dangerous.
The drama draws implicit parallels between the putrid world of Hamlet
(neither Medieval Denmark nor Elizabethan England, but some amalgam
of the two) and the world of 1980s Uruguay. As Elsinore’s subtitle, Después
de la ratonera [After the Mousetrap] suggests, the play is based on the scene
in Hamlet (3.2) in which the prince traps his uncle Claudius into publicly
revealing his part in the death of Hamlet’s father. By staging an image of
the assassination, the pouring of poison into a king’s ear, Hamlet succeeds
in getting Claudius to react so as to betray his guilt. In Elsinore, Varela
imagines a terrible punishment for the Player King after the performance:
The actor is beaten, interrogated, and kept prisoner for years by a character
known only as “Interrogator,” who Varela makes Polonius’s adopted son.
During the actor’s imprisonment, his wife, along with two young actors,
the remnants of his disbanded troupe, continues to perform the banned
work, resorting to the use of puppets when actors cannot be found, repeating the crucial moment over and over: the poison poured in the ear. Echoing Hamlet, Elsinore suggests that illegitimately obtained power requires
poisoning of an individual and of a society. Theater may not be powerful
enough to serve as the antidote, but at least it can be strong enough to create and recreate a public memory of the moment, or moments, of guilt.
The production of the play under dictatorship, which opened at the
Teatro de la Alianza Francesa in Montevideo on September 10, 1983, and
ran for three months, differed substantially from the text as it has subsequently been published. 23 The 1983 version centered entirely on the confl ict between two characters, called the Actor (Angel Armagno) and the
Interrogator (Roberto Jones). The later version adds the four supporting
roles—Ofelia, the Wife, the Young Man, and the Young Woman; complicates the plot as already described; and includes the ingenious use of puppets. Finally, the plot of the original version was more tightly linked to the
plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The running, darkly humorous gag, most
amusing to those spectators familiar with Hamlet, was that under the pressure of torture, the Actor would make up information that later turned out,
unluckily for him, to correspond by chance to actual events (the turning
53
points in the plot of Shakespeare’s play), thus convincing the Interrogator
all the more of his victim’s guilt.
The idea for the play came from an actor, Roberto Jones, who conceived
it as an exercise that could form the basis of an improvisational, collective
work. He began working with a fellow actor, Angel Armagno, who has
since died, and with a director, Marcelino Duffau. 24 Jones had recently
returned from several years of exile in Argentina; Duffau was back from
exile in Peru. The actors and director approached Varela to ask his help
in developing a script that would denounce torture. “We all had family,
or friends, or acquaintances that had been imprisoned and tortured. We
wanted to do something about it. But in the end we were not well received
by the public. Very few people came. Maybe we put our fi nger on a wound
that was still too raw,” recalls Duffau. Most reviewers, however, praised
the production, while alluding to its theme in only the most cautious terms.
Among the most direct phrases used to describe the theme were “apremios
fi sicos” [physical pressure] (Mirza, “Mecanismos” 18) and “canales de
repression y castigo” (Viale 21) [channels of repression and punishment].
Not one reviewer mentioned the word “torture.”25 An unsigned program
note written by Varela hints at the allegorical nature of the drama: “Los
dos únicos personajes hacen frecuente allusión a otros personajes de la tragedia shakespearana, pero el conflicto es nuevo” [The two lone characters
frequently allude to other characters from the Shakespearean tragedy, but
the conflict is new] [italics mine].
Elsinore’s ten scenes are structured so as to simultaneously reveal and
disguise the play’s import: It pretends to be nothing more than a play
about a play that resists illegitimate authority; yet it is also itself a play
that resists illegitimate authority. By setting the drama in Hamlet’s timelessly fictional past, Varela borrows an age-old dramatic cloak as thin in
contemporary Uruguay as it was in Hamlet’s court. The device signals its
own existence, putting the contemporary playwright in the place of Hamlet. Just as Hamlet uses The Murder of Gonzago to implicitly compare
Denmark to intrigue-fi lled Italy, Varela uses Hamlet to implicitly compare
Uruguay to Denmark’s rotten state. Besides providing a springboard for
humor based on anachronism, the distance in time and space creates a
historical perspective about events and practices—interrogation, torture,
disappearance—that were still raw wounds in Uruguay in 1983, the year
before the end of the dictatorship.
The manner in which time passes in Elsinore further conveys disguised
dissent. Time is measured and punctuated by the plot points of Hamlet:
the death of Polonius, the death of Ophelia, the general slaughter at the
end of Act V, and the rise to power of Fortinbras. The audience experiences
these events from the perspective of the imprisoned protagonist, who in the
absence of natural light or darkness depends on reports from above to mark
the days. Against this background of fictional narrative, however, the activities of the protagonist and his interrogator remain painfully monotonous
54
and true to the rhythm of Uruguayan prison life at the time: interrogation,
torture, “confession”; interrogation, torture, “confession.” The Interrogator pressures for information and names, sends the Actor off to be tortured
elsewhere by someone else, then meets him again at the beginning of the
next interrogation scene, each time more savagely beaten, more psychologically damaged. Under torture, we learn, the Actor has said something,
anything, named another name. Elsinore almost uncannily recreates the
routine described years later in postdictatorship accounts like Memorias
del calabozo [Memories of the Dungeon], a memoir written jointly in the
form of a dialogue by Mauricio Rosencof and Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, former guerrillas imprisoned for more than a decade. The character
of the Actor predicts their sufferings, their frustration at their inability to
mark the passage of time, their fear that fantasy is overpowering reality,
their desperate clinging to the edge of sanity. After the Actor is placed in
a rat-infested dungeon with the corpse of his friend and company member
Carlo, for instance, he is at the end of his rope. Varela did not need to rely
on his imagination to depict the horrors of political prison: As early as
1980 the International Committee of the Red Cross had concluded after an
inspection of South American prisons that Uruguay’s main political prison,
Libertad, was “The place where the system is pushed beyond the usual limits, both in the area of security and in the search for every possible means
of hurting the prisoners” (Weschler 124). Since the cultural memory of torture is so strong in Uruguay, one postdictatorship production of Elsinore
that I saw, directed in 2005 by Leonel Dárdano in Montevideo’s El Galpón
Theater, avoided explicit physical violence. Instead, the entire cast rhythmically beat their hands on the wooden floor between scenes, creating an
ominous, hollow thumping to symbolize the physical torments visited upon
the Actor.
Within political prisons, inmates and interrogators are both like actors,
for whom memory is a crucial part of the performance. Named for their
function, Elsinore’s “Actor,” and “Interrogator” are performers in a playwithin-a-play of their own, the sordid drama of interrogation and torture,
with its predictable script and familiar props. As they repeat their lines to
the point of inducing boredom in the spectator, they both learn their parts,
rehearse a scene, familiarize themselves with their roles. By the end of the
play, which extends beyond Hamlet’s redemptive ending to an imaginary
fall of Fortinbras, both are faced with the challenge of learning new roles.
The Interrogator is portrayed as neither charmingly evil nor as given to
eleventh-hour conversions, as in many torture plays, but as simply a tenacious fellow, a hardworking yet limited performer who only knows one
role and sticks with it, even after it has lost its effectiveness. 26 Though he
admits that “ya no importan los papeles” (72) [roles no longer matter], he
cannot bring himself to learn a new part. The Actor, by contrast, finally
breaks out and shouts his name, “Equion,” as if to affi rm an individuality
apart from his performative function.
55
Elsinore’s setting in Hamlet’s world allows Varela to draw from Shakespeare’s rich symbolic universe without explicitly stating a moral about
memory. The duty to remember is so powerfully depicted in Hamlet that
Elsinore need only allude to it. Rather than stage a ghost, as in Palabras,
Elsinore can rely on the informed spectator’s memory of the ghost of
Hamlet’s father, which is after all a physical representation of memory.
“Remember me” (1.5.91), the ghost of King Hamlet tells his son; and “Do
not forget. This visitation/ Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose”
(3.4.110–111), the ghost chides when the prince has been sidetracked by
his obsession with his mother’s infidelity. “The Mousetrap” highlights the
nature of theater as a space within which memory is transmitted, serving
not only to expose Hamlet’s uncle, but also to obey his father’s command:
remember me. The Player King, like the ghost, also offers an image of the
dead father, but he is visible and speaks publicly to all, not just to Hamlet.
In Uruguay under dictatorship, the “ghosts” are the dozens of people killed,
the thousands of people imprisoned for political reasons, the hundreds of
thousands who left the country. Remember them, Varela’s work commands
between the lines. Under the conditions of military rule, for an unarmed
public in 1983, memory was the only possible revenge. Even today, as bodies “disappeared” under dictatorship are still being unburied, an amnesty
law shielding the military remains in place, and no political leader has even
pressed for disclosure of the former military government’s fi les on civilians.
Remembrance may still be the only possible revenge. One of the Actor’s
dreams, supposedly about Denmark, is obviously about Uruguay:
ACTOR. (Muy bajo, para sí) Hoy soñé que una mujer vestida de negro
se acercaba a mí y extendía su mano . . . yo la seguía . . . y de pronto
llegaba junto a otras mujeres que lloraban. Ellas habían perdido a sus esposos, a sus hijos, a sus amigos. Ellas dijeron que toda Dinamarka sentía
su dolor . . . y que el mismo cielo se oscurecía para no ver tanta injusticia.
Ellas lloraban . . . y yo sentía que volvía a terner fuerzas. (70)
[ACTOR. (Very low, to himself) Today I dreamed that a woman dressed
in black came close to me and held out her hand . . . I followed her . . .
and soon I came close to other women who wept. They had lost their
husbands, their children, their friends. They said that all of Denmark
felt their pain . . . and that the sky itself had darkened so as not to see
so much injustice. They wept . . . and I felt my strength return again.]
In Dárdano’s 2005 production, as the Actor’s lament was followed by a
candlelight procession through an almost completely darkened theaterin-the-round, the lights fl ickering in the darkness seemed to summon offstage ghosts.
An amnesiac public, Elsinore suggests, can be reminded by theater of
how power was obtained illegitimately. Claudius killed his brother; the
56
Uruguayan president Juan María Bordaberry colluded with the military to
dissolve his own parliament. Both societies were betrayed and poisoned.
What hidden scene of guilt in Uruguay would correspond to the moment
in Hamlet when the poison is poured in King Hamlet’s ear? The 1973 dissolution of parliament? The 1976 murders of two of the most prominent
opponents of the dictatorship: former senator Zelmar Michelini and the
former president of the chamber of deputies Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz?
The play never says. Rather than offer a reductive correspondence, it
leaves it to the spectators to come up with their own individual scenes
in their minds’ eyes. But the play does stress how much of a threat such
a scene, or scenes, of guilt pose to the authorities. It indirectly explains
why Uruguayan theater practitioners were so censored and persecuted: The
aftermath of “The Mousetrap” imagined in Elsinore includes not only the
imprisonment of the Player King but also the banning of all theater, a situation only slightly more extreme than that suffered by the Uruguayan theater world. The Interrogator tells the Actor: “El rey ya no ve con buenos
ojos a los actores. Acaba de prohibir las representaciones en palacio . . .
y pronto creo que lanzará censuras mas severas para todos los actores de
Dinamarka” [The king no longer looks kindly upon actors. He just banned
performances in the palace . . . and soon I think he will take more severe
measures against all of Denmark’s actors]. The Actor replies: “El rey no
quiere verse en el espejo, verdad?” (43) [The king doesn’t want to see himself in the mirror, right?]. Yet theater, Elsinore implies, is even more than a
mirror: It creates rather than merely reflects memory. When the Interrogator searches the text in vain for a subversive message, he misses the fact that
the subversive power is in the performance rather than the text, and in the
performance within a political context that gives particular bodily movements (in this case, the pouring of poison in the ear) a special charge. Under
the right circumstances, before the right audience, a performance becomes
a public accusation of guilt.
The theatrical creation of memory can be seen most vividly in the repetition of the performance that doomed the Actor—modified as a puppet
show. Puppets substitute for actors, who are too frightened to perform,
underscoring how cultural memory may be perpetuated by the filling and
refi lling of roles with substitutes (Roach). In fact, during the dictatorship,
secret puppet shows were performed without benefit of publicity but before
large audiences, in concentration camps, private homes, housing cooperatives, and even in theaters (Barbosa 499).
Though the initial performance of “The Mousetrap” forms part of the
backstory to the play, it is subsequently staged three times during the course
of Elsinore, with the actors recounting that it has also enjoyed a long clandestine run. Each time the scene is repeated, it highlights a different element
of performance’s political power. The fi rst time, it politically awakens the
performers themselves. The young actors playfully defy the ban on theater
and animate puppets to repeat the dangerous scene without fully grasping
57
the significance of their little show. The Actor’s wife must pass on to them
the knowledge of how their performance threatens Claudius (48).
The second time the puppet play is performed, the emphasis is on a single spectator’s epiphany: “¡Asesinos!” [Assasssins!] exclaims Ofelia as she
watches the show, drawing the right conclusion (52). Memory and imagination come together to change her understanding of the world, a dialectical
process that I have described as the discovery of a certain truth at the cost of
a shift in one’s identity. What she loses in the process is political innocence, a
loss poignantly accented by the echoes of Shakespeare’s Ophelia and her loss
of sexual innocence. Still, loss of innocence for many Uruguayans came not
only, and maybe not even primarily, from the performances they attended
in theaters, but also from political performances of power and resistance
observed through the media, in the streets, and in the prisons.
The third performance of the puppet play is repeated as farce. Luciano
forgets the potion. The Queen clubs him on the head, exclaiming, “¡Para tu
memoria!” (62) [For your memory!]. The Young Woman wants to make the
play funnier; the Wife wants to stage it so as to accuse Claudius. At least for
her, the performance now carries a double denunciation: the original accusation against Claudius and his second crime, against Equion. Representation
of the first crime becomes a metaphor for both offenses. The crime of illicit
capture of power has been followed by the crime of “disappearance” necessary to maintain that power. Memory has been layered over memory, so that
the performance (like most performances) does not stand for a single thing,
but acquires multiple levels of meaning. The puppet play now serves to maintain a collective memory of crimes that might otherwise be forgotten, that
the authorities are trying to erase. No one who sees it and absorbs its lesson
can pretend that political life was never otherwise.
And yet, as Connerton stresses, memory is not only a tool for use by
resisters of repression: totalitarian regimes also reshape the past and may
also be inspired by the performance of memory to perpetuate violence and
repression (42). The Uruguayan military has its own reconstruction of memories, most importantly its self-portrayal as defender of the nation against
guerrilla threat. This self-definition prevailed among the general population
when they voted in 1989 to uphold an amnesty law granting the military
immunity from prosecution from human rights abuses committed during
the dictatorship, an amnesty that is now being reconsidered by the current
government of Tabaré Vasquez. Varela’s work recognizes that totalitarianism can also manipulate memory, not as resistance to authority, but as its
enforcer. Elsinore includes a warning against a naive faith in memory for
memory’s sake: The performance of memory by no means guarantees liberation from totalitarianism. As Richard Kearney notes: “Memory . . . is not
always on the side of the angels. It can as easily lead to false consciousness
and ideological closure as to openness and tolerance” (27).
Two scenes in Elsinore call attention to this darker side of memory: an
early meeting between the Actor and Ofelia, and the last minutes shared by
58
the actor and the Interorgator. When the Actor and Ofelia share a brief sexual encounter, performance is perverted into an instrument of illusion and
disillusion. Ofelia asks the Actor to pretend that he is Hamlet—a request
for a performance to both spur memory (of Hamlet) and forgetfulness (of
who is and is not Hamlet). Yet once their sexual union is over, she is distraught by the sudden return to the consciousness that the Actor is not
in fact Hamlet (16). In this example of unsuccessful surrogation, the performer fails to live up to the role. Instread of re-creating or surpassing the
enchantment of the original, the performed memory amounts to a betrayal
of its origins.
The last scene between the Actor and the Interrogator recalls how
fathers in both Cuentos and Alfonso y Clotilde, like the ghost in Palabras,
functioned as voices from the past that could guide ethical behavior. In
Elsinore, however, memory motivates both the protagonist and his antagonist: the Actor draws on memories of his father (and his wife) to summon
the courage to resume his life (72–73); the Interrogator draws on memories of his father to motivate his brutality. He fondly recalls his adoptive
father’s smile, “cada vez que constataba mi fervor por las armas, su mano
sobre mi hombro mientras me decía: ‘Hijo, no podemos atacar solo con
las palabras. No serviría de nada’” (69) [“every time he realized my fervor
for weapons, his hand on my shoulder while he said: ‘Son, we can’t attack
only with words. That won’t do any good’”]. Memory in and of itself, the
play suggests, cannot be counted on as a kind of buffer against evil; it is
only a tool that must be used correctly in order to succeed in reestablishing
ethical norms.
CRÓNICA DE LA ESPERA [CHRONICLE
OF THE WAIT]27 1986
After the military lost the plebiscite of 1980, it was clear that civilian rule
would eventually have to be restored. But the military rulers were in no
hurry. In fact, their fi rst step was to cancel the elections that had previously been scheduled for 1981. Even in the last two years of military rule,
human rights abuses continued and censorship remained in place. One sign
that the dictatorship was softening, however, came on March 17, 1983,
when in a departure from the usual practice of censorship without explanation, the police chief of the rural departamento of Lavalleja, Col. Hermann
Strappolini, felt compelled to issue a press release to explain why he had
forbidden an amateur production in a youth center of Tennessee Williams’s
play Glass Menagerie. Strappolini objected to what he read as the drama’s
“sometimes violent labor disputes” and its “references to drug addiction,
crime, and prostitution as a reaction to the lack of communication between
parents and children,” which, he maintained, constitute a justification for
the deterioration of “the fundamental values of the social cell” (Martínez
59
184). A more serious breach of civil rights was the April 16, 1984, assassination of Dr. Vladimir Roslik, a Russian immigrant, wrongly accused
of spying for the Soviets, who was tortured and asphyxiated by two military officers (Martínez 216). The following month, when the country’s
most popular political leader, Wilson Ferreira, returned to Uruguay after
a sixteen-year exile, he was promptly imprisoned. The fi rst presidential
elections since 1972 took place on November 25, 1984, without the participation of Ferreira, or of several other banned politicians. Under the new
civilian rule of President Julio María Sanguinetti, on March 14, 1985, the
last of thousands of political prisoners were freed and throngs of people
took to the streets to celebrate.
“Montevideo, 14 de marzo de 1985” is the fi rst line of Crónica, uttered
by a ten-year-old boy, Martín, holding a ball in his hand. 28
“Montevideo, mayo de 1986” is among the last words he utters as the
play draws to a close. Crónica is indeed a chronicle, a chronicle of a wait for
justice that has not yet ended, a chronicle in which Varela for the fi rst time
uses completely uncoded, direct language to refer to historic events in Uruguayan (and Argentine) history going back as far as the May 1976 murders
of the Uruguayan civilian political leaders Gutiérrez Ruiz and Michelini.
As Hayden White has shown, even the most bare-bones chronicle, a series
of dates, involves a narrative. The decision to include some dates and omit
others gives priority to certain events—the included dates represent significant events and suggest a relationship among them, in other words, a plot
(8–9). White also notes that a unlike a history, a chronicle lacks closure:
it finishes without summing up events with an interpretation (16). Varela’s
chronicle does indeed end without resolution for both aesthetic and political reasons. The lack of resolution allows him to avoid what would likely be
aesthetically jarring, the bald statement of a moral, while simultaneously
taking the activist stance that the resolution is up to the spectator to create
in the world outside the theater.
Although Palabras and Interrogatorio focused on the mnemonic power
of theater, Crónica casts the net more widely and demonstrates how ordinary people in daily life construct narratives that reinforce their memories.
In thirty short scenes, this long one-act play employs a wide spectrum of
narrative styles, ranging from the informal, individual, and sentimental to
the formal, public, and at least superficially logical. At least six different
types of narratives are stitched together in the play’s patchwork quilt of
juxtaposed scenes: the obfuscating evasions of government bureaucrats, the
legal formality of writs of habeas corpus, the chilling eyewitness accounts
of state kidnappings, the “objective” jargon of newspaper articles, the
chatty letters between friends, and the romantic fantasies of lovers.
As important as the contrast in styles is the fragmentary way in which
the narratives are told, with dialogue and stage directions constructed so
as to simulate cinematic techniques that interrupt the flow of the story,
including flashbacks, fadeouts, and jump cuts. In the 1986 production in
Montevideo’s Teatro Notariado, the scenic (Osvaldo Reyno) and lighting
designers (Carlos Torres) realized stage directions intended to create the
illusion of fast-paced movement from place to place. Two scenes sometimes
take place in different areas of the same stage, with dialogue flowing back
and forth from the characters in one scene to the characters in the other
scene, so that the two scenes quickly multiply into three or four exchanges
occurring at once. Sometimes the action taking place in the scenes is thematically related. Sometimes a character in one scene will smoothly transition into another scene, creating an effect similar to that of the cinematic
fade-out. Sometimes the same words used immediately after each other in
two or three different contexts simultaneously connect and interrupt the
flow of the action, creating a kind of aural jump cut. For instance, voiceovers interweave the voices, and the traumas, of the three female protagonists as they simultaneously respond to abusive authority figures in each of
their homes:
DELIA’S VOICE. ¡Paren, por favor! ¡Les digo que no está!
ISABEL’S VOICE. ¡No está! ¡Les digo que no esta!
DELIA’S VOICE. Qué quieren?
EMILIA’S VOICE. ¡Llevate al nene! ¡Llevalo lejos!
DELIA’S VOICE. Qué están buscando? (29)
[DELIA’S VOICE. Stop, please! I’m telling you he’s not here!
ISABEL’S VOICE. He’s not here! I’m telling you: He’s not here.
DELIA’S VOICE. What do you want?
EMILIA’S VOICE. Take the baby! Take him far away!
DELIA’S VOICE. What are you looking for?]
These interruptions and juxtapositions impede spectator identification
with any one character, encouraging alienation in the Brechtian sense of
spurring reflection rather than mindless identification. Specifically, they
encourage reflection upon the power of story in its many guises and call
attention to the formal elements of the language. And finally, they deny the
spectator a sense of closure, underscoring that the wounds infl icted by dictatorship remain far from healed and that the spectator shares some responsibility in crafting an ending to the chronicle, in shaping it into what White
would consider a proper history. The play’s continued relevance today was
painfully obvious to me while watching the audience’s reactions during
a staged reading I attended on November 20, 2005 at the Teatro Florencio Sánchez, directed by Carlos Aguilera. One middle-aged woman in the
audience had tears streaming down her face at the end of the performance.
“We lived this. We lived this,” she said. Another spectator, a bespectacled
lawyer, confessed to me that he now felt he had made a terrible mistake by
not taking even the slightest risk to oppose the dictatorship.
In 1986, Varela himself directed the play and made casting choices
emblematic of his family’s commitment to the cause of the disappeared.
61
He cast his mother, Violeta Amoretti, as Emilia; his aunt, Julia Amoretti,
as Delia; and his son, whose real name is Martín, as the character named
Martín. Though the military dictatorship had officially ended the previous
year when Sanguinetti, assumed office, Varela was still uncertain enough
about whether the new democratic government would hold that he only
allowed his son to perform under the condition that his name appear in
the program under a pseudonym, “Marcelo Mieres.” The play opened on
June 20, 1986, in the downtown Teatro del Notariado and earned generally
positive reviews. 29 Yet the audiences were small, as if perhaps the public
was not yet ready to confront a trauma so recent.
Crónica interweaves three narratives of political “disappearance”
including that of Martín’s father, who does not surface among the prisoners released on that March 14 of national jubilation and apparent reconciliation marking the end of the eleven-year dictatorship. Martín’s mother,
Isabel, is one of three women who become friends and activists during their
search for a missing husband, son, and daughter, respectively. Emila succeeds in discovering a few details about the death her son Hugo; Delia cannot even fi nd documentation that her daughter Cecilia was detained, and
Isabel seeks in vain for news of her husband Diego, Martín’s father. The boy
decides that even if his father, a dissident journalist, never comes home, he
will learn to type on the father’s typewriter and follow in his professional
footsteps. All three stories are based on actual accounts of disappearances
with which Varela was familiar. As White argues, narratives have the power
to imbue the narrator with legitimacy or legal authority (13). Building on
White’s insight, I would argue that the subject of the narrative also gains
authority, which is what makes narrative so crucial to the ethical exercise
of memory. As Ricoeur reminds us, ethical memory is always on the side of
the victims, the victims other than ourselves (89). In Crónica, Varela does
more than pay tribute to the victims: He actually helps embed their stories,
their narratives, in Uruguay’s collective memory.
Because to lack an official narrative is to lack legal recognition of one’s
identity, the three female protagonists seek to have their loved ones inscribed
in the official record. The worst thing that could happen to a person detained
under dictatorship was to remain undocumented, a situation in which the
individual did not legally exist and therefore had no legal rights, not even
theoretical rights. In the case of the disappeared, the lack of an official narrative could precede one’s literal annihilation. In Crónica, the government
bureaucrat to whom all three women appeal, López, described in the stage
directions as a man of “impeccable manners and appearance,” speaks and
reads from his fi les in the classic grammatical pattern of bureaucracy evading responsibility—the passive voice. “Nunca fue detenida” [She was never
arrested] he tells Delia about her daughter Cecilia (30). “Creo que hay una
confusion. Le informaron mal, entiende? Tal vez hubo un error porque
aquí hay otra Acuña. Aquí está escrito Acuña Ortega, Olga. No hay ninguna Cecilia Acuña registrada” (30) [I think there is some confusion. You
62
were misinformed, understand? Maybe there was a mistake because there
is another Acuña here. Acuña Ortega, Olga. There is no record of a Cecilia
Acuña].
Even after making allowances for the Spanish-language tendency to use
the passive voice more naturally and more often than it is used in English,
Lopez speaks in an extraordinarily opaque manner. Who arrested Cecila?
Who created the confusion? Who misinformed? Who made the supposed
mistake? Underscoring the state’s erasure of Cecilia as a legal entity, at the
end of the play, the women return to López’s office to fi nd that he has left
and that all his fi le cabinets are now empty.
In Uruguay today, more than twenty years after the end of the dictatorship, no one seems to know what happened to the thousands of files the
government kept on its own citizens, classifying them as “A,” “B,” or “C,”
according to their degree of supposed political trustworthiness. Each of
those fi les holds a narrative that affected the ability of a citizen to hold
a government job, to travel abroad, to remain free from arrest (Weschler
90–91). The very secrecy of the narratives made them even more powerful, as people could never be certain exactly what their story was, in the
eyes of the government. To try to discover their standing, people would
discreetly inquire among any contacts they might have in the military
government (Mirza personal interview). The information was invaluable
because it allowed one to gauge the risk that one might be imprisoned, a
fate that almost always included torture during the earliest stage of detention (Weschler 125).
To counter the lack of official, public narratives about the treatment, or
even the existence, of prisoners, hundreds of Uruguayans fi led petitions of
habeas corpus. The literal meaning of “habeas corpus,” “you should have
the body,” speaks to the importance of its narrative in establishing a legal
identity for the subject of the writ. In Crónica, the three women speak in
unison when reciting a letter to a judge inquiring, in the elevated diction of
legal requests, as to the response to their petitions:
ISABEL. Señor Juez . . .
EMILIA. Señor Juez . . .
DELIA. Señor Juez . . .
EMILIA. Soy ciudadana uruguaya . . .
LAS TRES. (JUNTAS) . . . y me dirijo a usted para poner en su conocimiento que no recibí respuesta a mi “habeas corpus,” aunque
sé por otras personas que salieron en libertad . . .
EMILIA. . . . que mi hijo aún está allí y por lo tanto le ruego . . .
ISABEL. . . . que mi esposo se encuentra todavía allí, por eso le solicito . . .
DELIA. . . . que mi hija Cecilia sigue allí, por lo tanto le ruego . . .
LAS TRES. (JUNTAS) . . . quiera usted poner su buena voluntad en
averiguar el motivo por el cual no se le dejó libre.
63
ISABEL. Isabel Vásquez de Castro.
DELIA. Delia Ramos de Acuña.
EMILIA. Emilia Lorenzo de Suárez. (25)
[ISABEL. Your Honor . . .
EMILIA. Your Honor . . .
DELIA. Your Honor . . .
EMILIA. I am an Uruguayan citizen . . .
ALL THREE. (IN UNISON) . . . and I address myself to you in
order to inform you that I have not received a reply to my petition
for “habeas corpus,” though I know from other persons who were
released . . .
EMILIA. . . . that my son remains there, and therefore I beg of you
...
ISABEL. . . . that mi husband is still there, and that is why I request
of you . . .
DELIA. . . . that my daughter Cecilia remains there, therefore I beg
of you . . .
ALL THREE. (IN UNISON) . . . if you would be so kind as to discover the reason why he/she has not been released.
ISABEL. Isabel Vásquez de Castro.
DELIA. Delia Ramos de Acuña.
EMILIA. Emilia Lorenzo de Suárez. ]
Each woman speaks fi rst of the individual circumstances of her family
member, then in unison with the other two, then individually again,
ending with the recitation of her own name, the most salient marker of
individual identity. The dynamic of the voices—separating, joining, and
separating again—aurally represents the dialectic between individual
and collective memory discussed earlier. In this scene, the personal recollection fuses with a much larger social trauma, the fate of thousands of
imprisoned Uruguayans, then moves to the individual again, but an individual altered by the experience of collective remembering. The moment
the women speak in unison recalls a Greek chorus, the social conscience
of so many tragedies, in this case the Uruguayan tragedy.
Nonfiction accounts of political detention and disappearance typically follow a pattern: the name and age of the person, what they did
for a living, what political activity they did or did not engage in, the circumstances under which they were detained, any available information
about their subsequent fate. The most recent Uruguayan compilation
of such accounts, the 604-page A todos ellos [To All of Them], subtitled the Report of the Mothers and Family Members of the Uruguayan
Detained-Disappeared, published in 2004, follows the same pattern as
the postdictatorship government reports in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay,
and Brazil, with the addition of a wallet-size photo portrait of the victim
next to the text, a personal touch that serves as an added reminder that
64
the individual was cared about by someone. Any available eyewitness
accounts of the abduction of the victim appear in italics beneath the
photo. Like the wedding announcements or obituaries section of a newspaper, the sense that a single template may shape many different individual stories fuses the individual with the collective narrative. In Crónica,
Emilia’s account of the fate of her son Hugo follows the chilling formula,
all too familiar from government and nongovernment reports alike:
Igual terminó su profesorado de Historia, pero no pudo ejercer y
siguió en la fábrica . . . una noche de julio del 76, lo vinieron a buscar . . . Después de ese día no volví a verlo. A Elena, mi nuera, la interrogaron durante una semana y salió muy mal. Ella ahora se queda
en casa, con mi nieto, y yo voy por todos lados, preguntando. (16)
He fi nished his degree in history, but he couldn’t teach and he
kept working at the factory . . . one night in July of 1976, they came
to look for him . . . After that day, I never saw him again. Elena,
my daughter-in-law was interrogated for a week and came out in
very bad shape. Now she stays at home, with my grandson, and I go
around everywhere, asking.
Like the after-the-fact reports, her story is full of references to missing information, gaps that frustrate both the narrator and the spectator,
gaps that call attention to the inadequacy of these narrative efforts as a
substitute for complete, official information about what happened to the
victim. For the most part, the passage of time has resolved the question of
whether the disappeared still live in the negative. But questions remain. The
introduction of To All of Them concludes: “Se terminó aquello de ‘Vivos
los llevaron, vivos los queremos.’ No. Queremos tener sus restos. Queremos saber, “¿Cómo? ¿Por qué? ¿Cuándo? ¿Quiénes? ¿Dónde?” (33) [That
business about ‘You took them alive, we want them back alive,’ is over.
No. We want their remains. We want to know, “How?” “Why?” “When?”
“Who?” “Where?”].
Journalistic narratives in Crónica are similarly represented as frustrated
by a lack of information and further cramped by self-imposed and official
censorship, which prohibits writing even what little one does know. Diego
for instance, before his own disappearance, wants to write an article about
his friend Alicia, who was taken prisoner just because she happened to be
in the Buenos Aires apartment of a friend when that friend was arrested by
the security forces. His wife Isabel doesn’t think that he should take the
risk of writing the story, even under a pseudonym, even if he published it
in another Latin American country (11). He writes an article describing the
process of state kidnapping and torture in very restrained language:
Se posibilita así la aplicación ilimitada de la tortura física y
moral durante los interrogatories, lo cual permite a su vez fabricar
65
información. En el marco del secuestro, cualquier persona puede
ser forzada a suministrar multitud de datos, ya sean estos reales o
sugeridos por los interrogadores, datos que serán luego utilizados por
los especialistas en inteligencia en forma totalmene arbitraria.” (17)
[The unlimited application of physical and moral torture is thus
allowed, which also permits the fabrication of information. Within
the process of the kidnapping, anyone can be forced to supply a multitude of facts, whether real or suggested by the interrogators, facts
that may then be used by intelligence specialists in a totally arbitrary
manner.]
Diego’s subsequent discussion with his wife, however, reveals another
narrative under his dry prose: the story of how his friend was tortured
in a house, an attractive waterfront villa in the upper-middle class Montevideo neighborhood of Punta Gorda. Though Crónica’s characters are
fictional, the house to which Diego refers is real and still stands today:
After the military no longer needed it as a torture center, it sold it back to
private owners who once again use it a residence (Weschler 128). Diego
fi rst reads aloud his article then tells his wife what he dare not write:
“¿La secuestraron, entendés? La torturaron y después la cargaron
con otros en un camión . . . Los trajeron aquí, de contrabando,
como si fueran ganado. (Pausa) Está aqui, en Montevideo, ¿te das
cuenta? Dicen que hay una casa en Punta Gorda y que está ahí, con
los demás” (17). [They kidnapped her, do you understand? They
tortured her and then they loaded her with others in a truck . . . They
brought them here, smuggled in, as if they were cattle. (Pause) She is
here, in Montevideo, do you realize? They say that there is a house
in Punta Gorda and that she is there with the others.]
The specifics of Diego’s anecdote—the reference to a friend, to an
actual neighborhood, and to a torture center infamous among Uruguayans—contrasts with his news story to highlight the lack of detail, the
missing information in what one dared write and publish, even under a
pseudonym, under dictatorship.
While the public narratives highlight the lack of information available
to ordinary people, the many letters exchanged between friends and family
members in the play underscore the suffering caused by physical absence;
the loss of people and things; the inability of words, memory, and imagination to fully compensate for the physical presence in a particular place of
a particular person. In one scene that effectively counterpoints the similar
longings of two strangers, a boy and a teenage girl, Martín tries to compose
a letter to his father while Cecilia reads aloud to her mother a letter from a
friend who has emigrated to Sweden. Both letters fondly recall the Parque
Rodó, a Montevideo landmark that includes amusement-park games,
66
cheap food stalls, and other popular entertainment (8). The simultaneous
positioning of the two sets of characters who don’t know each other on the
same stage visually connects them, creating a microcosm of what happens
when strangers flow through a public space, sharing the same carousel ride
at the same moment, for instance, intersecting experiences without ever
acknowledging each other. And this simultaneity of experience also applies
to the more abstract experience of dictatorship, which for more than a
decade affected so many Uruguayans who nevertheless, like the female protagonists of Crónica, felt desperately alone until they realized that others
were experiencing the same fears and losses (A Todos Ellos 28–29).
The final recourse of those who perhaps experience absence most severely,
the imprisoned, is a blend of memory and imagination. In one scene from
Crónica, Diego addresses his wife from his prison cell: “Isabel . . . estás siempre conmigo. La memoria es un milagro. Puedo reconstruirte, puedo crearte.
Tu cuerpo me acompaña. Tus ojos, tu voz, tu perfume” (26). [Isabel . . . you
are always with me. Memory is a miracle. I can reconstruct you, I can create
you. Your body keeps me company. Your eyes, your voice, your perfume.] In
his fantasy, Isabel is finally able to call him by the pet name she has formerly
avoided as too flowery, “amor” (26) [love]. Like the playwright Mauricio
Rosencof, who kept himself sane by taking long imaginary walks with his
daughter, like the Argentine poet Juan Gelman, who in his poems recreates
the “disappeared” son he never saw again, Diego visits his wife and son in his
mind. These fantasy narratives are the most personal of all, constructed to
comfort oneself and remind oneself of one’s identity. Though not necessarily
factually true, like a chronicle or a history, they also keep the absent person
present.
In Varela’s work, justice for the victims of dictatorship is often dangled as
a tantalizing but still unfulfilled desire. When his dictatorship-era plays are
restaged today, more than twenty years after the end of dictatorship, they
remain fresh partly because new horror stories from witnesses who never dared
speak before are still coming to light and because the military is still dribbling
out information about where the remains of bodies might still be unearthed.
In 2005–2006, for instance, the news media offered frequent updates on the
search for the body of María Claudia Gelman, the daughter-in-law of Juan
Gelman, who was nineteen years old and in the last stages of pregnancy in
1976, when she and her husband, Marcelo Gelman, were kidnapped in Buenos Aires by the Argentine military. He was soon killed; she was transported
to Montevideo, kept alive until she gave birth, then killed. Her daughter was
given to an Uruguayan police officer and his wife to raise and her true identity
was not discovered until 1999, when she was twenty-four years old.
In the years since Varela first wrote and staged Crónica, both the March
and May dates that he used to bookend the play have acquired intense significance in Uruguayan political life.
The 15th of March has become known as “The Day of the Liberated,”
and is commemorated annually, not only by the prisoners who were freed
67
and their families, but by many Uruguayans concerned with human
rights. In 2006 the commemoration centered on the burial of the recently
discovered remains of two men unearthed from an unmarked grave near
an air force barracks. The military itself provided the information necessary to locate the bodies of a high school physics teacher, Ubagesner
Chaves Sosa, and a law professor, Fernando Miranda Pérez, who were
active Communist Party members. They had both been killed under torture in 1976. Eduardo Galeano delivered a funeral oration in which he
spoke of the discovery of the bodies as the beginning of “the liberation
of memory in a country that seemed condemned to perpetual amnesia”
(La REL). The 20 th of May has become the occasion for an annual silent
march commemorating the assassinations of the disappeared, including
Michelini and Guttierez Ruiz. On May 20, 2006, some 75,000 participants marched under a banner reading “Stop the Impunity,” a reference
to the amnesty law that remains in place, blocking prosecutions of military personnel. A bit like Martín in Varela’s play, Zelmar Michelini’s
son, Rafael, has followed in his father’s footsteps, serving in the Uruguayan senate and pushing for repeal of the amnesty law so that the
human rights abuses such as the assassination of his father and of many
other less prominent Uruguayans can be prosecuted.
As the Galeano anecdote about the girl who drew bird’s eyes in her
trees reminds us, the use of memory-as-resistance demands an interpretative act. “Don’t you see?,” the little girl’s rebuke to her imprisoned father,
is the call of the artist to the audience. Varela’s early theater is particularly
exciting in part because of its constant tension between keeping memories
secret—a necessity to avoid reprisals—and making them public enough to
form part of a broader oppositional discourse. After dictatorship, as might
be expected, his theater has become more naturalistic and more cheerful,
including a dark domestic drama (Rinnng 1993) and a comedy about
servants and their employers (Quien oyó hablar de Madame Bovary?)
[Who Ever Heard of Madame Bovary?] (2002). Yet even one of his most
cheerful works, Las divas de la radio [Radio Divas] (1996), a light look
back at the heyday of radio drama, includes lines that evoke the nation’s
unnecessary losses: “Este país debe estar lleno de fantasmas” (6). [This
country must be full of ghosts.] The consequence of dictatorship, such
as the continued economic hardship and psychological anguish faced by
many returning exiles, also continues to preoccupy Varela. For instance,
one of his most significant later dramas, La Emboscada [The Ambush]
(1997), is a frightening Pirandellian portrayal of a fiction writer returned
from exile abroad and his malevolent creation, a character drawn from
the darkest days of dictatorship, who ends up stealing and destroying the
writer’s identity. Like the exiles safe in cafes far from home, Varela’s later
works need no longer whisper; yet they nevertheless continue to urge the
spectator to see, to reflect upon what happened, who is responsible, and
what is to be done.
2
Boal and Guarnieri
Historical Allegory and the
Duty to Inspire
In Uruguay, as we have seen, dictatorship took hold slowly; in Brazil,
dictatorship announced itself abruptly. The markers of change were stark
as the military staged an overnight coup on March 31, 1964, put the
civilian president on a plane to Uruguay, and attempted to steal the Left’s
thunder by declaring itself the leader of a “revolution,” a revolution from
the Right. And whereas in Uruguay political theater rebounded toward
the end of the dictatorship, in Brazil, political theater (and other oppositional arts) flourished in a four-year window between 1964 and 1968,
when the military had seized power but had not yet cracked down hard
on the civilian opposition. The memory of democracy was still vivid and
socialist revolution still seemed possible—not only in Brazil but in counter-cultural movements around the world. Some dissident artists then set
themselves a loftier goal than remembrance: they aimed for nothing less
than bringing down the government.
Among the most active of such artistic groups was São Paulo’s Teatro
de Arena.1 Under Augusto Boal’s leadership, Arena crafted alternative
national heroes, or alternative versions of existing heroes, who challenged the anticommunist Right’s self-positioning as the descendents of
Brazil’s founders and protectors. In a series of three allegorical plays,
Arena implicitly suggested that true Brazilian and Latin American heroes
share an ideological lineage with the Socialist “Hombre Nuevo” promoted by Che Guevara after the Cuban revolution. Analysis of the Arena
plays in performance reveals, in microcosm, the contours of a struggle for
control of collective memory and national self-defi nition. In the course
of that struggle, I contend, the Left both contested and mirrored the
military’s authoritarianism, deploying heroic visions that attempted to
inspire change yet sometimes unintentionally reinforcing the very ideas
they ostensibly opposed, underscoring how difficult, or impossible, it
is for would-be revolutionaries to avoid a certain degree of complicity
with dominant ideologies. Moreover, Arena’s efforts to inspire rebellion
against dictatorship and movement toward a more socialist system of government entailed a degree of simplification that unfortunately limited the
aesthetic power of its allegories.
Boal and Guarnieri
69
The two best-known Arena plays of the era, Arena conta Zumbi (1965)
and Arena conta Tiradentes (1967), were cowritten by Boal and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri. The almost-forgotten Arena conta Bolívar (1970) was
written by Boal alone after a 1968 crackdown that, among other repressive
measures, paved the way for much harsher censorship that effectively shut
down theatrical resistance until the mid-1970s. Because of the protection
from censorship, however limited, that it seemed to offer, these historical
allegories—embellished by music, song, and sometimes dance—became
Arena’s favored weapon of resistance to dictatorship. Until it disbanded
after Boal’s exile in 1971, the company increasingly devoted itself to political theater that pretended to tell just one story while actually narrating
another. Within these doubled tales the individual protagonist is always
constituted by his doubled public role: Zumbi is both the warrior-leader
of a colony of escaped slaves and a figure for self-sacrifice in the fight for
freedom from dictatorship; Tiradentes is both an early, failed fighter for
Brazil’s national independence and a symbol of the Left’s quixotic struggle;
Simón Bolívar is both a colonial-era combatant for a unified Latin America
and a contemporary guerrilla who must learn the value of incorporating
the rural masses in armed struggle.
The dictatorship, meanwhile, far from collapsing, maintained the support of a large segment of the middle class and kept itself in power for more
than two decades, until 1985. The political naiveté and artistic simplicity
of the Arena conta plays make it too easy to dismiss their contribution to
world theater with the well-worn phrase “of historical interest.” Heavily
influenced by Brecht, the plays recall more the agitprop spirit and style
of Señora Carrera’s Rifl es than the ambiguities and subtleties of Galileo,
which Boal cites in the introduction to Tiradentes and again in Theater of
the Opressed. 2 The works have not been published in any language other
than Portuguese and are out of print in Portuguese. With the exception of
a few revivals of Zumbi, they have rarely been restaged. The music from
Zumbi was released as an album but was never reissued on compact disc
and is now almost unknown except for a single song popularized by the
well-known singer Elis Regina, “Upa Neghinho,” which easily serves as a
metaphor for the struggle of Afro-Brazilians to rise in the ranks of Brazilian society. Boal, in his many subsequent decades of work, has come to be
known less for his productions with Arena and more for what he made of
the coringa, or joker, a type of character with extraordinary powers. The
plays do, however, provide insight into the development of the coringa and,
more importantly, exhibit moments of allegorical imagination that it is difficult to imagine will ever be dated.
In order to appreciate that imagination, one must fi rst understand what
Arena was up against. The Brazilian military had long propounded a heroic
model of its own: the man (always a man) who would selflessly dedicate
himself to the nation, seeing to the fulfillment of the positivist slogan emblazoned on the national flag: “order and progress.” While the Left worshiped
70
Che, the military worshiped heroes such as the Duke of Caxias (born Luis
Alves de Lima e Silva) and Manuel Luís Osório, who were considered “the
ideal of model Brazilian soldiers” (Castro 13). By contrast to Che’s identification with the contemporary common man (though his origins were
actually middle class), Caxias and Osório were white nineteenth-century
aristocrats forever on horseback in the statues that memorialized them.
According to Celso Castro’s A invenção do exército brasileiro [The Invention of the Brazilian Army], though Osório’s consecration as military hero
preceded Caxias’s, the latter gradually surpassed the former in the military
imagination (15–25). By 1930 Caxias was lauded as a peacemaker who
preserved national unity and maintained a dignified distance from political
squabbles (26). As altruistic as the New Man, the military man was supposedly uninterested in power for the sake of power and above partisan
politics.
Unlike Uruguayan and Chilean armed forces, which generally maintained a tradition of obedience to civilian leaders, in Brazil, as in Argentina, the military developed the habit of stepping in to, in its view, sort out
the muddles created by civilian politicians. In 1831 a National Guard was
established to quash popular uprisings (Dassin 41–48). A split developed
between the National Guard, which developed an alliance with the rural
oligarchy, and the remainder of the army, which became the protector of
the industrial bourgeoisie (Dassin 42). Besides defense of the nation from
external enemies, the military’s mandate came to include repression of
domestic rebellions against the central government (Dassin 43). While the
Uruguayan military slowly sidled into dictatorship and the Chilean military staged a sudden grab for power, the Brazilian military had long been
hovering protectively in the background of civilian politics. Compared to
the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships’ policies of “disappearing” their
dissidents, even during the harshest years of dictatorship, 1969–1974, far
fewer Brazilian citizens fell victim to political assassination—less than 600,
as opposed to about 3,000 in Chile and as many as 30,000 in Argentina.
And compared to its neighboring countries, a far smaller percentage of
Brazil’s population was tortured, imprisoned, or exiled. 3
In 1930, the army installed Getúlio Vargas in the presidency. Seven years
later, it backed Vargas’s decision to cancel elections he was likely to lose,
suspend the constitution, and proclaim himself leader of a new authoritarian state, or Estado Novo. The supposed threat of communist insurgency
was used to justify suspension of civil rights, censorship, and banning of
political opponents. In 1935, the military easily crushed a weak communist insurrection limited to a few isolated members of the armed forces in
Rio and the northeastern states (Williamson 417). Military men killed in
the revolt were subsequently commemorated in an annual ceremony that
was reinvigorated almost thirty years later, when the military once again
claimed to be defending the nation from communist subversives. During
the November 27 ceremony, military officials began to compare 1935 with
Boal and Guarnieri
71
1964, invoking the more recent year of the coup as a repetition of the earlier anticommunist battle (Castro 49–67). By framing the coup as a version
of a past glorious moment in Brazilian history, the present regime was thus
justified and exalted. Even after the return of democracy in 1985, the president continued to attend the annual commemoration. It was only five years
after the return to civilian government, in 1990, that President Fernando
Collor fi nally discontinued the tradition of attending the ceremony (Castro
64).
Just as anticommunist sentiment had led the military to install Vargas,
anticommunist sentiment also led the military to undermine him. In 1945,
alarmed by Vargas’s ambitions and pressured by the United States, the military pushed Vargas into resigning and held presidential elections (Williamson 420). In 1950, the military accepted election results mandating that
Vargas retake office. But four years later, as the country was besieged by
economic problems, Vargas appealed to the working class with populist
measures such as a large minimum wage increase, thus infuriating anticommunist officers (Skidmore, Politics 5). When one of Vargas’s prominent
critics was nearly assassinated under suspicious circumstances, the military
once again withdrew its support from the president and demanded his resignation, leading to his suicide (Skidmore, Politics 6). Vargas’s successor, Juscelino Kubitschek, was elected and allowed to take office only because the
military deemed him sufficiently anticommunist. Military power submitted
to constitutional rule briefly, in 1961, when—after an internal struggle—
the left-leaning vice-president João Goulart was allowed to assume office
in the wake of the more conservative President Jânio Quadros’s sudden
resignation. But by 1964 the military had had enough of Goulart’s leftist
populism and forced him out of office. For the next two decades Brazilian
presidents—Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco (1964–1967), Arthur da
Costa e Silva (1967–1969), Emílio Garrastazú Medici (1969–1974), Ernesto
Geisel (1974–1979), and Joao Batista Figueiredo (1979–1985)—were all
military men imposed by the military.
The ideal military man was to help realize the dream of a Brazilian
“manifest destiny,” in which the entire expanse of Brazilian territory is
fully developed, allowing Brazil to assume its rightful place as an economic
powerhouse in Latin America. A strong, stable, capitalist economy could
in turn help win the war against the invisible “internal subversion” that
allegedly threatened to implement devious psychological tactics in order to
sway the population toward communism. Under this Doctrine of National
Security, as it was known, writes Maria Helena Moreira Alves, “the entire
population becomes suspect, composed of potential internal enemies, who
must be carefully sought out and uprooted” (17). An intricate intelligence
apparatus was therefore necessary to root out the subversives and annihilate them, or at least expel them from the nation (Alves 17–28).
Most repressive measures were justified by a series of pronouncements
known as “Institutional Acts” that increased in severity over the years.
72
Institutional Act No. 1, announced soon after the 1964 coup, authorized
a purge of the government, the judiciary, and the military itself. Act No.
2, decreed the following year, limited the powers of Congress and the
judiciary, and abolished political parties. Act No. 3 abolished direct election of state governors; Act No. 4 convened Congress for a special session
necessary to rubber-stamp a new constitution. In reaction to the increasingly repressive measures, guerrilla groups were briefly emboldened but
then quickly stamped out by a deeper level of state repression that imposed
strict censorship, institutionalized torture, and established a policy of exiling opponents. The most draconian of the institutional acts was No. 5,
decreed in December 1968, which suspended habeas corpus for political
crimes, established military trials for political prisoners, and banned judicial appeals for those charged with political offenses. Unlike its predecessors, this act set no limits on the extraordinary powers of the president
and was accompanied by a supplementary act that suspended Congress
(Alves 95–99). Government could only be returned to civilian control after
the domestic war against communists had been won and the economy had
been steered into prosperous stability, two goals that kept taking longer
than originally planned.
Interestingly, it was a proposed boycott of military “performance,” in
two of the many senses of the word, that triggered the 1968 crackdown.
The military declared itself outraged after a member of congress, Márcio
Moreira Alves, called on the public to protest military violence by refusing
to attend the annual Independence Day ceremonies on September 7. Adding insult to injury, inspired by Lysistrata, Moreira Alves also encouraged
Brazilian women to refrain from sexual activity with military men who
did not oppose state violence. Though the reaction against the member of
congress’s speech may have been just a pretext for seizing more power from
civilians, it is nevertheless worth noting that the military, while shutting
down others’ performances, demanded respectful audiences to its own displays of prowess, both military and sexual.
As the self-appointed guardians of the national economy, military rulers
imposed a conservative economic plan that was never as whole-heartedly
free-market as those of the other Southern Cone countries under dictatorship. While maintaining centralized control of the economy, planners
spurred production, courted foreign investment, held inflation in check,
and played by the rules of international lenders. Though measures such
as keeping wages low increased the gap between rich and poor, workers
were easily cowed by authoritarian restrictions on strikes and other forms
of protest. Meanwhile, the middle class enjoyed lower levels of inflation
and greater availability of consumer goods, which in turn reinforced their
support of dictatorship. The military saw its success in managing the economy as yet another sign of its mission to lead Brazil to its manifest destiny
as a sovereign power that could dominate the continent. In a speech to
the Higher War College, the president, General Arthur da Costa e Silva
Boal and Guarnieri
73
boasted: “We are building a great civilization in the southern hemisphere
because we refuse to bow to geographical determinism” (quoted in Skidmore, Politics 90). Though the United States did not intervene as heavy
handedly in Brazil as it did in Chile under Allende, it did express its support
both for Goulart’s ouster and for economic policies it interpreted as reassuringly anticommunist (Skidmore 28–29).
To undercut the dictatorship’s national heroes, the purportedly anticommunist founders and protectors of the nation, Arena summoned collective
memory in order to reinvent historical figures as leftist heroes who would
serve as ideological ancestors of the company members and their fellow leftist dissidents among the spectators. Outside of the theater, in parades and
commemorations, with speeches and monuments, the dictatorship staged
its performances. Meanwhile, inside the theater, Arena’s works implicitly compared the military’s depiction of itself as national savior with the
behavior of supposedly more authentic heroes. The competing sets of performances, however, shared a nationalistic faith in the act of sacrifice for
the sake of Brazil. Moreover, the Left’s vision replicated some of the very
ideological structures it ostensibly opposed: Male military leaders—selfsacrificing but violent when necessary—commanded the masses from the
pinnacle of a hierarchical power structure. Even the ostensibly black leader
Zumbi, I argue, is metaphorically whitened, making him more similar to
traditional military leaders than he might otherwise have been. If the ideal
military man would realize Brazilian manifest destiny, the ideal Hombre
Nuevo [New Man] promoted by Che Guevara after the Cuban Revolution
would foment Socialist revolution throughout the developing world.
Arena’s historical allegories exemplify a theatrical strategy that often
surfaces under conditions of political repression, when the urgent need to
express dissent coincides with the urgent need to disguise the expression of
dissent. Fredric Jameson has defi ned “national allegory” as an artistic work
in which “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory
of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society”
(69). Historical allegory, as I defi ne it, functions less as correspondences
between an individual and a collective and more as substitutions of one historical dilemma for another: a collective experience distant in time stands
for a collective trauma occurring in the present. For instance, under the
direction of José Celso Martínez Correa, Teatro Oficina’s 1967 restaging
of Oswald de Andrade’s 1933 play O rei da vela [The Candle King] turned
what was originally a veiled critique of Getulio Vargas’s regime into a doubly veiled indictment of the 1967 regime.4 Alfredo Dias Gomes’s O santo
inquérito [The Holy Inquisition], written in 1960 but not produced until
1966, used the Inquisition, its methods of interrogation, and its victims
as a metaphor for the relationship between contemporary torturers and
their victims. 5 Chico Buarque and Ruy Guerra’s musical Calabar (1973)
reexamined a seventeenth-century historical figure commonly considered
a traitor to the Portuguese for his collaboration with Dutch invaders and
74
reframed his “betrayal,” as an idealistic quest for a more just Brazil.6 In
all of these dramas, the hero has little private identity; the characters are
almost entirely constructed from their actions in a public arena.
In Calabar, to look at this important historical allegory in a bit more
detail, the eponymous protagonist, Domingos Fernandes Calabar, does not
even appear on stage: The action revolves around what the other characters
make of his decision to switch alliances from the Portuguese to the Dutch.
His always off-stage character is an ever-present absence that other characters discuss and quarrel about, a figure who might be any imprisoned dissident about to die for his oppositional view of what it means to be a patriot.
His private life is entirely depicted through the character of his wife, Barbara, who cheats on him with the man who in turn betrays Calabar to the
Portuguese authorities who execute him. Considered in isolation, Barbara’s
betrayal may appear to exemplify national allegory as defined by Jameson.
Barbara’s personal behavior might appear to symbolize the nation, or prenation, of Brazil, the true betrayer of the man whose “betrayal” would actually have served a greater national good. Had the play not been banned, the
allegorical equivalences that the spectator would have been prodded to draw,
however, are much broader than national allegory: Barbara and Calabar the
private individuals, the unfaithful wife and the cuckolded husband, stand
for more than fickle citizens and their martyred would-be national savior.
The dramatic action creates a larger equivalence between two historical
periods: the seventeenth-century colonial period and the twentieth-century
dictatorship. Within this allegorical frame, Calabar is any seventeenth-century mestiço accused of betraying the Portuguese and any twentieth-century
“subversive” labeled unpatriotic and accused of betraying Brazilians. Barbara is any seventeenth-century traitor to colonial Brazil and any twentiethcentury traitor to the Left. In short, Calabar’s protagonists represent more
than individuals or nations: They embody the comparison of two historically disparate collective identities. Arena’s allegories similarly double identities that are both collective and public—slaves/capitalist workers in Zumbi,
conspirators against the crown/would-be revolutionaries in Tiradentes, and
colonial liberators/successful revolutionaries in Bolívar.
Some precursors of Arena’s historical allegories parody national delusions of grandeur and adopt an antiheroic stance, for instance Mário de
Andrade’s hapless hero, described in the subtitle as “without any character” in the novel Macunaíma (1928), which was later adapted for the stage
(1978), or the hero who, inconveniently for those who would manipulate
his legacy, turns up alive and cowardly in Alfredo Dias Gomes’s comedy
O berço do herói [The Cradle of the Hero] (1965). Teatro Arena’s protagonists, however, mark a fi rm departure, even rejection, of this cynicism
about the possibility of Brazilian heroism. In Brutality Garden, Christopher Dunn suggests that Arena’s celebration of the hero, under Boal’s
leadership, represented an attack on the “anarchic and ironic,” “iconoclastic and ambiguous” aesthetics of the Tropicália movement epitomized by
Boal and Guarnieri
75
Teatro Oficina’s production of O rei da vela (83). He summarizes Boal’s
1968 criticism of Tropicália, which appeared in the program notes to the
Primeira Feira Paulista de Opinião under the title “O que você pensa do
teatro brasileiro?” [What do you think of Brazilian theater?], and cites
Boal’s defense of moral absolutes in political theater: “The dictatorship
is Manichaean. Against it and against its methods left-wing art must rise
up Manichaeistically” (83). Dunn locates Boal’s antipathy to Tropicália’s
ambiguity as “rooted in the populist experience of the CPC,” the Centro Popular de Cultura [People’s Center for Culture], which in the early
1960s staged agitprop plays in working-class venues. Though that may be,
close readings of the Arena plays reveal that Boal’s heroic protagonists also
appear to have been nurtured by another, related source: the Guevara ideal
of the New Man.7
Arena’s search for an authentic Brazilian hero, paradoxically, attracted
the company to an Argentine who fought in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia.
In March 1965, Che’s dispatch from Africa to the Uruguayan weekly Marcha, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” was published and widely circulated
throughout the region (Deutschmann 246). In the form of a letter to an
unspecified “compañero,” the article describes Che’s vision of a “New
Man,” selfless and brave, who for the sake of building a socialist utopia
would sacrifice material rewards, family life, and social life outside of the
Party. Such an individual derives satisfaction from internal rather than
external motivators: “It is not a matter of how many times a year someone
can go to the beach, nor how many pretty things from abroad you might
be able to buy with present-day wages. It is a matter of making the individual feel more complete, with much more internal richness and much more
responsibility” (258). According to Che, such a sacrifice requires a love far
more dispersed than love of one’s immediate circle of family and friends, it
requires a love of “the people.” The way to such socialist sacrifice, as Che
sees it, will be paved by the young, who will lead the pueblo into the future
by glorious example.
Historians and literary critics have traced Che’s New Man to two disparate sources: the Bible and Karl Marx. His idea of love and sacrifice may
be found in the Christian vision articulated in the New Testament letter of
Paul to the Ephesians (4:20–4:24), in which the apostle promises that those
who have “learned Christ” will shake off the “old man” and “put on the
new man,” recognizing that “we are members one of another” (Siles del
Valle 62–68). From Marx, Che borrowed the key concepts of alienation
of labor and class antagonism. The New Man, according to Che, is epitomized by the guerrilla fighter who leads the people into battle as subjects of
their own history (Siles del Valle 68–72).
The members of Teatro Arena, though by no means entirely homogeneous in their political views, were in general young, middle-class, White
idealistic leftists who at the very least admired, if not emulated, Guevara.
As reconstructed by the company, the characters of Zumbi, Tiradentes, and
76
Bolívar may all be read as examples of various aspects of the New Man.
All three protagonists are exceptional warriors, embodying traditionally
“male” virtues of physical strength and valor, who sacrifice everything for
their people and/or their countries. Upon the occasion of Che’s assassination in Bolivia, for instance, Boal composed a theatrical collage, A lua
pequena e a caminhada perigosa [The Small Moon and the Dangerous
Walk] (1968), that borrowed loosely from many Che pronouncements to
represent him as a courageous leader until the very last moment of his life.
Boal’s other heroic protagonists are often as unblemished, and as martyred,
as Che. In a tacit acknowledgment of the grim reality that the military had
swiftly overpowered and crushed the small Brazilian guerrilla opposition,
Arena plays often deferred the hero’s victory, depicting it as a vision that
would come to fruition in a hazy future. Arena could nevertheless count
on historical fact to remind spectators that utopian dreams are sometimes
realized, that the losers in the on-stage battles ending in defeat could one
day be absolved by history, to paraphrase Castro, and hailed as posthumous victors. Though Zumbi was vanquished and the escaped slave colony
of Palmares was annihilated, slavery was fi nally abolished in 1888. Tiradentes was foiled but his dream of an independent Brazil was realized,
three decades after his 1792 execution, in 1822. Though Bolívar’s vision
of a unified Latin America never came true, he did manage to liberate five
countries. Arena’s plays stoked the hope that the losing side in Brazil’s
1960s social confl ict—the opponents of dictatorship—might ultimately
prove as triumphant as Zumbi or Tiradentes or Bolívar. If nothing else, like
Che, they might prove glorious martyrs to the cause. Boal’s autobiography,
published in 2001, is fi lled with references to Che that cast an ironic glance
back on the revolutionary’s influence on Arena: “Che Guevara was our
model of honesty, tenderness and bravery. He wanted to do good, to rescue
the weak and oppressed—like Christ with machine-guns!” In retrospect,
Boal concludes, the “Che syndrome” was condescending and authoritarian
toward the people it was intended to enlighten (Baker’s Son 186–187).
Another of Boal’s heroes, Brecht, perhaps had a more salutary influence
on the Brazilian playwright’s work. Improvisation on Brechtian alienation
techniques led to the development of what Boal dubbed the coringa, after
the Portuguese word for the “joker” in a deck of cards. Like the joker,
the coringa can transform him or herself into any character, or even drop
the character to assume the role of interrogator of other characters, or to
address the audience directly. 8 A theatrical superhero, the coringa is free of
the constraints of space and time that bind actors operating under the rules
of realism. When he assumes the role of informant to the audience, he creates a didactic distance between actor and spectator, making him more of
a historian than the other actors: Sometimes he articulates what the other
characters can only show, which for those seeking aesthetic sophistication
can make him rather annoying. In his exploration of the role of the actor in
historical drama, Freddie Rokem has suggested that the performer serves
Boal and Guarnieri
77
as a “hyper-historian” whose embodiment of historical figures provides
“restorative energies” that attempt to compensate for a collective loss (13).
Though not all actors in Arena’s allegories function as historians, since at
certain key moments the actors make a bid for audience identification that
is more symbolic—using body shape motion, voice, and gesture to convey
the essence of an emotional appeal—the coringa does fit Rokem’s description of the actor as hyper-historian. Like a historian, rather than seamlessly
embody, the coringa teaches; rather than limit him or herself to mimicry,
the coringa narrates. Moreover, just as Rokem posits the function of the
actor in historical drama, the coringa and the other Arena actors do indeed
seem to have been mourning a collective loss, the loss of democracy and
the loss of the dream of socialist transformation of Brazilian society. These
plays insist, against a great deal of evidence to the contrary, that that dream
is still possible, which is perhaps a reason for their appeal then and for their
obsolescence now.
***
The history of Teatro Arena is the history of a company that wanted to
create a Brazilian theater with Brazilian heroes. In the tradition of cultural cannibalism advocated by Oswald de Andrade, dramatic works, performance techniques, and even theater theory from the United States and
Europe became grist for the cultural mill. Inspired by Margo Jones’s Theatre-in-the-Round (1951), which sings the praises of arena staging in the
United States, in 1953 the São Paulo actor and director José Renato and
a few of his friends began to experiment with staging plays in a circular
space, something that had never been done before in Brazil. They were
excited by how an arena venue would allow an intimacy with the spectator
created by realistic gesture and speech, a radical departure from the operatic gestures of the large proscenium theaters that were then the norm in
Brazil. Moreover, the actor’s proximity to the public promised an antidote
to what Renato calls “a irresponsabilidade da distância, a irresponsabilidade dos bastidores, da coxia, do ponto” (Arena conta Arena, Renato 3)
[the irresponsibility of distance, the irresponsibility of wings, of aisles, of
prompters].9
On February 1, 1955, Arena inaugurated its permanent home in Sao
Paulo, a theater-in-the-round with just 144 seats. Despite the company’s
desire to stage national works, it was constrained by two grim facts: First,
there was a dearth of Brazilian playwrights; and second, foreign plays,
particularly French farces, were extremely popular at the box office. Yet
despite the dutiful staging of several French comedies, by 1958, not only
was Arena was in fi nancial trouble, but less than a handful of its fi rst two
dozen plays had been written by Brazilians. With nothing to lose, Renato
decided to take a chance on directing a new drama written by a young
company member, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, the now legendary Eles não
78
usam black-tie [They Don’t Wear Black Tie]. After a slow start, the play
became a box office hit, running for more than a year and putting Teatro
Arena on more fi rm footing, both fi nancially and artistically (Arena conta
Arena, Renato 6).
The realistic staging of ordinary working-class people in Black-Tie
thrilled Brazilian audiences. The smell of fresh coffee fi lled the theater
as María (played fi rst by Miriam Mehler then by Vera Gertel) prepared
it for her boyfriend, Tião (played by Oduvaldo Vianna Filho), and they
chatted in a colloquial speech that had rarely been heard on Brazilian
stages (Gertel personal interview). Tião is torn between his need to earn
a living to support the pregnant María and his desire to support his fellow strikers, including his father. In Guarnieri’s tragic fi nale, Tião makes
the decision to break the strike, which leads his father to expel him from
the favela and his girlfriend to decide to remain behind rather than leave
with him. Tião’s exit is accompanied by María’s melodramatic plea for
him to return: “E quando tu acreditá na gente . . . por favor . . . volta!”
(87) [And when you believe in the people . . . please . . . come back!]. The
political message was clear: The working class must stick together. “OK,
so we weren’t working class, but we were Brazilian. And it was a great
relief to play Brazilian characters for a change,” recalls Vera Gertel (personal interview).
While all the members of the company shared the concern for social
issues revealed by Black-Tie, not everyone agreed on how theater could
best effect progressive social change. And not everyone was equally
active in party politics. Guarnieri, Vianna, known in Brazil as Vianinha,
and his wife at the time, Gertel, were all children of communist activists who had met in high school, where they were all young members of
the Communist Party (Gertel personal interview). Vianinha contributed
his considerable acting skills and his 1959 drama, Chapetuba Futebol
Clube [The Chapetuba Soccer Club], to Arena. But by 1961, discouraged
by the company’s inability to reach out beyond its middle-class leftist
core of support, he broke away to eventually found the Centro Popular
de Cultura, which was dedicated to making agitprop for more popular
audiences (Damasceno 72-–73). Other Arena members, however, such
as Boal, Flávio Migliaccio, and Marília Medalha, were not active in any
political party.10
After Black-Tie, Arena pledged to produce only Brazilian plays for
two years. In 1960, the company staged a comedy by Boal, Revolução na
América do Sul [Revolution in South America], that is actually quite cynical about the prospects for revolution. As Margo Milleret notes, “The
title might imply that the play will demonstrate revolutionary action, or
that it might even encourage it, but there are no examples of either tendency, nor are there suggestions of how revolution might be carried out”
(Teatro Arena 102). One of the two main characters endures prolonged
starvation only to choke to death upon his fi rst bite of a real meal; the
Boal and Guarnieri
79
other starts out as a would-be revolutionary and ends up selling out to
the establishment.
Revolução’s program cover illustration, a cartoon signed “Marcelo,”
seems prophetic of Arena’s fate: As a chaos of random violence erupts around
them, two beefy police officers with malevolent Cheshire-cat grins focus their
negative attention on a beleaguered little fellow with a furrowed brow holding a placard that reads, “HOJE / Teatro de Arena / Revolução na América
do Sul” [TODAY/ Arena Theater/ Revolution in South America]. In the program notes, Renato, who directed the work, asks the spectators: “Teatro deve
apenas divertir ou participar ativamente dos problemas em geral?” [Should
theater only entertain or should it actively intervene in general issues?] The
question indicates that Renato felt the need to prod the social conscience of
Arena’s audience, which is reflected in the program advertisements as almost
exclusively white and well-heeled. Arena’s advertisers appealed to people who
could afford, or aspired to afford, such luxuries as flights to Europe, designer
handbags, and rented tuxedos, all depicted in drawings of beautifully coiffed
white people enjoying lives of leisure.
Renato left Arena in 1962, leaving Boal to assume the position of artistic
director, a post he was to hold for the remaining nine years of the company’s
existence. Since neither Revolução nor the following two Brazilian plays
were box-office successes, Boal returned Arena to classic European and U.S.
plays, but this time with the stated intention of nationalizing them (George
48). He directed in a hybrid style influenced both by his admiration for Brecht and by his two years of study in New York City with John Gassner,
who exposed him to Stanislavsky’s realism (Babbage 6–8). The theatrical
potpourri of classics Arena offered from 1962 to 1964 included works by
Brecht, Machiavelli, Williams, Martins Pena, Lope de Vega, and Moliere
(George 49).
The military coup of March 31, 1964, however, quickly channeled
Arena’s energy into crafting a theatrical response to the new dictatorship:
Opinião. Directed by Boal and cowritten by Vianinha, Armando Costa,
and Paulo Pontes, the musical collage used allusive testimonials of three
singers from three different social classes—the Northeastern rural folk
(Zé Keti), the slum-dweller (João do Vale), and the upwardly mobile urban
woman (Nara Leão)—to tackle issues such as poverty, political repression, commercialization of music, and fear of self-expression.11 Interestingly, almost three years before Arena employed the figure of Tiradentes
as a symbol of freedom, he was already used in Opinião to highlight the
unfi nished business of the struggle for independence. The death sentence
for Tiradentes was read aloud and declared “a luta primeira que se deu no
Brasil” [the fi rst struggle that took place in Brazil] for “Um Brasil mais
decente, Um Brasil Independente” [a more decent Brazil, an independent
Brazil] (quoted in Damasceno 132). This short tribute would blossom
into the larger-than-life figure that dominates the five acts of Arena conta
Tiradentes.12
80
But fi rst Boal and Guarnieri collaborated on Zumbi with the composer
Edu Lobo. The three men began discussing the idea of the “perfect play”
over drinks, and soon Boal and Guarnieri were taking turns at the typewriter while Lobo shut himself up in an adjacent room to compose (Fonseca-Downey 89; Boal, Baker’s Son 165). Boal and Guarnieri shared a
similar background. Both were the children of middle-class immigrants:
Boal’s parents had migrated from Portugal in 1914, seventeen years before
his birth in 1931; Guarnieri’s had migrated from Italy when he was two
years old, in 1936. Both playwrights were leftists, though Guarnieri was a
communist party member and Boal was not. Yet as Boal writes: “We were
united ideologically, in struggle against the recent installation of the civicmilitary dictatorship, which killed so many people, and which caused so
much irreparable damage” (Baker’s Son 165).
Zumbi opened on May 1, the Socialist Labor Day, of 1965 and ran for
eighteen months. Censors, who allowed the work to be staged with only a
single minor change in wording, missed quite a bit of parody of the dictatorship. Boal and Guarnieri’s second collaboration, Tiradentes, met with
less popular success and a mixed critical reception. It opened on April 21,
1967, and closed after seven months.
Meanwhile, outside the theater, confrontations between the Left and
the right-wing government grew more intense, culminating in the coupwithin-a-coup at the end of 1968 that brought a harder-line faction to
power. While the Brazilian Communist Party had long advocated a nonviolent transition to socialism, in 1967, a splinter group called the Aliança
de Liberação Nacional (Alliance for National Liberation) called for armed
struggle. Other armed groups also jumped into the fray, planting bombs,
robbing banks, and, most spectacularly, kidnapping the United States
ambassador to Brazil. 13 A few members of Teatro Arena were convinced
that artistic activity in and of itself would never suffice to effectively combat
dictatorship. Izaías Almada, for example, was working for Teatro Arena as
an assistant director and acting in Arena conta Zumbi when he joined
the guerrilla group Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária (VPR) and began
to “expropriate” cars for use by revolutionaries. His activities with VPR,
though never fully uncovered by the authorities, eventually led to a twoyear prison sentence (personal interview).14 Other theater practitioners,
however dubious they may have felt about the power of art to engender revolution, limited themselves to resistance through performance. Almada’s
wife at the time, for instance, the singer Marília Medalha, who performed
with him in Zumbi, was unaware of her husband’s underground activities
(personal interview).
After the limited success of Tiradentes and the 1968 coup-within-acoup, Boal and Guarnieri began to part ways. Boal toured abroad with
Arena; Guarnieri kept writing in Brazil, but at a slower pace and in a far
more allusive fashion that never achieved the impact of his earlier works.
In August 1969, on the same weekend as the Woodstock festival upstate,
Boal and Guarnieri
81
under Boal’s direction, eight Arena actors performed a Portuguese-language Zumbi in St. Clements Episcopal Church in New York City, winning
a glowing review from The New York Times, which correctly identified
the political allegory but made a point of stressing that the show was nevertheless good fun, summing it up as “an exciting romp of a musical play”
(Raymont 31). The following year Boal wrote Arena conta Bolívar on his
own, took it with Arena actors to the Public Theater, then went on to tour
Latin America. Back in Brazil, as he walked home alone one night in 1971,
Boal was detained by three men who turned out to be military police sent
to arrest him (Baker’s Son 284).15 Perhaps in part thanks to an extensive
campaign of public pressure, a campaign featuring Arthur Miller and other
well-known theater practitioners that was organized behind the scenes by
Joanne Pottlitzer, the producer of Arena’s tours to New York City, Boal was
released after less than three months.16 He left for Buenos Aires and eventually settled in Paris. In 1986 he returned to Brazil and is now based in Rio,
where he directs the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed and trains others
in the performance methods he has outlined in several books, including
most famously, Theatre of the Oppressed.
In the years following his collaboration with Boal, Guarnieri wrote several noteworthy plays under what he called Teatro de Ocasião [Theater
of the Occasion], his attempt to continue combating dictatorship, and collaborated with fi lm director Leon Hirszman on a prize-winning 1981 fi lm
version of They Don’t Wear Black-Tie. His 1971 play Castro Alves pede
passagem [Castro Alves Asks Permission to Pass] highlights media censorship through the metatheatrical strategy of a television talk show that hosts
the nineteenth-century abolitionist poet Antonio Castro Alves. In Um grito
parado no ar (1973) [A Scream Frozen in Midair], he experiments with the
use of a tape recorder to examine the relationship between daily life and
art. And in Ponto de partida [Point of Departure] (1976), he once again
resorts to allegory to protest contemporary injustices. Set in the Middle
Ages, the play alludes to the 1975 police assassination of the São Paulo
journalist Vladimir Herzog. As Brazil slowly moved toward civilian rule,
Guarnieri increasingly dedicated himself to acting in numerous television
dramas. Despite a long battle with kidney disease, in 2006 he was still so
active in television performance that when he fell seriously ill, his character
had to be written out of an ongoing series.17 He died on July 22, 2006, at
the age of 71.
ARENA CONTA ZUMBI
On May 11, 1988, the white nineteenth-century military hero Caxias and
the black seventeenth-century fugitive slave hero Zumbi almost collided,
metaphorically speaking, on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Protesters in
the “First Black March against the Farce of Abolition” intended to end
82
their demonstration at the monument commemorating Zumbi in downtown Rio and had purposely selected a route that would take them past
the statue of Caxias, located just a few blocks down the same avenue. The
protesters wanted to take the opportunity to confront the figure of Caxias
with the deaths of thousands of low-ranking Afro-Brazilian soldiers under
his command (1866–1869) in the war against Paraguay (1864–1870). At
the last minute, however, army officials decided that Caxias should not
be subjected to such a show of “disrespect” and scuttled the confrontation by forcibly rerouting the march away from their hero (Castro 35–36;
Hanchard, Orpheus 148–150).
Twenty-three years earlier, in São Paulo, Teatro de Arena ostensibly staged
a similar confrontation between black and white heroes, between the leaders of Zumbi’s fugitive slave community, Palmares, and the colonial military
men sent to annihilate the rebels. Boal and Guarnieri’s response to the 1964
coup, Arena conta Zumbi, could have highlighted the racial inequalities that
persisted long after the end of slavery and continue to afflict Brazil today.
Instead, Zumbi avoided a potential exploration of the intersection between
race and class in favor of a juxtaposition of socialist utopia with capitalist reality: Issues of class almost erased race. One could contend that the
slaves’ story was narrated and embodied so as to metaphorically “brown”
the cast and, by extension, identify all of Brazil’s leftists, of whatever race,
with the black leader Zumbi. But the all-white casting, among other directorial and dramaturgical decisions, while celebrating Zumbi, also “whitened”
him, turning his image into a vessel for a Che Guevara-like Socialist leader.
Boal writes in Theatre of the Oppressed that Arena “revalidated the struggle of the Blacks as an example of another that we must wage in our own
time” (167). Close examination of the text and performance, however, shows
that in appropriating Afro-Brazilian struggle for antidictatorship purposes,
Arena unwittingly reinforced one of the dominant ideologies propagated
by the military government, that Brazil was a “racial democracy,” in which
race was supposedly irrelevant to personal progress and political participation. While on the one hand condemning racism, Arena depicts the struggle
between the Left and the Right through an allegorical syllogism that, on the
other hand, sidelines race: The blacks in the play stand for Socialists; the
Socialists are created from white models (Che and Brecht) and embodied by
white actors; the “blacks” thus in a sense become white leftists, just like the
authors and the cast members.18 On a symbolic level, the play’s central confrontation takes place between two sets of white leaders.19
Boal cites Zumbi’s simple red shag rug of a set and the jeans-and-sweatshirts costumes, both suggested by designer Flávio Império, as evidence that
the troupe members were conscious of themselves as narrators of someone
else’s history:
We were middle class: the set would be a soft red rug, middle class
like us (today I detest soft red rugs . . . ). And the costumes? Jeans and
Boal and Guarnieri
83
coloured shirts, each a different hue. The show was as if a group of
friends descended on a living room, where some other friends, the audience, were waiting. (Baker’s Son 241)
Boal maintains that Arena actors were not pretending to be anything other
than their middle-class selves: “We knew we were not going to dialogue
with the people. We would show our own face” (241). Without referring
explicitly to race, Boal here uses the term “people” [povo in Portuguese
and pueblo in Spanish] in the Latin American sense of the word, meaning
something like the common people, the working poor and unemployed.
In Brazil, where almost 50 percent of the population considers itself black
or brown, the vast majority of the povo is of African ancestry. 20 Though
Arena actors did not use blackface and literally showed their own white
faces, they spoke in their own version of what Boal and Guarnieri imagined
to be seventeenth-century Afro-Brazilian dialect, thus engaging in what
Susan Gubar calls “cross-racial ventriloquism.” Beyond recounting the stories of their characters, they also embodied them, thus engaging in what
Susan Manning calls “metaphorical minstrelsy.”21 Boal’s choreography,
accompanied by music composed by Edu Lobo, adds up to much more than
actor-as-narrator. As reconstructed by interviews with performers, choreographic notes, reviewers’ accounts, and performance video, Zumbi clearly
consists in large part of white actors who embody slaves brought from
Africa, their Brazilian-born descendants, and their persecutors, who were
either Portuguese or descendants of Portuguese. 22 Because each character
was played in turn by each of the eight actors, who remained on stage during the entire performance, every actor embodied every character at least
once. Arena’s minstrelsy was only metaphoric. Nevertheless, a dynamic
similar to the one Eric Lott illuminates in Love and Theft seems to be
at play: The performance simultaneously pays homage to Zumbi yet robs
him of his racial identity, as if in order to pose a worthy opponent to the
military’s heroes he has to undergo a process of symbolic branqueamento,
the whitening through miscegenation that according to some Brazilian race
theorists would eventually lead to an ever more fair-skinned people unencumbered by racial confl icts. 23
An introductory song signals the spectator to draw parallels between
past and present. The embodiment of Zumbi’s story then begins on the
slave ship from Africa to South America, as the actors sit cross-legged in a
circle on the floor and “row.” The focus shifts to Zambi, the great-grandfather of Zumbi, who stands in the center of the circle as if his hands were
tied behind his back, and under a blue light sings in a plaintive low-note
lament of a lost spiritual homeland, Aruanda. In a series of short scenes,
spectators experience the alternation of Stanislavskian performances with
Brechtian narration: They see men sold into slavery, view a slide show of
the instruments used to torture slaves (an allusion to contemporary torture
at the hands of the military), are told of Zambi’s flight to Palmares, watch
84
as the cast members, transformed into a chorus of slaves, kneel and bow
their heads in subservience to Zambi. The slaves sing a rebellious “Ave
Maria,” in which the virgin is worshipped in syncretism with the Yoruba
deity Olorum. They convince a frightened slave to risk the fl ight into freedom, then begin to build their community to an upbeat rhythm that makes
the back-breaking work they mime with imaginary pickaxes, shovels, and
machetes seem like fun:
Trabalha, trabalha, trabalha irmão
Trabalha, trabalha de coração.
Palmares tá grande, Palmares cresceu,
com a fôrça do braço do negro que sabe o que é seu. (38)
[Work, work, work brother
Work, work with all your heart.
Palmares is big, Palmares grew,
With the strength of the arm of the black man who knows what is his.]
A series of short scenes builds to the climax of a thriving Palmares: The
slaves establish ties with white traders who begin to buy their agricultural
products, defeat the earliest Portuguese expeditions sent to crush them, and
rescue Zambi’s grandson Ganga Zona (Zumbi’s father) from slavery. By the
end of the first act, the former slaves invite the audience, positioned as the
still-enslaved, into their utopian community with the joyful melody, “Venha,
venha ser feliz, ai venha . . . Venha que essa terra é nossa/ e o trabalho é bom,
sinherê!” (46) [Come, come and be happy, oh come . . . Come because this
land is ours and work is good, sirs!]
The second act encapsulates almost a hundred years of seventeenthcentury history, as leadership among the blacks passes to Zumbi from his
great-grandfather Zambi. The Portuguese intensify their attacks until the
bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho finally succeeds in wiping out Palmares.24
As the play ends, Zumbi stands alone, under the blue bulb, his fist raised in
a gesture reminiscent of the black-power salute, arm straight, fist clenched.
The chorus kneels but their torsos remain erect, their fists also clenched in
defiant salute toward the audience.
Critical discussion of Zumbi, perhaps taking its cue from the play itself,
has tended to ignore racial issues and focus primarily on its efficacy as a
political and aesthetic product. Much debate has centered on to what extent
the play distorts history, simplifies characters, and simplifies leftist politics,
and to what extent such simplification is necessary, desirable, or unfortunate. On the one hand, Brazilian critics such as Décio de Almeida Prado,
Roberto Schwarz, Edélcio Mostaço, and Cláudia de Arruda Campos, among
others, have taken the work to task for its didacticism, its agitprop simplicity, its preaching to the converted, and its apparent celebration of defeat. Iná
Camargo Costa further argues that the play distorts both Afro-Brazilian
history and the history of the Brazilian Left. On the other hand, North
Boal and Guarnieri
85
American critics such as Margo Milleret and Robert N. Anderson have been
more willing to make allowances for such supposed flaws, praising the play
on the grounds that it provided much-needed encouragement to a demoralized Left. Anderson interprets the performance as communal ritual between
the actors and the audience, in which the sacrifice of Zumbi represents the
sacrifice of the student community (“Quilombo” 25). And Milleret reads it
as a story recounted by a samba school during a carnival parade, with one
important difference: “Whereas carnaval allows people of low social status
to portray aristocrats, Zumbi is acted out by white, middle-class university
students who accept the roles of noble Africans and decadent Europeans”
(“Acting” 23). Accept or appropriate? Is Zumbi elevated or eviscerated?
The most obvious evidence of branqueamento was the all-white cast,
which included one of the playwrights, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri; Vânya
Sant’Anna, who later married Guarnieri and pursued a career as a sociologist; a then unknown young singer Marília Medalha, who went on to stardom; Chant Dessian, who was soon replaced by Izaías Almada, Medalha’s
husband; Lima Duarte, who is now one of Brazil’s most well-known film and
television actors; Dina Sfat, who also became a well-known film and television actor before her premature death; Anthero de Oliveira, who also devoted
himself to television acting before his early death; and David José, who gave
up acting for writing and university teaching.25 Several of Arena’s founders
met at the University of São Paulo, in an era when the number of university
students of Afro-Brazilian descent was miniscule, making it unlikely that
they would have met any black actors through that social network (Telles,
“Ethnic Boundaries” 124–131). People of color who did venture into acting
were often discriminated against. Though there was no tradition of blackface
in Brazil comparable to the U.S. minstrel show, both theater and television
producers often assigned leading black or mulatto roles to white actors in
blackface (Fernández 8).26 Reviewers of Zumbi, both in Brazil and in the
United States, when it traveled to New York City in 1969 and 1970, did not
find the racial composition of the cast worthy of comment.27
Beyond casting, precisely how did Arena transform black slave leaders
into white socialist revolutionaries? Marcelo Ridenti provides a starting
point when he describes Zumbi as a type of New Man who is nevertheless based in the past, “na idealização de um antêntico homen do povo,
com caízes rurais, do interior, do “coração do Brasil”, supostamente não
contaminada pela modernidade urbana capitalista.” (24) [in the idealization of an authentic man of the people, with rural roots, from the interior,
from the ‘heart of Brazil,’ supposedly uncontaminated by urban capitalist
modernity]. Ridenti’s observation underscores two important elements in
the construction of Zumbi’s black characters: First, they are saintly noble
savages, and second, they are modeled on Guevara’s ideal of a new man.
In the utopia of Zumbi’s refugee slave community, lack of individuality coupled with fairy-tale goodness makes many of the black characters
seem interchangeable. Not only is Zumbi whitened, but also his ancestors,
86
who had confusingly similar names: Zumbi’s great-grandfather Zambi, the
founder of Palmares; Zumbi’s grandfather, Zumba; and his father, Zona.
The three characters who figure most prominently—Zumbi, Zambi, and
Zona—are distinguished by their piety, bravery, sincerity, self-sacrifice, and
endless willingness to work hard for the greater good of the community,
making it difficult to distinguish them from each other. Their individuality
is further erased by the fact that their characters were played by each of
the eight actors in turn. To help spectators keep track of who was who, the
actors relied on signature gestures, such as straight arm with clenched fist
for Zumbi, a gesture that evokes both class and race with its echoes of both
the Socialist salute of the Spanish Civil War and the black power salute of
the 1960s.
The creation of an idealized Palmares led by mythic heroes requires
changing or ignoring historical accounts that recount black oppression
of other blacks within the quilombo. The altering of historical events, in
a work of fiction, is not particularly objectionable. After all, as Hayden
White has shown, even the most straightforward historiography cannot
avoid the techniques of fictional narrative. Therefore I point out some of
those alterations in Zumbi not to object to them per se, but to show how
they create a narrative of an encounter between blacks and whites that relegates blacks to a minor role in their own history. 28
Established in the palm forests of a mountainous area of northeastern
Brazil around 1605, over most of the century, Palmares grew to include
nine distinct settlements, the largest of which sheltered some 6,000 inhabitants (Funari and Vieira de Carvalho 12). According to documents left
by expeditions sent in failed attempts to pacify the maroon settlement,
documents that were of course biased against the escaped slaves but that
have not been entirely discredited, the colony’s rulers were far from the
uniformly good-hearted leaders created by Boal and Guarnieri. In fact,
Palmares’s population apparently grew into the thousands partly through a
system of enslavement within the quilombo: Some former slaves kidnapped
other slaves still working on plantations, brought them to Palmares, and
kept them in slavery there, unless they were willing and able to go on
another kidnapping expedition to fi nd yet another slave to replace them
(Kent 169). Anyone who attempted to leave the colony was killed (Anderson, “Quilombo” 551). In Boal and Guarnieri’s play, the possibility that
slavery was practiced within Palmares was not even mentioned; the practice of kidnapping is tacitly acknowledged but transformed into a playful,
gentle scene of consciousness-raising with a slave called Nico, who doubts
the advantages of freedom. As Nico repeatedly voices his doubts—“Não
quero ser livre. Ser livre pra quê?” (33–35) [I don’t want to be free. Be free
for what?]—the other characters take turns responding to his concerns.
While the entire cast sings of the riches that Palmares has to offer, symbolic
of the plenitude of freedom, the men chase after Nico like children playing
tag; the women gracefully skip in a circle and flap their arms in evocation
Boal and Guarnieri
87
of the many beautiful birds among the wonders of the escaped slave colony.
Kidnapping thus appears as harmless as a game.
Struggles for succession among Palmares’s leaders are similarly presented in the gentlest possible light. According to one historical account,
Zumbi, or his followers, poisoned the reigning leader in order for Zumbi
to take power in 1680 (Anderson, “Quilombo” 563). In Boal and Guarnieri’s rendition of events, just the opposite happens: The descendents of the
aging ruler refuse to plot against him. Instead, recognizing that the time
has come for his great-grandson to take power, Zambi stabs himself in an
operatic moment of self-sacrifice (50).
Part of the saintliness of Zumbi’s black leaders derives from their insistence on the redemptive power of work. The actors’ cheerful, energetic miming of chopping, digging, and planting recalls the famous images of Guevara
cutting sugar cane in the fields of Cuba, building a revolution that in turn
was intended to change the world. Borrowing Marx’s use of bondage as a
metaphor for alienation of labor, Che writes in his letter from Africa: “In
this way he [man under socialism] will reach total consciousness of his social
being, which is equivalent to his full realization as a human creature, once
the chains of alienation are broken” (qtd. in Deutschmann 253). Rephrasing
Marx, Che explains how the nature of work will change under socialism:
“Work no longer entails surrendering a part of his being in the form of labor
power sold, which no longer belongs to him, but represents an emanation
of himself, a contribution to the common life in which he is reflected, the
fulfillment of his social duty” (quoted in Deutschmann 254). Without ever
using the dangerous word “socialism” in Zumbi, Palmares’ founder, Zumbi’s
great-grandfather Zambi, similarly exhorts his followers:
Ser livre num é encostar o corpo. Ser livre é trabalhar e vigiar e poder
continuar senhor de si . . . Não vamos viver só das coisa já nascida, das
coisa que Deus deu. Vamos fazer o mundo mais de nosso jeito. (35)
[Being free isn’t laying the body down. Being free is working and keeping watch and being able to keep being one’s own master. We aren’t going to live only by the things that have already been born, by the things
that God gave. We are going to remake the world (literally, “make the
world more our way”).]
Zumbi converts Palmares’s runaway slaves into workers, liberated from
capitalism, and given the opportunity for self-realization under socialism.
The implication is that once liberation from capitalism has been achieved,
racism simply vanishes. All the abuses of slavery so richly detailed in the
play’s early scenes—the slave ships, the crack of the whip, the selling of
human bodies—evaporate in Palmares-as-socialist paradise.
Besides allusions to Che, indirect references to another socialist hero,
Brecht, infuse Zumbi with socialist fervor. At the ends of their lives, both
88
Zambi and later his great-grandson Zumbi sum up their existence with
almost identical monologues and songs with the same melody and only
slight variations in the lyrics. The monologue and the song “Eu vivo num
tempo de guerra/ Eu vivo num tempo sem sol” [I Live in a Time of War/
I Live in a Time without Sun] are translations and revisions of the famous
Brecht poem composed and revised during the 1930s, “To Those Born
Later.” The song lyrics come from the fi rst, and most morose part of the
poem, which expresses horror (“Truly, I live in dark times!”), self-doubt
(But how can I eat and drink if I snatch what I eat/ From the starving . . . ),
and futility (And yet I eat and drink). In keeping with the sincere optimism
of Zumbi’s tone, however, the song begins with a lone male voice accompanied by a slow, melancholy guitar yet builds to a lively chorus accompanied
by brisk, triumphant strumming:
Eu sei que é preciso vencer
Eu sei que é preciso brigar
Eu sei que é preciso morrer
Eu sei que é preciso matar. (49)
[I know that it’s necessary to win
I know that it’s necessary to fight
I know that it’s necessary to die
I know that it’s necessary to kill.]
In the recording of Zumbi, each line is sung with an emphasis on the fi nal
infi nitive, already underscored by being the only word in the phrase that
changes: win, fight, die, kill! The violent aspect of Guevara’s lessons comes
to mind here, as the song departs from Brecht’s language to end on an echo
of Che’s exhortations to hate as well as love, to kill when necessary for the
sake of socialist revolution (Siles del Valle 52).
Zumbi’s spoken self-reflection draws primarily from parts II and III
of the poem, rephrasing and omitting so as to craft Zumbi as a far more
self-assured, heroic figure than Brecht’s lyric voice. The third stanza of
Part II reads:
All roads led into the mire in my time.
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers.
There was little I could do. But those in power
Set safer without me: that was my hope. (13–16)
In the mouth of Zumbi the same lines become:
A voz da minha gente se levantou e minha voz junto com a dela. Minha
voz não pudo muito mas gritá eu bem gritei. Tenho certeza que os
donos dessas terra e Sesmaria ficaria mais contente se não ouvisse a
minha voz. (49).
Boal and Guarnieri
89
[The voice of my people arose and my voice together with theirs.
Though my voice could not do much more than shout, I shouted well.
I am certain that the owners of those lands and land-grants would be
happier if they didn’t hear my voice.]
“That was my hope” becomes “I am certain.” “There was little I could do”
is eliminated in favor of “I shouted well.” The poet looks back on his life
with an ambivalent blend of helplessness and faint hope; Zumbi looks back
with self-confidence bordering on arrogance.
The direct address of the poem’s last stanza, however, is cited almost
verbatim and functions similarly in both the poem and the play: It transports the reader or spectator into a future that looks back at the present:
But you, when the time comes at last
And man is a helper to man
Think of us
With forbearance. (17–20)
Zumbi, Zambi’s successor, repeats these lines at the end of the play, creating
a cyclical sense of history, as each generation fights the same battle again.
Implicit in this repetition is, again, an optimistic stance: the battle may be
lost but the war isn’t over. The war, however, is not the war against slavery
or its successor, racism, but the war against fascism, the war for socialism
that Brecht, for those spectators familiar with Brecht, personified. Another
part of the poem cited in the play, the refrain at the end of each of the four
stanzas in the poem’s second part, obliquely addresses the spectator: “So
passed my time / Which had been given to me on earth.” The lines toll like
a bell, reminding spectators of their own mortality and posing the implicit
question: What are you doing with your time? What is the meaning of your
stay on earth?
In performances of Zumbi, white actors playing black men recited words
written by a white man in reference to Europe’s socialist struggle against fascism. The allegory sweeps chronologically and geographically: from colonial
Brazil to Europe before World War II and back to Brazil in 1965. Though as
Anderson notes, Zumbi’s death is never shown on stage, perhaps suggesting
that his spirit lives on in the young white actors who portray him, the allegory reincarnates the black slave leader as a white socialist (“Quilombo” 21).
The sacrificial ritual Anderson identifies as the core of Zumbi—the sacrifice
of the individual for the community extolled by Brecht’s poem—is also the
sacrifice of the past for the present, the sacrifice of the present for the future,
and the sacrifice of the African for the European. Implicitly identifying the
African with the past, the allegory moves primarily in one direction: toward
a present and future identified with the European.
By contrast to the black characters, the white characters in Zumbi,
the seventeenth-century colonizers and ruthless bandeirantes, are not
90
deracialized. Although they represent capitalist exploiters and the military
forces that back them, they are also racist villains cut from the Simon
Legree cloth. As allegorical figures for contemporary politicians and
military leaders, the whites incarnate greed, hatred, stupidity—and also
racism against blacks. Though equally exaggerated as the black characters,
I would argue that the white characters offer a more powerful critique of
both racism and dictatorship.
If it is difficult to tell the three black heroes apart, the three white villains may be distinguished primarily by extent of their malevolence. Dom
Pedro de Almeida, the governor of Pernambuco until 1678, is a doddering
old fool who must be propped up by his aides in order to speak and tends
to doze off in mid-thought (42). Yet he is willing to strike a truce with
the slaves. Dom Ayres de Souza de Castro, the hardliner who succeeds
Dom Pedro, wants to wipe out Palmares but isn’t militarily astute enough
to do so. It takes the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho, depicted as an
ignorant degenerate who engages in a wide range of disgusting behaviors
mandated by the stage directions, from nose-picking to public masturbation, to think of the dirty trick that (in Arena’s rendition) dooms Palmares:
releasing victims of deadly contagious diseases within the communities of
former slaves (51).
Building on Décio de Almeida Prado’s 1965 review, Cláudia de Arruda
Campos puts her fi nger on the clash of styles of the two groups of protagonists—the heroic povo versus the melodrama villains—and argues
that rather than further elevate the struggle for freedom, the juxtaposition actually lowers the stakes (88). Zumbi’s comedy, she maintains, citing
Eric Bently’s analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, is a kind
of concentration-camp humor that doesn’t lead to escape from the camp
but merely makes the internment more bearable. Videotape of the production, however, demonstrates a sharp edge to the satire of the military—an
edge that may have done more than simply make the dictatorship more
bearable by mocking its leaders. It has been well documented that certain monologues were taken directly from newspaper accounts of political
speeches (Fonseca-Downey 99–100; Milleret 142–143). For instance, one
monologue, attributed to Governor Dom Ayres de Souza, was taken almost
verbatim from a speech by President Castelo Branco exhorting the army to
combat the communist “enemy within” (Boal, Oppressed 172).
The gestures and body movements that accompanied the language, which
have been analyzed less, are crucial to the full import of the performance.
Dom Ayres (played by Lima Duarte in the videotaped performance I saw)
adopts a hunchbacked simian posture as he begins his speech announcing his
intention to pursue repressive measures without regard to their popularity.
As the speech gets more and more repressive, he swings his arms from side
to side ever more violently and hunches over until his head reaches his knees.
By the climax of the speech—“Nossos heróis formavam um belo exército: já
não necessitamos de exército. Necessitamos de uma fôrça repressiva, poli-
Boal and Guarnieri
91
cial” (45–46) [Our heroes formed a beautiful army; we no longer need an
army. We need a repressive police force]—the violence of his body matches
the violence of his words. He stomps up and down on both feet like an
enraged ape. Without pronouncing the word, the performer’s body alludes
to the Left’s derogatory term for the forces of repression: “gorillas.” 29 When
playing the even more supposedly debauched Domingos Jorge Velho while
on tours in Mexico and South America, Duarte recalls, the producers would
sometimes ask him to please eliminate his groin-rubbing gestures so as not
to shock conservative audiences. Though he would usually comply, during
one performance in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Regina he defied the authorities,
leading them to turn off the lights and abruptly end the show early that
night. “The bandeirantes used an early form of biological warfare to kill
women and children. They were disgusting and they don’t deserve respect.
I tried to make them seem as disgusting as possible,” Duarte explains his
defiance (personal interview). Aside from the entertainment provided by the
gross-out factor, the simulation of orgasm as Velho details his plans to massacre old people, women, and children underscores the erotic thrill that can
accompany the sadistic imposition of power (51). In my view, the farcical
exaggeration of gesture cloaks a powerful critique of the military.
Like the military, bandeirantes have often been exalted as forerunners of
Brazilian democracy and national spirit. A famous nineteenth-century oil
“portrait” of Velho by the painter Benedito Calixto depicts him as a portly
figure, with a full, well-groomed gray beard and long mustache, elegantly
clad with clean collar and cuffs peeking out from under a button-down
jacket, a coat half-draped casually over one shoulder. His leather broadrimmed hat frames a serious-but-kindly gaze. His left hand rests lightly on
the muzzle of a rifle balanced vertically, like a cane he does not really need;
a dagger hangs from one side of waistband; a pistol is tucked into the other
side. Calm but well-armed, Velho seems ready for anything. To his side and
slightly back stands an aide, shorter, less imposing, one of many under his
command.
In the twentieth century, the idea of the bandeirante-as-hero was reinforced by intellectuals such as Cassiano Ricardo, who in Marcha para oeste
[Westward March] paints a pastoral picture of bandeirante life as a conflictfree, egalitarian society in which slavery and indentured labor are reframed
as mutual cooperation and “contribution:”
The contribution of the white and mameluco [a mixture of Indian and
white] is in the thinking which leads the bandeira [the team of explorers] and governs the action. The Indian contribution is in the long
marches, in the warrior impetus . . . The Negro contribution is during
respites, in the settlements around the discoveries, in the labor at the
mines, in the organization of plantings to supply the troops: in short,
during the hours of “psychological relief” so congenial to the sedentary
African. (197)
Writing with more violent racism, in an article published in English in
1948, Ernesto Ennes describes the devastated Palmares as “an extensive
wilderness, now infested with rebellious Negroes” (213). A Portuguese historian, Ennes lauds Velho as an example of “the mettle, the strength, the
heroism, the sacrifice, the strong and unbreakable, the indomitable and
persistent will of these Paulistas, in whose venturesome and boldly exploring nature there is to be seen the native genius of the Portuguese” (206).
The Velho created by Boal and Guarnieri, by contrast, echoes the question
asked by turn-of-the century historian João Capistrano de Abreu, after
citing a Jesuit account of a 1637 bandeirante massacre of Indians who had
sought refuge in a church: “Do horrors such as these make it worth thanking the bandeirantes for taming this land and establishing it as part of
Brazil?” (96).
Some spectators may have been prompted by the white characters’ racism in Zumbi to recognize contemporary versions of seventeenth-century
patterns of racial interaction in 1960s Brazil—the paternalism, extralegal segregation, and refusal to acknowledge the need to address current
discrimination or redress past discrimination—what Florestan Fernandes
called “a disguised form of perpetual enslavement” (137). If nothing else,
argues Milton Gonçalves, the only black actor in the cast when the play
opened in Rio under the direction of Paulo José, a few months after its São
Paulo debut, a Brazilian play that revolved around a black historical figure
was almost unheard of before Zumbi: “Even if he is played by a white
actor, Zumbi is still black. When I fi rst read the play, I didn’t even know
a Zumbi from a zombie. Now he is taught in schools everywhere. That is
progress”30 (personal interview).
Nevertheless, some spectators may have read the white characters’
obvious racism solely as a metaphor for contemporary attitudes toward
the Left. Though for the most part the two racial groups do not interact on stage, short scenes featuring slaves are sometimes juxtaposed to
short scenes featuring whites, as if to highlight the contrast between the
good-hearted blacks and the cruel whites. For instance, a chorus of blacks
concludes a verse of “Trabalha, trabalha . . .” [Work, work . . . ] with
the naive hope: “o branco vai nos entender” (40) [the whites will understand us.] 31 The chorus of whites that follows concludes with a vow to
“exterminar a subversão. O negro destruiremos” (40) [exterminate subversion. We will destroy the blacks]. Their condemnation of the peaceloving blacks employs the military regime’s term for leftist dissenters,
“subversion,” using contemporary rhetoric that dislodges the characters
labeled “blacks” from their racial identity. These blacks, the spectator
might understand, are not specifically blacks; they instead represent any
and all opponents of the dictatorship, an opposition that was led by middle-class white students.
It would have been difficult to fi nd many people in 1960s Brazil, including its military leaders, who would have agreed, or at least openly agreed,
Boal and Guarnieri
93
with Dom Pedro that “slavery dignifies blacks” (42) or concurred with the
image of the black man as rapist of white women that he and Dom Ayres
concoct to frighten the public (43). Because the military was invested in
the proposition that Brazil was a racial democracy in which antiracist
activism would be superfluous, such obvious racism was frowned upon.
The fl ip side of that was that any attempts to organize political action on
the basis of race were seen as a subset of “leftist subversion” (Winant 103;
Telles 40–42). Nor was the organized Left eager to grapple with race.
Thereza Santos, an Afro-Brazilian actor and member of the Popular Center of Culture of the National Union of Students in the 1960s, recalls:
Whenever I would ask questions about the racial issue, I would hear a
lecture about my ideological deviations, as there was no racial question but only the question of social class. If the social question could
be solved, I was always told, everything else could be solved. I needed
to learn that the real issue was social inequality. Prejudice and discrimination did not exist. (190)
At any rate, it is more likely that spectators recognized contemporary racism in the white characters than that they recognized contemporary black
dissention in the black characters. The voices of Afro-Brazilian leaders
such as Florestan Fernandes and Abdias do Nascimento, or even prominent international black Socialist figures such as Patrice Lumumba, are
nowhere to be found in the play.
Numerous studies, beginning with Florestan Fernandes’s seminal A
Integração do negro na sociedade de classes [published in English as The
Negro in Brazilian Society], fi rst published in Brazil in 1965, the same year
Zumbi was staged, have demonstrated that the idea of racial democracy
inadequately patched over patterns of race relations that perpetuated deep
social, political, educational, and economic inequalities. 32 Nevertheless, it
was not until after the military loosened some restrictions on civil liberties,
in 1978, that the Movimento Negro Unificado [Unified Black Movement]
openly organized to combat racism. A decade later, in 1988, Zumbi’s reappropriation by black leaders was underscored by the way in which they
wrested control of a demonstration intended, by government officials, to
commemorate the century since the 1888 abolition of slavery. Black leaders retitled the march to reflect their opinion that abolition was a “farce,”
invoked the name of Zumbi as a figure of resistance to slavery and racism,
and gathered some three thousand protesters to attempt to march first past
the statue of Caxias then to the statue of Zumbi (Hanchard, Orpheus 150;
Winant 104). 33 Though ultimately rerouted by six hundred soldiers and
military police, the march’s focus on Zumbi helped begin to recast the
image of blacks in the narrative of abolition from passive subjects liberated
by Princess Isabel to active agents who resisted their captivity. The commemoration of the abolition of slavery has now been discarded in favor of
94
Dia da Consciência Negra [Day of Black Consciousness]: November 20,
the date of Zumbi’s death in 1695.
ARENA CONTA TIRADENTES
The Left was free to exert control over the figure of Zumbi because he was
not particularly coveted by the Right. The figure of Joaquim José da Silva
Xavier, “Tiradentes,” however, was the potential prize in a longstanding
tug-of-war between the Left and the Right. A low-ranking military officer
in colonial Brazil, Tiradentes took part in a late-eighteenth-century conspiracy against the Portuguese crown that never got off the ground. Traditionally, the Right had depicted Tiradentes as a martyr for the cause of
Brazilian unity. Reacting against this portrayal, Teatro Arena threw itself
into the tussle for control of the Tiradentes’ legacy with a play that depicted
the national hero as the soul of rebellion, an idealistic young revolutionary
reminiscent of Che Guevara. Although the military contended that the morally superior armed struggle, the true continuation of Tiradentes’s battle,
was their fight against communist rebels, Boal and Guarnieri’s Arena conta
Tiradentes portrayed the rebel soldier as an early fighter for an antidictatorship, communist revolution. Both the military and its leftist opponents,
however, shared the implicit assumption that sacrifice for the sake of the
nation was a worthy undertaking that must be led by an authoritarian
male willing to give his life for his country. Moreover, in reconstructing
Tiradentes as a military man who would have waged war for the right reasons, Arena reinforced the very image of Tiradentes that the military was
propagating in some of its speeches, commemorative ceremonies, and even
publications for children’s “civic education.”34
Of the eleven conspirators sentenced to death in 1792, Tiradentes was
the only one who was not of the aristocracy. (In fact, the nickname “Tiradentes” came from his rather lowly part-time occupation, pulling (“tira”)
teeth (“dentes”). He was also the only conspirator whose sentence was not
commuted to banishment. While his fellow plotters were shipped off to
Africa, Tiradentes was sentenced to be hanged. In the three years of imprisonment before his sentence was carried out, he was said to have become
very religious. Legend has it that as he was led to the spot in Rio where he
was to be executed, he clutched a crucifi x in his bound hands, kissed the
feet of his executioner, died with a prayer on his lips (Carvalho). One nineteenth-century historian summed up the transformation: “Prenderam um
patriota; executaram un frade!” (quoted in Carvalho 63). [They arrested
a patriot; they executed a friar!] Although his features were never fully
described by anyone by anyone who actually saw him, the earliest portraits
and statues in his honor portrayed him with the long hair, flowing beard,
and benign countenance of a Christ figure. At the same time, however,
nineteenth-century radicals, the republicans who opposed the monarchists,
Boal and Guarnieri
95
began to stress Tiradentes’s love of liberty over his piety and claimed him
as their standard bearer.
When a statue of Dom Pedro I, the Portuguese emperor, was erected
in 1824 on the spot where Tiradentes was hanged in Rio de Janeiro, the
republicans protested to no avail. 35 Later, the Tiradentes Club of Rio, a
hotbed of republican activism, tried unsuccessfully, in 1893, to have the
statue covered for the April 21 commemoration of Tiradentes’ execution,
perhaps one of the earliest uses of Tiradentes as inspiration for a would-be
rebellious performance. The government, however, canceled the ceremonies (Carvalho 61). And despite their preference for Dom Pedro I as a hero,
the monarchists eventually came to embrace Tiradentes as well (Carvalho
69). The image of Tiradentes they lauded, however, was Tiradentes-as-martyr, not Tiradentes-as-rebel. For instance, a 1926 statue erected in front
of the then Chamber of Deputies in Rio, designed by Francisco Andrade,
depicts Tiradentes with a long flowing beard, wearing a long flowing robe
reminiscent of the garment typically used in representations of Jesus; his
hands are folded over his chest; his eyes look off into the distance, as if
he has attained inner peace. As martyr, notes José Murilo de Carvalho
in his history of the struggle over Tiradentes’s image, Tiradentes was less
threatening: He served to unify rather than divide the country. As rebel,
he threatened to reveal the contradictions underlying the apparent social
tranquility. In fact, Silvia Hunold Lara suggests that the drawing and quartering of Tiradentes’s body after his death, and its subsequent display on
various posts in disparate locations, is an apt metaphor for the divisions
that endure in Brazil today as a consequence of both its diversity and its
racial and economic inequalities.
In 1966 the military government, under the leadership of Castelo Branco,
decreed by law that Andrade’s statue would be the only image of Tiradentes
that could be displayed in schools and government buildings. A law decreed
the year before had lauded Tiradentes as a “glorious republican” and mandated that his memory be celebrated throughout the nation on April 21. 36
While on the one hand the military promoted the image of Tiradentes-as-martyr, on the other hand it also stressed his identity as a soldier,
particularly in publications intended for internal military consumption.
Aline Fonseca Carvalho’s study of military representations of Tiradentes
during the dictatorship, A Conveniência de un Legado Adequável: Representações de Tiradentes e da Inconfi dência Mineira Durante a Ditadura
Militar, found that seven of the fourteen images of Tiradentes published in
the Noticiário do Exercito during the dictatorship depicted Tiradentes in
military uniform (45). Moreover, essays, poems, and speeches published
in the military newspaper often called attention to the uniform. One essay
published in the Noticiário less than a month after the coup, on the anniversary of Tiradentes’s execution, April 21, 1964, refers to the would-be
independence leader as “a figura de herói que vestia nossa farda” (quoted in
Carvalho 48) [a heroic figure who wore our uniform]. Carvalho points out
96
that by referring to Tiradentes, not as a military man, but as a hero garbed
in our uniform, the essay unites all Brazilians, military and civilian alike,
in a collective entity protected by those in military costume (48).
As the dictatorship dug in, the Left nevertheless continued to try to
claim Tiradentes for itself. The São Paulo prison used to house political
prisoners was named Tiradentes; but so was the guerrilla group Movimento Revolucionário Tiradentes. He turned up as a martyr in officially sanctioned school pageants, but he also turned up as the subject
of antidictatorship sambas. And he occupied a prominent position in the
fi rst substantial theatrical defiance of dictatorship, the Show Opinião,
written by Oduvaldo Vianna Filho along with Amando Costa and Paulo
Pontes, which opened in Rio on December 11, 1964 (Damasceno 123).
Directed by Boal, the collage of popular music included a song devoted to
Tiradentes’s story that praised him as the initiator of a struggle for “Um
Brasil mais decente, Um Brasil Independente” [a more decent Brazil, an
independent Brazil].”
Boal and Guarnieri threw themselves completely into the struggle for
control of the Tiradentes legacy when they opened Arena conta Tiradentes on April 21, 1967 in Ouro Preto, the old northeastern capital city
where the conspiracy was hatched. 37 After its Ouro Preto opening, Tiradentes moved to São Paulo, where it ran for seven months, less than half
as long as Zumbi, and earned a mixed critical reception. Some reviewers
complained of infidelity to historical fact and twisting of events in order
to make them fit contemporary reality. Most of the allegorical lessons
in this lesson-play were not lost on anyone and some were deemed so
unthreatening that they could be openly published in newspaper reviews:
Brazil is an economic colony of the United States; effete intellectuals can
never lead the revolution; don’t attempt revolutionary change without the
support of the povo; some people are spies for the Right and therefore
should not be trusted. The most threatening lesson, however, was not
explicitly stated, namely, that the Left, not the Right, is the true ideological descendent of Tiradentes, and that armed struggle against dictatorship is worth undertaking, despite the likelihood of failure. This
represents a significant radicalization of Boal and Guarnieri’s position in
the two years since their collaboration on Zumbi. David José, an actor
who performed in Zumbi and who also played the starring role in Tiradentes, explains the shift:
O Teatro de Arena anuncia nesse momento [Zumbi] que lutar é o
único caminho a seguir para que se tenha uma existência livre e digna.
Mas não fala ainda de luta armada. Fala apenas de seu desejo de uma
nova sociedade, uma sociedade livre e solidária. Em 1967, porém, na
voz de Tiradentes, falará claramente que a única saída é armar o povo
para que ele, sozinho, sem aliança com a burguesia, liberte o país da
dominação estrangeira. (E-mail to the author)
Boal and Guarnieri
97
[Arena Theater announces at that moment [Zumbi] that struggle is
the only path to follow in order to have a free and dignified existence.
But it doesn’t speak yet about armed struggle. In 1967, however, in the
voice of Tiradentes, it will clearly say that the only way out is to arm
the povo so that he, alone, without alliances with the bourgeoisie, can
free the country from foreign dominance.]
José’s description elides the distance between Tiradentes and the people,
alluding to the personification and embodiment of a class in that single
character.
Arena’s choice of a government-consecrated hero as protagonist and the
use of history as an allegorical cloak perhaps explains how a play advocating armed struggle toward revolution made it past the censors. Arena’s
Tiradentes shows a Che Guevara-like idealism, or naiveté, as he goes about
trying to drum up support for his rebellion, boldly, or stupidly, telling anyone who will listen that Brazil must liberate itself from the Portuguese yoke
in order to take full advantage of its own riches. The play opens with a
theme song vaguely reminiscent of Patrick Henry’s regret that he had but
one life to give for his country: “Dez vidas eu tivesse / Dez vidas eu daria”
[Had I ten lives / I would give ten lives], followed by the consequences of
Tirandentes’s audacity: the famous death sentence that gives the gruesome
details of how his body will be beheaded and his head stuck on a post, how
the remainder will be quartered and displayed on other posts in various
regions of Minas Gerais, how his house will be raised and the land salted
so that nothing will ever grow there. Each of the five episodes that follow,
within two large sections, advances the conspiracy. The conspirators grow
from just Tiradentes to a group of a dozen men, including the poets Tomás
Gonzaga and José Alvarenga Peixoto, the high-ranking military officer
Francisco de Paula, the industrialist Col. Domingos de Abreu Vieira, and
the Judas figure of the tale, the traitorous Joaquim Silvério dos Reis, who
eventually denounces the conspirators to the authorities. The men advance
from idly chatting in hypothetical terms to actually calculating how many
troops they can count on and fi nally setting a date for the insurrection to
begin, the date an unpopular tax is scheduled to take effect. Forewarned
of their plans by Sivério, however, the governor cancels the tax and has all
the conspirators arrested.
The twenty-two characters were played by just eight actors, who
switched roles, as in Zumbi, at certain predetermined moments. The exceptions were the protagonist Tiradentes, who was always played by the same
actor, José, and the coringa, played by Guarnieri. Boal later explained that
while he and Guarnieri wanted to keep aiming for Brechtian alienation of
the character from the actor, they also wanted to maintain a greater degree
of empathy with the hero (Boal, Baker’s Son 249). Period costumes and
stage properties designed by Flávio Império added to the realism. Other
Brechtian techniques included a chorus, recitations of verse, and musical
98
intervals composed by Gilberto Gil, Sidney Miller, and Caetano Veloso,
arranged and conducted by Theo de Barros.
To balance the greater degree of empathy with the protagonist allowed
in Tiradentes, the coringa has a much more prominent role than he does in
Zumbi. In Tiradentes, the coringa starts each episode with an explanation
of the dramatic action, labeled in Brechtian fashion “explanation.” Unlike
the other characters, who remain bound by the realistic demands of time
and place, the coringa moves back and forth between the colonial era and
the modern era, drawing parallels between then and now, establishing a
kind of nudge-and-wink complicity with the audience. His explanations
range from the mundanely didactic to the cleverly entertaining, fi lling in
background like a lively high school history teacher. In some scenes the
coringa also functions as the colonial trial judge who interrogates Tiradentes; in others, he assumes the role of a contemporary journalist, pursuing the other characters as if he were a reporter on the trail of a hot story.
One of the most comic scenes arises from this anachronism, as the coringa
approaches Gozanga and is cut off with the equivalent of “no comment!”
(92). [Não tenho nenhuma declaração a fazer!] [lit. I have no statement
to make!]
Writing shortly after Brazil returned to civilian government, Cláudia de
Arruda Campos dismisses the character of Tiradentes and the play alike as
quixotic attempts to unify an impossibly splintered Left:
Por trás das tentativas de reagrupar forças transparece a divisão. Derrotada, tocaiada, sem espaço para ação junto às massas, a esquerda
entra em crise, desmembra-se e consigo mesma digladia. Tiradentes
tenta combinar o inconciliável. (159)
[Behind the attempts to regroup forces the divisions come through. Defeated, ambushed, without the chance to take action together with the
masses, the Left falls into crisis, dismembers itself and battles itself.]
Campos’s analysis dovetails with the traditional image of Tiradentes as
a martyr for the sake of national unity. Yet she reads what she sees as
Arena’s version of Tiradentes’s martyrdom as a “pathetic” and “impotent”
attempt promote leftist unity (117). Campos betrays frustration that Arena
could not provide more insight into how to unite the Left. But it seems to
me that Arena’s Tiradentes has more of the rabble-rouser about him than
the martyr; he is more of an emotional catalyst for revolution rather than
an intellectual negotiator of the confl icts of interest among the would-be
revolutionaries. The how is left up to the spectators. 38
In order to better understand the significance of Tiradentes’s antics, it
is worth briefly reviewing the divisions within the Brazilian Left in the
1960s. Battered by international and domestic pressures, the last civilian
leader before the military coup swung from centrist to populist measures.
Boal and Guarnieri
99
On the one hand, international lenders refused to extend credit to Brazil
unless President Goulart enforced austere monetary policies; on the other
hand, urban workers demanded housing and wage increases to help offset
rampant inflation. As Goulart began to announce limited reforms, different social interests disagreed about how much change to push for and how
quickly to demand it. Some factions of the Left thought he had gone too far;
others thought he hadn’t gone far enough. Some thought the government
should expropriate land for landless peasants; others argued that reform
should begin with rural unionization and extension of labor legislation to
the rural worker (Fausto 266). Meanwhile, Goulart’s advisors assured him
that he had the support of the povo, which turned out to be false (Skidmore, Politics 14–16). When the military stepped in, on March 31, 1964,
union leaders were not even able to get workers to participate in a general
strike (Skidmore, Politics 16). Ridenti lists no fewer than six separate parties with the word “communist” in the name. By 1966, at least two of those
parties had split into two or more factions, some of which advocated armed
struggle (367). 39
The Brazilian Left had long been divided about the use of armed struggle. In A luta armada contra a ditadura militar: A esquerda brasileria e
a influência da revolução cubana [Armed Struggle against the Military
Dictatorship: The Brazilian Left and the Influence of the Cuban Revolution], Jean Rodrigues Sales dates the training of small numbers of Brazilian
peasant activists in Cuba to as early as mid-1961 (43). By the end of the
year, activists in northeastern Brazil were buying up land to use as guerrilla
training camps, with the rationale that they might have to defend themselves against a United States invasion similar to the Bay of Pigs (45). While
the Brazilian Communist Party remained opposed to armed struggle, some
of its leaders, including most prominently, Carlos Marighella, who had
close ties to Cuban leaders and spent several months in Cuba, began to
question whether the party had made a mistake in seeking an alliance with
the middle class and limiting itself to nonviolent attempts at reform. In
1966 Marighella openly declared that armed struggle leading to civil war
was the only way to dislodge the dictatorship. The following year, after
the central committee voted to expel him from the party, he continued his
activism as leader of the break-away faction Ação Libertadora Nacional
(65).
In Arena conta Tiradentes, Boal and Guarnieri allegorize armed struggle against dictatorship as a step that must be taken without the support of
many, if not all, intellectuals and without the support of the middle class.
The drama depicts the bourgeoisie as too selfish and cowardly to be trusted
in any alliance, as shown by the confl icting interests of the various bourgeois sectors of colonial society. In the second episode, after the governor
announces that the crown has refused to delay collection of the head-tax,
each character, representing a different social sector, tries to take advantage of the other’s misfortune. When the industrialist Domingos complains
that his factory will be closed and his two hundred slaves will remain idle,
the landowner Silvério offers to buy them and put them to work in his
fields. Yet another character, the money lender Claúdio, thinks that he may
be able to turn a profit by lending the others down-payments on their tax
debt (88). Besides poking fun at the bourgeoisie, on a second level of allegory, the scene also parodies the divisions that plagued the contemporary
Left. Though leftist leaders were not competing for wealth-building advantages under a capitalist system, one might argue that they shared a pattern
of thought with the colonial bourgeoisie: an obsession with how to win
advantage for one’s own faction at the expense of the greater good.
Indeed, the play mocks intellectuals such as the poet Gonzaga who
lounge about devising slogans for the flag and fantasizing about the university that will supposedly be built after independence. In performance, the
actor playing Gonzaga at any particular moment always twirled a flower in
his or her hand, a tool to help spectators identify the character and a clear,
if homophobic, symbol of effeminate pacifism. Tiradentes, by contrast, may
be seen in production photos holding his sword in his hand. To justify their
inactivity, some of the conspirators maintain that the “head” must lead the
“arms” in a revolution, identifying themselves with the brains of the metaphor. The wife of one of the conspirators, Bárbara Heliodora, forshadows
their defeat in her retort: “Eu só espero que da mesma maneira com que
vocês concluíram tão bem a etapa intelectual da sedição, tenha a braçal o
mesmo êxito!” (113). [I only hope that your success in concluding the intellectual phase of the sedition is matched by the arms!] The 1960s equivalent
of those useless intellectuals were the fi fteen friends of Boal gathered on
the night of March 31, 1964 to watch television for news of the impending coup—professors, journalists, musicians, theater practitioners, fi lm
makers—who Boal parodies mercilessly in his autobiography (Baker’s Son
221–230). Not only were those middle-class spectators to history unwilling
to assume any physical risk, but most of them thought that the coup would
not take place. According to Boal’s version of events, he was the only pessimist in the crowd who anticipated the coup (223). He apparently translated
his impatience with the pontificating passivity of a man he identifies only
as “the professor,” a man who promised to bring out champagne upon the
(incorrectly) expected announcement that a coup had been avoided, into
the character of Gonzaga (Baker’s Son 249).
Tiradentes’s third episode heightens the contrast between the effete
intellectual, Gonzaga, and the dynamic revolutionary, Tiradentes, as five
short beats alternate between two simultaneous conversations. In the fi rst
conversation, Tiradentes convinces the high-ranking military officer, Francisco de Paula, to join the conspiracy and passionately details how he will
single-handedly behead the governor, a plan he modifies upon further consideration, deciding to settle for a mere arrest. Meanwhile, in the second
conversation, Gonzaga and his friends wile away the hours sipping coffee
and dreaming up slogans for the flag. When the would-be rebellion fails,
Boal and Guarnieri
101
the fault lies more with the Gonzagas of the world than with the Tiradentes, the coringa implies in his last address to the spectator at the end of the
fi fth episode:
Se Tiradentes tivesse o poder dos Inconfidentes; se os Inconfidentes
tivessem a vontade de Tiradentes, e se todos não estivessem tão sós,
o Brasil estaria livre trinta anos antes e estaria novamente livre todas
as vezes que uma nova liberdade fosse necessária. (163)
[If Tiradentes had the power of the conspirators, if the conspirators
had the will of Tiradentes, and if they weren’t all so alone, Brazil
would have been free thirty years earlier and would be free anew
whenever a new freedom were necessary.]
Commitment, power, solidarity, and a willingness to take risks are identified as the ingredients for successful revolution, with the fi nal clause
implying that this is indeed another moment when heroic figures might
lead the povo to a “new freedom.”
Attempts to win freedom, Tiradentes, like Zumbi, acknowledges, often
end in defeat. And because the Left had obviously suffered a major defeat,
the play’s allegorical structure, I would argue, turns the spectator toward
both the lessons of past defeats and the undeniable possibility of future
failures. Some critics have read the play as exclusively about the past.
Iná Camargo Costa, for instance, complains that the allegory equates
leftist activists to conspirators. The real conspirators, she counters, were
the military men who in 1964 plotted to overthrow an established order
(140). Within the context of the play, however, conspiracy is not a negative activity: On the contrary, the conspirators bear a certain resemblance
to the would-be reformers in Goulart’s political circle. And although it
would be going too far to identify Tiradentes entirely with Goulart, certain similarities in their fates are striking. Consider historian Boris Fausto’s description of Goulart’s last moments in office before going off into
exile in Uruguay:
Goulart was left dangling in air. Around him, the only ones who remained were the minister of war, who had lost his command; union
leaders who were targeted for repression and who had scant following; and personal friends who had been responsible for fomenting an
illusion. (279)
Even Fausto’s metaphor “dangling in air” coincidentally recalls Tiradentes’s end at the gallows. I point this out not to argue that Fausto is drawing a parallel between Goulart and Tiradentes, but rather to suggest that
it might have been logical for spectators in 1967, just three years after the
coup, to imagine a parallel.
102
Past failures were acknowledged, and even celebrated, I would argue,
because repeated failure was deemed a necessary step on the long road
to future revolutionary triumph. Again, the example of Che Guevara is
instructive. Despite the risk of defeat, Guevara rarely hesitated to advocate
taking up arms, as evidenced by his famous slogans, “the duty of the revolutionary is to make revolution” and “one, two, three . . . many Vietnams.”
In Guerrilla Warfare, he argues that armed struggle against an oppressive
regime can begin with as few as thirty men (157–158). Though some of
those small battles, which Guevara called “focos,” were bound to fail, the
idea was that as the forces of the dominant power were dispersed in waging
minor battles here and there, eventually one or more focos would trigger
revolution. The duty of the guerrilla leader was to risk failure in order to
stand a chance, no matter how slender, of victory (Childs 622). By the criteria of the foco theory, Tiradentes and his group of a dozen conspirators,
along with the military men that they commanded, had more than enough
muscle to start a revolution.
Like the nobility of failure, solitary action is part of what has made so
many heroes, including Che and Tiradentes, so appealing to their admirers. Che’s life story is full of solo—or almost solo—adventures, from his
motorcycle trip through Latin America with just one friend to his and Fidel
Castro’s early attempts at ousting Batista with only a handful of men, from
his failed mission into the Congo (without the approval of the rebel leader
he had ostensibly gone to assist) to his catastrophic expedition into Bolivia.
The bureaucratic duties he temporarily undertook as a high-ranking official in the Cuban government could not satisfy his hunger for individual
exploits (Harris 24). Though he was married and had children, popular
images almost always depict him alone or with other male guerrillas.
In order to create the myth of a revolutionary Tiradentes who embodies
the povo, certain facts that would have portrayed Tiradentes as less of a
solitary figure had to be omitted. For instance, in the program notes, Boal
dismisses as “irrelevante” [irrelevant] to the creation of a heroic myth, and
therefore not present in the play, any references to Tiradentes’s mistress and
illegitimate daughter. The essence of a hero, Boal writes, in a description of
Tiradentes that could have come from a Che speech, lies not in a man’s private life but in his political activities: “Nêle a importância maior dos atos
que praticou reside no seu conteúdo revolucionário.” [The primary significance of the actions he practiced resides in their revolutionary content.]
The historical fact that Tiradentes alone shouldered responsibility for the
conspiracy is underscored by the chorus of a song, Estou só [I am Alone]
that evokes sympathy for the hero yet also lightens the sentimentality of the
lyrics with humorous word-play:
Estou só. Sempre estive só
Aprendí e agora sei:
Só dois homens me seguiam
Boal and Guarnieri
103
Espias do Vice-Rei! (152)
[I’m alone. I’ve always been alone
I learned and now I know:
Only two men followed me
Spies of the Viceroy! ]
The “followers” he had counted on as adherents to his cause turned out
instead to be spies who physically pursued him. In performance, the isolation of the conspirators was underscored by a chorus of marching soldiers
who formed a square around the individual under arrest and herded him
off stage. Tiradentes is the last to be arrested.
Guided by Arena’s performance, history, in the spectator’s minds, may
have repeated itself, with variations. The historical allegory created a genealogical memory that traced a lineage from Tiradentes to Che to Goulart
to some future as-yet-unknown heroic leader that would embody the povo.
Did Tiradentes’s revolutionary reincarnation provide inspiration to some
would-be Brazilian Che Guevaras in the audience? As the chorus sang the
lyrics to the fi nal song at full volume, according to José, audiences composed primarily of middle-class leftist university students would leap to
their feet and applaud enthusiastically. The lyrics suggested that the next
leftist hero might be standing there among them:
Quanto mais cai, mais levanta
Mil vêzes já foi ao chão.
Mas de pé lá está o povo
Na hora da decisão!” (163)
[The more it falls, the more it rises
A thousand times it’s been beaten down
But the povo is standing there
At the moment of decision!]
Among the few questions left open in a play that tried to answer so much
were who would be the next revolutionary hero, and would he be a victorious hero or yet another martyr?
ARENA CONTA BOLÍVAR
Between the 1967 staging of Arena conta Tiradentes and the 1969 writing of Arena conta Bolívar, on October 9, 1967, Che Guevara was captured alive and executed by the Bolivian army in collusion with the CIA
(Anderson 727–739). Soon afterward, the last moments of his life were
dramatized in Boal’s short play A lua pequenha e a caminhada perigosa
[The Small Moon and the Dangerous Walk], which explicitly justifies the
104
armed struggle allegorized in Tiradentes and the international nature of
the socialism celebrated by Bolívar.40 Like Tiradentes and Bolívar, Lua is
also a historical play, documentary in its collage of intertextual appropriations from journalistic accounts, letters, speeches, and poems (McMahon
77). Yet unlike the two full-length dramas, Lua is not allegorical: It plainly
states what the other two works only insinuate, that armed struggle is
indispensable to leftist revolution and that Guevara is the model of a revolutionary hero.41 While the protagonist is not labeled “Che Guevara,” he
is named “Comandante” [Commander], the military title Che was known
for around the world. Rather than serve as an allegorical disguise, then,
the military title emphasizes Che’s commitment to guerrilla warfare. In the
scene “O Desertor” [The Deserter], the following exchange between Che
and one member of his small band of fighters, who later deserts when it
becomes clear that the Bolivian army is closing in, voices the question on
the minds of many 1960s leftists:
ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ FLORES. Comandante, será necessária
luta armada?
COMANDANTE. Não há un só exemplo na história de uma classe
dominante que tenha abdicado graciosamente do poder. (92)
[ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ FLORES. Comandante, I wonder if
armed struggle is necessary?
COMANDANTE. There isn’t a single example in history of a dominant class that has graciously abdicated from power.]
A few lines later, Comandante reiterates that armed struggle is unavoidable and cannot be contained within the borders of any single nation (92).
Just as importantly, the Comandante himself, an Argentine who fought in
Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia, was also a man who did not belong to any
one country.
Arena conta Bolívar moves away from the icons of national identity
Zumbi and Tiradentes in order to narrate the story of an international
figure who transcends national borders, a man respected but not claimed
by all of Latin America. Born in Venezuela, Simón Bolívar traveled widely
through Europe and fought his battles for liberation from colonial rule in
Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as his native land. Expeditions in search of military support took him to Jamaica and Haiti. Perhaps not coincidentally, Boal took up the subject of Bolívar at a moment
in his life when he too sought international support, if nothing else, in the
realm of public opinion, for his side of a mostly metaphoric battle (with the
exception of a few tiny armed guerrilla groups) waged in his native country,
the battle against dictatorship. After Tiradentes’s limited success, Guarnieri gave up on the “Arena conta” formula; Boal decided to take it abroad.
Bolívar revisits one of the lessons propounded by Tiradentes—the participation of the povo is crucial to the success of a revolution—and repeats it
Boal and Guarnieri
105
with revisions in an international context. This historical allegory, then,
operates on a continental rather than a national scale.
The play’s extended metaphors insert Brazilians, or indeed any Latin
Americans, as historical subjects in the Cold War confl ict. Had the
play been performed before a Brazilian audience, though it never was,
it might have reinforced an internationalist concept of what it means
to be Brazilian, that Brazilians need not be psychologically confi ned to
Brazil, that they can also conceive of themselves as citizens of the world.
While Zumbi created a heroic genealogy that positioned the spectator as
the descendant of a white, Socialist Zumbi, and Tiradentes’s genealogy
positioned the spectator as the inheritor of Tiradentes’s unfulfi lled quest
for unity among the Left, Bolívar urges spectators to think both diachronically and synchronically, to project themselves beyond the boundaries of their own nation and perceive of themselves as part of a legacy
of solidarity with other people of a Third World caught between two
super-powers. Arena’s touring strategy as a theater company imitates,
whether consciously or not, Bolívar’s military strategy of repeatedly fleeing Venezuela when on the brink of defeat, only to recoup and return to
launch another assault on royalist forces. Che and Fidel had also resorted
to this strategy in order to fi nally wrest control of Cuba from Batista.
The unfortunate difference was that when Arena returned to Brazil and
launched another theatrical assault—Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of
Arturo Ui (1971)—the military responded with so much force that it
destroyed the company.
But before Arena’s demise, Bolívar reached hundreds of spectators in
other parts of South and North America. After a tour through Mexico
and several U.S. university theaters, from Berkeley to Buffalo, the play
opened in New York City’s Public Theater on March 27, 1970, a step
up in prestige from the St. Clement’s Church space where the group had
performed the year before. In a short review, The New York Times’s
Henry Raymont summarized the play so literally that its political import
within the Latin American context was all but lost. As in his “musical
romp” description of Zumbi, he instead stressed the entertainment factor: Bolívar offered “an intriguing hopscotching of roles where each of
the eight members of the company interchange characters to the beat
of lively Latin rhythms of Theo de Barros’s music” (33). After the New
York City run, the company traveled to Peru and Argentina.
Bolívar has never been published and the original Portuguese-language script seems to have been lost, leading to an absence of critical
attention to the work. Boal believes that the original script may have
been destroyed during the military raid on his home after his arrest (email to the author, 13 April 2004). A Spanish-language translation of
the play, however, survives in unpublished manuscript form in the FUNARTE library in Rio de Janeiro. All citations here are taken from that
translation, by Eduardo Solari.
106
In two acts and many short scenes, Bolívar employs the same stylistic blend of music, verse, and dialogue as its Arena conta predecessors.
Roles were exchanged as in the previous two plays, though the role of
the coringa is not as prominent as it was it Tiradentes. Costumes were
the same jeans and sweatshirts of Zumbi, which, according to Boal,
allowed the cast to decide at the last minute whether to perform Zumbi
or Bolívar on any given night of the tour (e-mail to the author, 10 March
2007). The music was composed by Theo de Barros, who had arranged
and directed music composed by others in the previous two Arena productions.42 The cast list in the February 1970 program for Guadalajara’s
Teatro Degollado indicates that the play was performed by just three
of the eight actors who had performed Zumbi the previous year: Lima
Duarte, Renato Consorte, and Cecilia Thumin. Five new actors had
joined the group: Isabel Ribeiro, Zezé Motta, Helio Ary, Rene Silva, and
Fernando Peixoto.
As in Zumbi and Tiradentes, the action does not flow in uninterrupted realism. Realistic scenes alternate with songs, interventions from
the coringa, and short scenes collected under a title that, in Brechtian
fashion, enumerates the varieties of experience they encompass, such as,
“Five Ways of Fleeing the Struggle” (26) or “Seven Ways to Wage Real
War Against the Spanish” (50). Though it is impossible to say exactly
what Guarnieri contributed to the previous Arena efforts, the language
of this play is more prosaic, lacking, for example, the lushness of Zumbi’s
descriptions of nature, which piled indigenous terms for flora and fauna
into a rich tapestry. The light, dry humor of Tiradentes becomes more
heavy-handed and bawdier in Bolívar, as some of the attempts at comedy
rely on sexual crassness: In an early scene, the young Bolívar in a brothel
rejects offers of kinky sex; in a later scene, townspeople offer him their
virgin daughters in an attempt to fulfi ll what they mistakenly interpret as
his desire. Much to their relief, he refuses to accept their gift.
Bolívar’s plot telescopes the events of 1802–1827, from the time the
Liberator, as he was called, fi rst traveled to Europe at the age of nineteen
until his triumphant return to his homeland at the height of his power
and prestige. The play’s structure streamlines a complicated history full
of possible chains of causality into two failures and a success: two of
Bolívar’s failed attempts to invade and conquer Caracas, in 1812 and
1815, followed by his subsequent decision to wage war from the plains of
the Orinoco River and the Andean mountains, taking the war to Colombia before returning to dominate Caracas in 1821. (A third assault, on
Venezuela, in 1816, that lasted only eight days is alluded to in the play’s
theme song but is not depicted in the action.) The turning point of the
narrative comes at the start of Act 2, with Bolívar’s trip to Haiti, where
President Alexandre Pétion gives Bolívar armaments in exchange for the
promise that he will abolish slavery in the territories under his control.
The rest of the play consists of a series of victories, with the help of the
Boal and Guarnieri
107
rural povo, and ends with the victorious Bolívar making speeches, which
paraphrase some of his actual words, so as to neatly sum up the lessons
of the drama.
Analysis of how Boal includes, omits, or embellishes some significant
events from Bolívar’s actual biography, and completely invents others,
is important in order to better appreciate how Boal’s version of Bolívar
fulfi lls the allegorical mandate, emphasized by theorists from Walter
Benjamin to Craig Owens, to both re-present the past and rescue the
present for the future. Bolívar searches for the elusive povo—a search
that has always daunted the Left, both in Brazil and elsewhere—with
fable-like simplicity. Reading the play today as both an artistic creation
and an historical document that implicitly acknowledges the failures of
the Left, one can interpret it as a wish-fulfi llment fantasy: If only it were
this easy. Yet just below the surface of the “lively Latin rhythms” one
discerns frustration, anger, and an attempt to express abroad what could
not be said domestically after the coup-within-a-coup of 1968 brought a
harder line faction of the military to power.
The “hyper-historian” coringa tells the story of Bolívar’s advance as a
tale of unmitigated liberation: “Fueron liberando a los negros esclavos,
toda la población fue expulsando a los españoles. Todo el mundo fue
descubriendo que una patria sólo es libre cuando el pueblo no tiene
miedo” (60). [They kept liberating the black slaves, the entire population
kept expelling the Spanish. Everyone kept discovering that a nation is
only free when the pueblo has no fear.] Like a fairy-tale king, the hero’s
words cast a spell that magically institutes instant social change. In fact,
while Bólivar did keep his promise to Pétion to declare slavery abolished
in the areas he conquered, the slave-owners did not simply give up their
source of cheap labor. In fact, slavery continued to be practiced long
after its formal termination (Lynch 210). Latin American spectators to
Bolívar did not need to consult textbooks to know that history was more
complicated; they only needed to look around at their stratified societies,
in which blacks and indigenous peoples occupied, and still occupy, the
lowest rung on the social ladder. As with Zumbi and Tiradentes, critics
who would seek in the allegory a practical prescription for action or a
sophisticated critique of contemporary politics are bound to be disappointed. Instead, the play must be appreciated as a kind of Wizard of
Oz in which the wizard turns out to be real, or a kind of daydream
about how history might have been different had a Bolívar, or a Che,
triumphed. The hope it holds out for the future involves a kind of escapist fantasy, in which a powerful leader can wave a magic wand to make
injustice disappear.
Teatro Arena’s Bolívar, nevertheless, is a slightly more nuanced hero
than Zumbi or Tiradentes. He even has a few, though not many, flaws.
And one biographical fact forthrightly depicted early in the play actually
presents Bolívar in an extremely negative light: his arrest of his fellow
108
revolutionary Francisco de Miranda and subsequent decision to hand
him over to the Spanish, who kept Miranda a prisoner until his death
(Lynch 63). The coringa underscores the event with a verse recapitulation that does not attempt to justify Bolívar’s behavior:
En este episodio extraño
Bolívar a su General prendío
y al enemigo lo entregó
ante el espanto general. (41)
[In this strange episode
Bolívar his General arrested
and gave him to the enemy—
to this the general horror attested.]
Bolívar claimed that Miranda had proven himself a coward by surrendering
to Domingo de Monteverde, who commanded the Spanish forces. Yet he
himself had been making plans to leave the country and was granted safeconduct by Monteverde (Lynch 60–64). One might easily infer that Bolívar
succumbed to the temptation to eliminate a potential rival for the title of
Liberator. Teatro Arena’s account of these historical facts, without an exculpatory frame, while far from imbuing Bolívar with a tragic flaw, nevertheless
adds a dimension of complexity to his character. An Arena historical allegory, however, can only go so far in the admission of a hero’s defects before
the duty to inspire brings the narrative back to the path to triumph.
Because the narrative capped by well-deserved triumph is intended to
impart the lesson that persistence pays off, it does not touch upon the last
few years of the Liberator’s life, when he found himself politically isolated,
exiled, and suffering from the tuberculosis that claimed his life at the age of
47. The theme song instead dwells on his tenacity:
Tres veces Simón Bolívar
su tierra conquistó;
tres veces fue derrotado
pero nunca se desanimó. (2)
[Three times Simón Bolívar
conquered his land;
three times he took some hits
but he never called it quits.]
The stage directions ensure that the performers are aware of the lesson they
are supposed to help impart: “El coro delante de la platea ofrece el espectáculo y canta [que] el arte de la victoria se aprende en la derrota” (2). [The
chorus stands before the public, opens the show and sings of how the art of
victory is learned in defeat.]
Boal and Guarnieri
109
The mandate to inspire through heroic example leads Boal to omit several darker episodes from Bolívar’s biography, episodes that would have
emphasized his authoritarian streak, and indeed, his consistent distrust of
the povo. In one controversial episode, for example, Bólivar ordered the
execution of a black general, Manuel Piar, for a level of insubordination
that he tolerated in his white generals (Chasteen 24–25). At another historic crossroads, Bolívar proved incapable of ceding any authority to José
de San Martín, the liberator of Chile and Argentina, who might have provided great assistance to him in his Peruvian campaign (Chasteen 25–26;
Lynch 172–175). And after the fighting was over, despite repeated political
defeats, Bolívar never understood why people refused to accept his constitution, which mandated a president-for-life with the power to choose his
successor (Lynch 203). None of these matters are touched upon in Arena
conta Bolívar. While Boal could allow for some lack of judgment on the
Liberator’s part, especially before he learns the play’s lesson about uniting with the povo, to portray him as an aristocrat who coveted dictatorial
powers and never completely overcame his silver-spoon elitism would have
precluded his embodiment of Socialist egalitarianism.
Bolívar’s body, Christopher B. Conway demonstrates in his perceptive
study, The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature, has been used
by some writers to symbolize not Latin America as it might have been or
might yet be, but Latin America as it is. Conway shows how Gabriel García
Márquez, in his 1989 novel El general en su laberinto [The General in His
Labyrinth], uses Bolívar’s deteriorating body as a synecdoche for the health
of the hemisphere: “The decay of the general’s body is thus the decay of
the continent, wounded by its marginalization from the very discourses
that defi ne it” (148). García Márquez, in contrast to Boal, focuses on the
fi nal days of Bolívar’s life in 1830, as his body fails him and it becomes
painfully obvious that he will not live to see his dream of American unity
realized. Conway maintains that García Márquez dismantles Bolívar as a
distant, mythical figure, bringing him closer, “inviting us to rediscover his
humanity and the promise of pan-American unity all over again” (150).
Boal does the opposite: He avoids representation of the vulnerable body,
staging instead the robust swashbuckler, magnifying and distancing the
heroic figure from the spectator: Bolívar is never depressed, never ill, never
physically debilitated by age.43 The glorified body appears only as it was at
its peak; the American continent appears only as it might be at its apogee.
In fact, actor Lima Duarte recalls that some of Bolívar’s signature gestures—hand over the head, palm facing up as if preparing for battle, or arm
outstretched toward the ground, as if planting seeds—were borrowed from
São Paulo statues of historical heroes (personal interview). Once again, as
in Zumbi and Tiradentes, utopian dream rather than grim reality appeals
to the spectator’s imagination.
And once again, the hero is depicted as a thoroughly public figure with
almost no private life. For instance, one of the most well-known episodes of
the Liberator’s life, an episode that highlights his vulnerability, his romantic relationships, and his reliance on one particular woman, does not come
up in the play. Biographers and fiction writers alike, from Tomás Cipriano
de Mosquera (1853) to García Márquez (1989), have delighted in recounting the night that Bolívar’s longtime companion Manuela Sáenz confronted
the men who came to assassinate him and stalled them long enough for
Bolívar to jump out of a window and flee. By all accounts, Bolívar hid
under a bridge until troops loyal to him rounded up the conspirators and
restored order. The image of Bolívar shivering in the cold river water, listening in the darkness for signs that it was safe to go home, would hardly
conform to the ultramasculine guerrilla-Bolívar that Arena represented as
completely independent of women, except during brief sexual dalliances.
Sáenz is thus erased from the biographical narrative.
The episodes in Bolívar that appear to have been entirely invented are
sometimes the most thought-provoking because they deploy what Owens
calls allegory’s “supplementary meaning,” which he maintains effaces or
obscures earlier meanings (84–85). I would argue, however, that allegory
at its most complex adds layers of significance that nevertheless allow earlier meanings to shine through, an effect similar to oil paint layered on
a canvas. In Bolívar, when multiple meanings pile up, the work attains a
kind of richness of texture, a texture it lacks when earlier meanings are
obscured. For instance, when Miranda tells Bolívar, “El mundo está hoy
día dividido en dos grandes bloques, dos superpotencias” (16) [The world
today is divided into two giant blocs, two superpowers], the words “blocs”
and “superpowers” serve as a clue that the comment refers to twentiethcentury colonial powers: the Soviet Union and the United States. And yet
a prior meaning (prior in the sense that it fits more with the context of
the scene and thus presumably comes fi rst to the spectator’s mind), which
refers to the nineteenth-century colonial powers, France and England, has
not been obscured. The simultaneous coexistence of the two superficially
incompatible meanings creates a kind of tension that the mind seeks to
resolve by interrogating the metaphor: How is the Cold War similar to the
nineteenth-century colonial wars? Is there a causal relationship between
nineteenth-century colonialism and contemporary colonialism?
In his eagerness to impart a lesson, however, Boal sometimes denies the
reader the pleasure of pondering the doubled meanings of allegory. For
instance, Bolívar and Miranda go on to discuss the need for an army:
BOLIVAR. Y que nos falta?
MIRANDA. Soldados.
BOLIVAR. Tenemos al pueblo que es el mejor ejército.
MIRANDA. Necesito soldados y usted me habla de guerrilleros?
BOLIVAR. Quien es el buen soldado? (17)
[BOLIVAR. And what are we missing?
MIRANDA. Soldiers.
Boal and Guarnieri
111
BOLIVAR. We have the pueblo, which is the best army.
MIRANDA. I need soldiers and you speak to me of guerrillas?
BOLIVAR. Who is the good soldier?
Instead of letting the question hang, and allowing the audience to consider
the doubled meaning of soldiers/guerrillas on its own, the chorus breaks
into song and explains in “Cancion del Mejor Soldado” [Song of the Best
Soldier] exactly what, according to Boal, is involved in being a good soldier: not obedience and discipline, but poverty and experience of social
injustice:
El buen soldado es el torturado,
Es quien no tiene trabajo,
Es el que no tiene ni para el tecito;
El buen soldado es Don Juan
que a su hijo no compro ni pan, es Don Juan (18)
[The good soldier is the one who has been tortured
Is the one who has no job
Is the one who hasn’t even got enough for tea;
The good soldier is Don Juan
who couldn’t buy bread for his son, it’s Don Juan]
The Brechtian device of the song might entertain, but far from encouraging
the Brechtian goal of reflection in the spectator, it shuts down the process
of thought. The lack of metaphor and excess of explicit defi nition encourage spectators to passively consume political propaganda. Other scenes
similarly slip back and forth between poetry and pamphlet as they condemn torture, critique U.S. domination, and protest repression. One such
scene features a clever song sung by the Spanish King Charles IV, “Solo no
es Prohibido Prohibir” [Only Forbidding is not Forbidden].
The fraught history of the struggle for control of Bolívar’s image includes
instances not only of poetry and pamphlets, plays and novels, but also of
prayers, monuments, paintings, fi lms, biographies, eulogies, folk songs,
and children’s stories. Out of many possible examples, a brief look here at a
poem and a folksong provides a glimpse of two very different leftist appropriations of Bolívar that help illuminate Arena’s Bolívar. Pablo Neruda’s
“Un Canto para Bolívar” subverts the nineteenth-century depictions of the
Liberator as a saintly cult figure intended to unify the nation and establish
national order.44 Neruda begins the 1941 poem as a prayer, at fi rst appearing to embrace Bolívar as a Christ figure:
Padre nuestro que estás en la tierra, en el agua, en el aire
de toda nuestra extensa latitud silenciosa,
todo lleva tu nombre padre, en nuestra morada: (1–3)
[Our Father who art on Earth, in the water, in all the air
112
of our extensive silent breadth,
everything bears your name Father, in our dwelling: ]
Yet in lines 17–22, the color red develops as a motif—red roses, red hands,
red seeds, and red soldiers—evoking passion, blood, and, of course, communism. The many red hands that rise from Bolívar’s ashes form a metaphorical chain that links the Liberator to the Spanish Civil War and to
battles against injustice on the American continent alike. The Chilean
poet concludes the ode by addressing Bolívar directly [Father] and asking
in a moment of plaintive agnosticism: ¿Padre . . . eres o no eres o quién
eres? (58) [Father . . . are you or aren’t you or who are you?]. In the last
line, Bolívar’s response affi rms his existence, not as an ethereal god but as
a volcanic force of nature identified with humanity: “Despierto cada cien
años cuando despierta el pueblo” (60) [I awaken every hundred years
when the pueblo awakens].
Like Neruda, Boal plants Bolívar fi rmly on the Earth in communion
with the common people, not in the heavens. For both the poet and the
playwright, the Liberator’s blood nourishes present resistance. Yet Neruda, writing in the wake of the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War, takes the long view: Bolívar’s spirit only stirs once a century.
For Boal, on the other hand, the hero seems to have instant communion
with the people, once he decides that that is what he wants. In 1970,
though the guerrillas had been almost entirely defeated in Brazil, and
student activists had been crushed in Mexico, in other parts of Latin
America where Bolívar was performed, such as Peru and Chile, guerrilla
groups had yet to peak. The hope that one of those struggles might at
any moment spark a revolutionary fi re that would spread throughout the
hemisphere is tangible in the drama. The play does not contemplate historical cycles; it urges immediate action. The last line, uttered by Bolívar,
can be read between the lines as a call to revolutionary action: “Senadores, inciad vuestra tarea, yo completaré la mía” [Gentleman, begin
your work, I will complete mine]. Perhaps this challenge accounts for
what Boal recalls as an audience reaction that was enthusiastic but “a bit
frightened” (e-mail to the author, 10 March 2007).
More recently, Cuban folk singer Silvio Rodríguez invoked Bolívar’s
specter yet again to celebrate a successful revolution, the leftist guerrilla
war in Nicaragua that ousted rightwing dictator Anastasio Somoza and
brought the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional to power in 1979.
In “Canción Urgente para Nicaragua,” during the fi rst flush of Sandinista
victory, Rodríguez sings to the accompaniment of a happy guitar and
drums:
Me recuerdo de un hombre
que por esto moría
y que viendo este día
[I remember a man
who died for this
and who watching this day
Boal and Guarnieri
como espectro del monte
jubiloso reía.
like a ghost from the mountains
laughed joyously.
El espectro es Sandino
con Bolívar y el Che
porque el mismo camino
caminaron los tres
The ghost is Sandino
with Bolívar and Che
because the same path
was walked by all three.
Estos tres caminantes
con identica suerte
ya se han hecho gigantes
ya burlaron la muerte.
These three fellow travelers
with identical fates
have already been made giants
have already mocked death.]
113
The lyrics position Augusto César Sandino, the hero of the Sandinista
movement, who waged guerrilla war against invading U.S. marines in the
1920s, as more than a successor to Bolívar, or a predecessor to Che. All
three men are fused, like a holy trinity, in the image of the specter who
watches from the mountains. The descendents in this genealogy are the
contemporary Sandinista leaders, who implicitly gain heroic status from
the Bolívar–Che–Sandino ghost’s approval of their project. From a more
secular perspective, Arena positions Bolívar as the founding father of a
similar lineage. But the contemporary Brazilian leaders who might have
inherited the mantle of revolutionary glory, the Brazilian Ches and Sandinos, never materialized.
The battle over Bolívar’s legacy still rages today as Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez and U.S. President George W. Bush have each tried to capture
Bolívar’s aura for his own agenda.
The leftist populist Chávez has gone so far as to change the name of
Venezuela to “the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” and to refer to himself
as a “revolutionary Bolivarian.” As he embarked on a 2007 tour of Latin
America, Bush countered by declaring Bolívar the ideological double of
George Washington, and claiming Bolívar and Washington as the forefathers of all Americans: “Like Washington, he [Bolívar] was a general who
fought for the right of his people to govern themselves. Like Washington,
he succeeded in defeating a much stronger colonial power, and like Washington, he belongs to all of us who love liberty. One Latin American diplomat put it this way: ‘Neither Washington, nor Bolívar was destined to
have children of their own, so that we Americans might call ourselves their
children’” (President Bush Discusses Western Hemisphere Policy).
The Chávez–Bush tussle continues a broader dispute alluded to at the end
of Arena conta Bolívar, the debate over whether and to what extent Latin
American countries should emulate the United States. Reframing Bolívar’s
opposition to provisions for regular transfer of power as a nationalistic call
for self-determination, Arena’s Bolívar exhorts his fellow citizens to refrain
from mindless imitation of the United States: “Ustedes desean copier las
leyes de Washington, pero yo les digo que cada país debe tener sus leyes.
114
Para hacer nuestras leyes, el pueblo debe ser consultado, y no el código
de George Washington” (67). [You want to copy Washington’s laws, but I
tell you that every country should have its own laws. In order to make our
laws, the pueblo should be consulted, and not the code of George Washington.] In the context of Latin America in 1970, Bolívar’s words resonated as
a rejection of the staunchly anticommunist, procapitalist philosophy that
the United States was attempting to impose throughout the hemisphere.
As Chávez’s popularity demonstrates, even in a post-Cold War world, the
yearning for national heroes who purport to resist imperialism endures.
Figures 115
Figure 0.1 Eles não usam black-tie—São Paulo. Left to Right: Lélia Abramo and
Oduvaldo Vianna Filho (Vianinha) in the 1958 Teatro de Arena production of Eles
não usam black-tie. Photo courtesy of Vera Gertel.
Figure 1.1 Alfonso y Clotilde—Montevideo. Left to right: Leonor Álvarez and Juan
Alberto Sobrino in the 1980 production of Alfonso y Clotilde in the Teatro del Centro, Montevideo. Photo courtesy of Carlos Manuel Varela.
116
Figure 1.2 Cuentos del Final—one. Left to right: Miguel Pinto and Estela Medina
in the 1981 production of Los Cuentos del Final in the Sala Verdi of the Comedia
Nacional, Montevideo. Photo courtesy of Carlos Manuel Varela.
Figures
117
Figure 1.3 Cuentos del Final —two. Left to right: Maruja Santullo and Delfi Galbiati
in the 1981 production of Los Cuentos del Final in the Sala Verdi of the Comedia
118
Figure 1.4 Palabras en la Arena. Left to right: Gloria Demassi and Delfi Galbiati
in the 1982 production of Palabras en la Arena in the Sala Verdi of the Comedia
Figures
119
Figure 1.5 Elsinore—Eslabon—one. Left to right: Carlos Sorriba and Nelson Castillo in a 2005 production of Interrogatorio en Elsinore in Montevideo’s El Galpón
Theater. Photo by Leonel Dárdano, courtesy of Leonel Dárdano.
Figure 1.6 Elsinore—Eslabon—two. Left to right: Nelson Castillo and Soraya Olivera in a 2005 production of Interrogatorio en Elsinore in Montevideo’s El Galpón
Theater. Photo by Leonel Dárdano, courtesy of Leonel Dárdano.
Figures
121
Figure 1.7 Crónica. Left to right: Gustavo Alonso and Margarita Musto in the 1986
production of Crónica de una espera, directed by Carlos Manuel Varela, Teatro del
Notariado, Montevideo. Photo courtesy of Carlos Manuel Varela.
122
Figure 2.1 Arena conta Zumbi—one. Clockwise: Marília Medalha, Chant Dessian,
Vanya Sant’Anna, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, Dina Sfat, Lima Duarte, and Antero
de Oliveira in rehearsal for the 1965 production of Arena conta Zumbi, Teatro de
Arena, directed by Augusto Boal in São Paulo. Photo courtesy of Vanya Sant’Anna.
Figure 2.2 Arena conta Zumbi—two. Left to right: Milton Gonçalves and Vera Gertel in rehearsal for the 1965 production of Arena conta Zumbi, directed by Paulo
José in Rio de Janeiro. Photo courtesy of Vera Gertel.
Figures
123
Figure 2.3 Arena conta Zumbi—three. Program cover of the Mexico tour of Arena
conta Zumbi. Photo courtesy of Centro de Investigación Teatral Rodolfo Usigli/
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.
Figure 2.4 Arena conta Tiradentes—one. Clockwise from left: Vanya Sant’Anna,
Sílvio Zilber, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, David José (center), Dina Sfat, Renato Consorte, Claudio Pucci, and Jairo Arco e Flexa (front) in rehearsal for Arena conta
Tiradentes. Photo courtesy of Vanya Sant’Anna.
124
Figure 2.5 Arena conta Tiradentes—two. David José, in costume as Tiradentes, outside of an Ouro Preto church during Teatro Arena’s 1967 production of Arena
conta Tiradentes. Photo courtesy of David José Lessa Mattos.
Figures
125
Figure 2.6 Program for Revolução na América do sul. Program cover for Augusto
Boal’s play, Revolução na América do sul, staged by Teatro Arena in São Paulo in
1960. Photo courtesy of FUNARTE, Rio.
126
Figure 2.7 Teatro de Arena, São Paulo. On February 1, 1955, Teatro de Arena inaugurated its permanent home in downtown São Paulo, near the University of São
Paulo’s urban campus. Photo courtesy of FUNARTE, Rio.
Figures
127
Figure 3.1 La malasangre poster. Publicity poster for the 2005 production of
Griselda Gambaro’s La malasangre, Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires. Left to right: Luis
Ziembrowski, Leonardo Saggese, Carolina Fal, and Joaquín Furriel. Front: Catalina
Speroni and Lorenzo Quinteros. Photo courtesy of Laura Yusem.
Figure 3.2 La malasangre poster. Left to right: Joaquín Furriel and Carolina Fal in
a publicity poster for the 2005 production of Griselda Gambaro’s La malasangre,
Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires. Photo courtesy of Laura Yusem.
Figures
129
Figure 3.3 Antígona—one. Painted polyester shell of Creonte, designed by Juan Carlos Distéfano, for the 1986 production of Antígona furiosa, staged at the Goethe
Institute in Buenos Aires. The shell was worn by the actor playing Coryphaeus when
he assumed the character of Creonte. Photo courtesy of Laura Yusem.
130
Figure 3.4 Antígona—two. Bettina Muraña as Antígona in the 1986 production of
Antígona furiosa, staged at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. Photo courtesy of
Laura Yusem.
Figures
131
Figure 3.5 Antígona —three. Bettina Muraña in the 1986 production of Antígona furiosa, staged at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. Photo courtesy of Laura Yusem.
132
Figure 3.6 Antígona—four. Bettina Muraña in the 1986 production of Antígona furiosa, staged at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. Photo courtesy of Laura Yusem.
Figures
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Figure 4.1 La contienda humana. Left to right: Kurt Glockzin and Wolfgang Packhaüser in the 1988 production of La contienda humana, directed by Juan Radrigán
in Dortmund, Germany. Photo by Thilo Beu, Courtesy of Juan Radrigán.
Figure 4.2 Las Brutas—one. Actors from El Farol theater’s production of Las Brutas;
directed by Arnaldo Berríos in 1983 in Valparaiso, Chile. Left to right: Fernando
Berríos, Graciela Navarro, and Raquel Toledo. Photo courtesy of Juan Radrigán.
Figure 4.3 Las Brutas—two. Unidentified actors in a cross-dressed production of
Las Brutas in Sweden in 1987. Photo courtesy of Juan Radrigán.
Figure 4.4 Hechos consumados—one. Silvia Marín as Marta, in the 1981 production of Hechos consumados directed by Nelson Brodt in Santiago. Photo courtesy
of Juan Radrigán.
Figures
135
Figure 4.5 Hechos consumados—two. Left to right: Mariela Roi, Pepe Herrera (seated),
Manuel Lattus (with stick), and Silvia Marin in the 1981 production of Hechos consumados directed by Nelson Brodt in Santiago. Photo courtesy of Juan Radrigán.
136
Figure 4.6 Pueblo del mal amor. The cast of the 1986 production of Pueblo del Mal
Amor, at the Teatro de la Universidad Católica in Santiago, directed by Raúl Osorio.
Photo courtesy of Juan Radrigán.
Figure 5.1 Alfonso y Clotilde (Italy)—one. Damiana Bertozzi in the 1998 production
of Varela’s Alfonso y Clotilde, directed by Thomas Otto Zinzi for the Rimini-based
Teatro della Centena. Photo courtesy of Carlos Manuel Varela.
Figures
137
Figure 5.2 Alfonso y Clotilde (Italy)—two. Damiana Bertozzi and Gianvito Banzi in
the 1998 production of Varela’s Alfonso y Clotilde, directed by Thomas Otto Zinzi for
the Rimini-based Teatro della Centena. Photo courtesy of Carlos Manuel Varela.
Figure 5.3 La malasangre (Repertorio Español, New York). Anilú Pardo in La malasangre directed by Alejandra Orozco for Repertorio Español in New York City,
2002. Photo by Michael Palma. Courtesy of Repertorio Español.
3
Griselda Gambaro
Abstract Allegory and the
Duty to Conceal
Despite its penchant for torture, throughout its two decades in power,
Brazil’s military fairly consistently managed to convince many of its citizens that it was helping them fulfi ll the national motto of “order and
progress.” Argentina’s military, however, kept a less steady hand on the
national rudder, as evidenced by the chaotic succession of military coups
and countercoups alternating with brief periods of civilian rule that
plagued the country from the moment of Juan Perón’s ouster and exile in
1955. And while the Brazilian military, despite highs and lows in its levels
of repression, held to a relatively moderate level of brutality throughout
its most recent two decades in power (1964–1985), Argentina’s military
rulers rarely hesitated to come down on their civilian population with an
iron fist. To use just one rough measure of atrocity, the number of civilians
estimated to have been killed by the military in Argentina, a country with
a population of about 30 million, during the dictatorship of 1976–1983
has been estimated as high as 30,000; the highest estimate of the number
of civilians killed by the military in Brazil, a country with a population of
almost 200 million, during a dictatorship that lasted more than twice as
long, is less than a thousand.1 Argentina’s military rulers looked to Brazil
as a model when structuring both their economic policies and their system
of political repression. Yet while Argentine economic policies never managed to replicate Brazil’s economic success, the Argentine machinery of
torture, assassination, and “disappearance” functioned with far greater
efficiency than Brazil’s. 2
The difference in harshness of military rule, I would argue, informs the
strikingly divergent theatrical styles developed during roughly the same
period of time by Boal and Guarnieri in Brazil and Gambaro in Argentina.
While the duty to inspire resistance that motivates Boal and Guarnieri
also drives Gambaro, in her work that duty is tempered by an equally
urgent moral imperative to conceal meaning. In Teatro Arena’s historical
allegories, a chain of one-to-one correspondences links cover stories to
thinly disguised subversive narratives of dissidence: Zumbi’s fight against
slavery mimics the fight of contemporary opponents to dictatorship. Dictatorship equals slavery. Opponents to dictatorship are as brave and noble
Griselda Gambaro
139
as Zumbi. Characters are based on actual people recreated as villains and
victims so clearly distinguishable that they slip into melodrama. Protagonists often represent historical figures involved in “true” stories of battle
against forces of evil: Zumbi’s and Tirandetes’s noble struggles for liberty
from Portuguese oppression, Che’s glorious fight for revolution, Bolívar’s
victorious campaign to liberate five countries from Spanish rule. Gambaro’s
heroes are less heroic, her dictators more cruel. Arena’s villains—from the
bandeirantes who crush Zumbi to the Spanish king who would ban everything except the practice of banning itself in Bolívar—seem cartoonishly
malevolent compared to the breathtaking ruthlessness of Gambaro’s dictatorial characters. And while she also alludes to actual historical figures,
from Hitler to the mothers of the disappeared, she never attempts a realistic portrayal of any single individual. Even when she names a dictatorial
character “Franco,” for instance, he bears little resemblance to the actual
historical figure of the Spanish dictator.
Gambaro too depicts history as a cycle in which the brutality of the past
returns in the present. But instead of creating straightforward narratives in
which each element of the past corresponds to some aspect of the present,
she crafts more fragmented, even confusing, narratives featuring morally
murkier protagonists opposing more slippery antagonists. Their dialogue is
often mysterious and they function in universes that reflect the real world
only in that, as in Argentina at times, it is difficult to know what game is
being played, much less what the rules are. Gambaro’s strategy, which I call
“abstract allegory,” simultaneously reflects, shields against, and attempts to
reshape her nation’s political reality. Given the greater repression in Argentina, it makes sense that Gambaro developed a more hermetic theatrical
strategy, in which subversive meaning is decipherable to the alert spectator
but more difficult for would-be censors to identify and punish. “I deal with
real facts; it’s just that my form of expression isn’t realistic,” Gambaro said
in a 1985 interview with Evelyn Picón Garfield (63).
Born in 1928, Gambaro wrote short stories since her childhood in the
1940s and won national prizes for her fiction as early as 1963. She turned
to drama in 1964, revising some of her prose pieces for the theater, and
soon rose to prominence in that field as well, with major works such as Las
paredes [The Walls] (1963), El desatino [The Blunder] (1965), Los siameses
[The Siamese Twins] (1965), and El campo [The Camp] (1967). During the
dictatorship Gambaro published an allegorical novel, Ganarse la muerte
[To Earn One’s Death] (1976), in which a teenage girl is beaten, raped, or
otherwise abused by every adult with whom she comes in contact. “I didn’t
think she reflected the state of women; I thought she reflected Argentina,”
Gambaro said in a 1984 interview (quoted in Betsko and Koening 194).
The metaphor of the bruised and battered nation, helpless in the hands of
its violent leaders, the “adults,” was apparently not lost on the authorities
who banned the work, precipitating Gambaro’s three-year exile with her
husband and children in Spain. In a collection of autobiographical jottings
140
written in exile but not published until years later, Escritos inocentes
[Innocent Writings] (1999), she describes the political power of allegorical
writing, appropriately enough, with an allegory:
Dictatorships practice this art [exile] consistently but imperfectly: they
cannot empty a country as if it were a box and authorize entrance only
to the submissive. Since they can’t do that, they impose internal exile,
which they suppose easier. They are mistaken. Some exile their ideas
and their habits, but the majority dissemble, and like one who has a
rock hidden in hand, as soon as a moment of carelessness arises, they
throw it. Thus dictatorships must impose on themselves absolute exile
from their own comfort. Never can they sit in the sun, walk in the
street, drink wine at a table with friends: they crumble. Rocks begin
to fall. 3 (27)
Before, during, and even after, the military dictatorship of 1976–1983,
Gambaro threw and continues to throw theatrical “rocks” that rip holes in
authoritarian ideologies.
The five Gambaro plays discussed here span twenty-four years, from
1967 to 1991, twenty-four years during which Argentina lurched from
moderately repressive dictatorship to brief, inept civilian rule to ruthlessly
repressive dictatorship and then to relatively benign civilian rule, where it
has remained for the last twenty years despite continued economic hardship,
political turmoil, and sometimes corrupt leadership. Representations of
troubled families and perverted erotic relationships in Gambaro’s works
capture the essence of Argentina’s national discord, betraying frustrated
hopes for national peace and prosperity, hopes that seemed within reach in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One of Gambaro’s earliest
abstract allegories, El campo [The Camp] (1967), figures the nation, then
under the rule of Gen. Juan Carlos Onganía, as a concentration camp
from which there is no escape, a prison from which the “hero” cannot
liberate the damsel in distress. Written seven years later, the short one-act
El despojamiento [Stripped] (1974) heightens abstraction so greatly that
neither the surface nor the intended subtext can be easily extracted from the
excess of meaning, multiple narratives, and fragmented language. Yet far
from a Gertrude Stein-like exercise in narrative deconstruction, Stripped
brings to life the cliché of “senseless violence” that Argentina experienced
as left-wing guerrilla kidnappers and killers faced off against right-wing
underground kidnappers and killers. Onganía was ousted by one general
who in turn was ousted by a second general, replaced by yet a third general,
Juan Perón, who returned from exile, sparking further violence from
feuding factions of supporters, then died within months, leaving the nation
to the mercy of his incompetent widow and her iron-fisted henchmen—
all between 1970 and 1974. A decade later, La malasangre [Bad Blood]
(1981) comes toward the end of a second era of dictatorship (1976–1983), a
Griselda Gambaro
141
dictatorship that proved far more horrific than any of its twentieth-century
predecessors. This play is allegory posing as realism, political theater
cloaked in drawing-room melodrama: One allegory, employing the family
as a figure for nineteenth-century dictatorship, shelters another, more
dangerous system of metaphors—the nineteenth-century regime as the
political ancestor of the current government. The two last Gambaro works
discussed, Antígona furiosa [Furious Antigone] (1986) and Atando cabos
[Putting Two and Two Together] (1991), look back at the latest dictatorship
and draw from literary as well as historical sources. They elevate allegory
to a mythic plane, as the playwright, like her heroines, demands to have
her version of what happened to her nation during the campaign of state
terror that the military dubbed the “Dirty War” not only inscribed in the
historical record, but also immortalized in a supernatural realm, the realm
of the “disappeared” victims of that offensive.
I have argued that for Boal and Guarnieri, resistance to oppressive
authority, even when failed, has a certain nobility, a sense that next time
things might turn out differently. In contrast, for Gambaro, failed resistance has a pathetic, ridiculous quality, compounded by a sense that next
time things are likely to turn out just as badly as they did the time before.
Especially in her early plays, written in the 1960s at about the same time
as Boal and Guarnieri wrote for Teatro Arena, Gambaro seems far more
cynical than her Brazilian counterparts about the prospects for meaningful opposition to brutality. Instead of crafting mythic national heroes to
inspire and lead spectators toward solutions, Gambaro begins her playwriting career by creating grotesquely amusing antiheroes, who, true to
comic type, are usually unable to cope with the terrible circumstances
that befall them. The fi rst two Gambaro “heroes” discussed here are hapless victims of violence that far exceeds their ability to resist: El Campo’s
Martín and El despojamiento’s Woman. La malasangre’s Dolores edges
toward the sort of heroine—aggressive, courageous, articulate—that Gambaro only fully develops much later in her three decades of playwriting,
in the 1990s, when some of her protagonists begin to personify defiance
and rage. Only the two later Gambaro heroines I will discuss, Antígona
from Antígona Furiosa and Elisa from Atando cabos, seem fully capable
of effectively subverting authoritarianism.4 Even in these plays, however,
the heroines do not come across as flesh-and-blood female characters but
instead appear as visitors from a mythic realm of the living-dead, as if
the truths they embody can only come from an alternate universe. Still, in
contrast to Teatro Arena’s physical and moral supermen, these women do
little more than speak. Taking the risk of breaking the silence about state
repression, as the playwright does by writing and staging her work, is all
Gambaro asks of her protagonists and her spectators. Even in her darkest
works she always leaves the door at least slightly ajar for the spectators
to attempt what the characters cannot manage—to rouse themselves from
passivity. Though her protagonists operate in theatrical universes plagued
142
by an evil more stubborn than Boal and Guarnieri ever imagined, the spectator is always indirectly urged, by counterexample, to break the pattern of
passivity that dooms the characters, to fight back.
ABSTRACT ALLEGORY
I call Gambaro’s allegory “abstract” to contrast it with the historical allegory developed by Boal and Guarnieri, to distinguish it from other kinds
of allegory, such as national or dialectical, proposed by other scholars,
and to suggest a parallel with abstract painting. Like an abstract painting,
abstract theatrical allegory simultaneously offers multiple meanings in a
nonrealistic system of representation. While abstract painting, however,
may or may not have a political lesson, in theater, at least in South American theater under dictatorship, abstract allegory usually served to disguise
political dissidence.
Unlike Arena’s historical allegories, Gambaro’s abstract allegories
refuse to subordinate the personal to the political, a strategy that has
been traced back at least as far as nineteenth-century foundational fiction. In Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer persuasively argues that
allegory in nineteenth-century Latin American novels does not privilege
a political subtext over a personal narrative, but instead equally privileges
the discourses of love and nation-building, in what she sees as a dialectical relationship between the two. The passion of the love story fuels the
passion for nation building, which in turn refuels private passions, and
so on, until couple and country live happily ever after, or not. Even under
intense political pressures, such as dictatorship, many twentieth-century
writers have proved themselves to be deeply invested in individual narratives. For instance, Mary Beth Tierney-Tello builds on Sommer’s work
to argue in her study of twentieth-century South American allegorical
novels written by women under dictatorship: “As allegories of sexuality
and politics, these texts show us simultaneously the political nature of
sexuality as well as the gender-based nature of authoritarianism” (18).
The individual narrative for these women novelists is far more than a
coded representation of what Jameson calls “the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society (“Third-World” 69).” It is also
a representation of the private individual destiny as marked by public culture and society. For these allegorical novelists, not only is the personal
the political, the political is also the personal. Some types of allegory, as
I see it, are therefore political but not “national,” in Jameson’s sense of
the term, because the individual narrative is just as important as—and at
times indistinguishable from—broader social circumstance.
Looking at antidictatorship theater through Sommer’s lens provides
some new insight into the workings of Gambaro’s allegories as a tool
against repressive political authority.
Griselda Gambaro
143
If nineteenth-century foundational novels used erotic desire allegorically
to help construct the modern, unified Latin American nation, what work
does allegory do in Gambaro’s theater under dictatorship in the 1970s and
1980s? Benedict Anderson explains the nation as a community conceived,
whether true in fact or not, as “deep, horizontal comradeship,” a “fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many
millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited
imaginings” (7). But Gambaro’s protagonists suffer, and sometimes die,
not so much for their nations as because of them. The nation, or, to be
more precise, the national military machine, extracts a meaningless sacrifice from civilians who are not asked whether or not they are willing to
die. Gambaro’s plays acknowledge and call attention to the failure of the
nineteenth-century national project: The twentieth-century nation remains
divided, violent, and exploitative of its weak. Erotic desire in this context
is often abusive, perverted, or simply frustrated, signaling the frustration
of the utopian vision.
The national disappointment is the disappointment of one who like
Antigone, quoted by Gambaro in her version of the Greek tragedy, “was
born to share love, not hate” (145). 5 As a nation based on love, or even
simple human decency, remains elusive for Argentines under dictatorship, Gambaro’s work constantly teases the spectator’s desire for a happy
romantic ending, or any ending with a strong sense of closure, only to deny
it in the end. Rather than encourage further nation-building in the direction Argentina is already headed, Gambaro’s plays recoil from the national
agenda created by its military rulers. She thus uses allegory to covertly prod
spectators to acknowledge the disaster and consider an alternative national
project. 6
In Argentine drama, as Jean Graham-Jones details, the period from
1976 to 1979 was one in which reality was what she calls “metaphorized”
(20–54). 7 Houses and apartments came to symbolize the country; fathers
represented tyrants; apparently innocent games concealed “self-destructive
escapism or ritualized violence” (29). El despojamiento, which Gamaro
wrote two years before the 1976 coup, already exhibits many of the allegorical symbols Graham-Jones identifies in the 1976–1979 period—the
room-as-country, the patriarchal figures (a director, a Young Man, and
an abusive boyfriend), and a self-deluded protagonist who falls victim to
ritualized violence. In fact, abstract allegory has been Gambaro’s primary
(though not exclusive) mode of expression in the majority of the more than
two dozen plays and several of the novels she has written during the fortyyear span of her career.
While the coded language of allegory provides some protection from
would-be persecutors, its instability of meaning also denies spectators a
reassuring-but-false sense of certainty, forcing them instead to grapple with
the chaotic realities of Argentine society. Walter Benjamin saw in allegory’s
fragmentary quality a revelation of history as a process of decay:
144
In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in
this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal
life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself
to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what
ruins are in the realm of things. (178)
“Irresistible decay” would be an apt description of the prolonged Argentine slide from economic prosperity and political tranquility in the early
1900s to economic instability and political violence in the latter part of
the century. Though distant in time and place from the German Baroque
drama that preoccupied Benjamin, Gambaro’s allegories also reconfigure
painful shards of history, providing magnificent ruins rather than joyful,
eternal things of beauty. Still, these theatrical “ruins” have great aesthetic
merit: Their ambiguity and symbolic richness provides a level of complexity and sophistication that avoids preaching or dogmatism, the oft-heard
complaint about political theater.
As we have seen, Boal and Guarnieri’s historical allegories typically
employ a narrative veneer to hide a single layer of significance; Gambaro’s
abstract allegories further complicate the aesthetic strategy. While the traditional view of political, or “national,” allegory identifies one story as the
real story hidden by a cover story, and while the dialectical interpretation
of allegory equally privileges both stories, my reading of abstract allegory
suggests that several different interpretations of the same dramatic narrative may be layered so as to form a loosely woven but coherent whole.
Instead of two narratives fueling each other in a dialectical relationship, in
Gambaro’s allegories, three or more alternative perspectives may be simultaneously presented. These multiple levels of significance are often further
refracted through nonrealistic representation marked by fragmentation of
characters and plots.
All allegory to some extent refers to an abstract concept. The Romantic
critics deemed the symbol superior to allegory precisely because symbols
supposedly remained more tightly linked to the objects they represented.
Allegory, by contrast, was considered a vague and muddied business.8 The
Greek root meanings of allegory, “to speak” (agoreuein—as in the agora)
and “other” (allos), indicate the indirect method by which allegory functions, telling one story to refer to another. “To compose allegorically is
to construct a work so that its apparent sense refers to an ‘other’ sense,”
explains The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms (7). According to
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, “abstract” comes from the
Latin abstrahere, meaning “to draw away from, withdraw.” In visual art,
The Grove Dictionary of Art reminds us, abstract painting “stresses the
independence of form from its descriptive function while stopping short of
a complete severing of links with perceived reality.” Like abstract painting,
abstract allegory pulls away from historical allegory’s representational limits, transcending direct representation. In scholarly circles, as we all know,
Griselda Gambaro
145
abstract may be used either as a verb meaning to epitomize, or summarize,
or as a noun, indicating something that has been summarized. Allegory
already encompasses both the artistic and scholarly usages of abstract: It
pulls away from reality, paradoxically, in order to epitomize it.
Any text or performance may of course be subject to multiple interpretations. Yet allegory is distinguished by a narrative veneer that covers at
least one layer of significance, an underlayer that is sometimes potentially
threatening to the dominant ideology, and that is hinted at through a
chain of metaphors. Abstract allegory further fragments and complicates
the relationship among more levels of meaning, to allow for the simultaneous presentation of several different perspectives—think of the meticulously jumbled geometric shapes of a cubist painting. In the theater, the
actor’s relationship with the spectator adds a performative dimension that
even further complicates allegory. An actor’s tone of voice, gestures, body
position, and direct address to the spectator may all be used to add symbolic charge—whether politically subversive or not—to a line that read
on the page might remain locked in a single interpretation. It is important to remember though, that it is not just the addition of meanings
that constitutes abstraction, but also the addition of sustained metaphors
that paradoxically lead the spectator away from the most superficial
interpretation(s) in order to signal just as plausible, and more compelling,
hidden meanings.
To further complicate matters, Gambaro’s allegories often have more
than one underlying narrative. A false narrative often covers several
potential “true” stories within the play, which in turn signal the discrepancy between what the spectators believe, or would like to believe, about
their world and what the confusing range of realities might be. I see this
structure as three-dimensional rather than linear, like Russian dolls or
like a braid. The Russian-doll metaphor is useful for imaging the “truths”
hidden in the most protected, innermost sanctums of interpretation—for
both the characters and the spectators. Yet this metaphor is imperfect
because no truth is necessarily “smaller,” or less significant, or even less
discernable than any other. The image of the braid helps visualize how
three (or more) levels of meaning might be inextricably linked and coexist
in more-or-less equal measure on the same theatrical plane.
Gambaro’s avoidance of realistic representation advances multiple chains
of metaphors. Admittedly, the mere presence of a body or an object on stage
signals actual people or things. Thus, the “exclusion of natural forms” that
art historian Meyer Schapiro identified as one of the defi ning characteristics of abstract art is difficult to achieve in the theater (186). Yet by distorting movement, costume, language, and the body, a character may be so
denaturalized as to at least partially elude human proportions. Along the
same lines, stage properties may be introduced into unexpected contexts,
incongruously positioned, exaggerated in size or shape, or endowed with
unusual powers. Characters, objects, and situations refuse to be pinned
146
down to a single significance and resist easy comprehension. In abstract
allegory, the superficial narrative is sometimes as difficult to comprehend
as the underlying message.
It would be easy to mistake abstract allegory for postmodern pastiche. Superficially, nothing might seem more postmodern than a collage
of images drawn from different geographic locations, literary forms, and
historical eras then presented on the same stage, as if the performance
were a model of “intertextuality,” its three dimensions flattened into what
Jameson describes as depth replaced by emotionless surface, or the “waning of affect in postmodern culture” (Postmodernism 10). Far from being
devoid of meaning, emotional charge, or political consequence, however,
Gambaro’s theater employs pastiche in order to heighten certain emotional
effects and remind spectators of history. Her eclectic positioning of the
past-in-the-present, whether in language, character or narrative construction, heightens rather than detracts from a sense that Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s resulted from a combination of the nation’s
own violent origins and from international realities such as World War II
and the Cold War. Though characters, plots, and language may be dismembered, the parts remain suspended within the same web, as in a mural,
such as, for instance, Picasso’s Guernica, in which juxtaposed fragments of
horror serve as a passionate commentary on the inhumanity of the Spanish
Civil War. Gambaro’s work similarly evokes terror and pity worthy of classical tragedy while simultaneously demanding reflection and action.9
EL CAMPO [THE CAMP] 1967
It is tempting to read El campo anachronistically, as prophetic of the fate
of Argentina in its most recent and most infamous period of dictatorship,
from 1976 to 1983. Written a decade earlier, the play nevertheless seems to
foresee the armed camp (or “campo”) that the nation would become during
what the military called by the sinister name of “The Process of National
Reorganization,” or “El Proceso” for short. Diana Taylor, for instance,
notes that the play “looks ahead to where the escalating violence will lead
Argentina” (Theatre of Crisis 124). Indeed, the play was restaged in 1984,
just after the end of the Proceso, when an anonymous reviewer from the
major newspaper La Nacíon linked it to the recent dictatorship with a cautious indirect reference: “un espejo singular por el que desfilan imágenes de
la historia confundidas en el pasado y el presente” (15 July 1984) [a unique
mirror in which images stream by from history that blend past and present].
Yet it is equally fruitful to situate the play in the Argentine political climate
of 1967–1968 when it was fi rst written and staged as a veiled critique of
both the dictatorship of Gen. Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970), and of
the ideology that brought him to power, which the play suggests is a type
of Argentine authoritarianism influenced by European fascism.10 I would
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147
argue that Gambaro uses abstract allegory as a strategy to fuse national
and European history in a single devastating portrait of her country under
Onganía’s dictatorship, a portrait that prods spectators to reflect on their
delusions about the nature of their national leadership.11
A military coup on June 28, 1966, led to the installation of retired army
general Onganía as president. His program of economic and social transformation, “Revolución Argentina,” was intended to satisfy some of Perón’s
supporters without bringing back the divisive leader, who had been living in
exile in Spain since 1955. The idea was to shift back to Perón-style corporatism, in which the state maintained order by subsuming interest groups under
its controlling umbrella. According to David Rock, however, Onganía marginalized rather than integrated interest groups, particularly labor unions
(Argentina 347). Though he also hoped to follow in the footsteps of the Brazilian military, which had been imposing modernization through autocratic
rule since its own coup two years earlier, Onganía had a more hardline style
of repression. He dissolved Congress, banned political parties, imprisoned
union leaders, forbade student organizations, and imposed dress codes on
the young. On the infamous July 29, 1966, “Noche de los Bastones,” he
ordered the police to raid university campuses to beat up students and faculty suspected of communist sympathies (Romero 173–176). Long before the
coup of 1973, then, Gambaro already had plenty of evidence that her country
was beginning to resemble a concentration camp. Yet rather than thinly veil
an equation of Argentina with Auschwitz, for instance, as Boal might have
done, Gambaro gathers historical totems of the Nazi camps—uniforms, tattoos, guard dogs, rattle of machine guns, smell of burning flesh—and redeploys them in the service of a more sophisticated scheme. The world of the
camp is neither Argentina nor a Nazi death camp but a pastiche of elements
from both worlds, a pastiche that covertly encourages the spectator to reflect
on the similarities between the two realms.
The plot suggests that escape from such a world is difficult, if not impossible, and in any case would require much more cleverness and imagination than the protagonist musters. Martín ostensibly comes to the camp to
work as an administrator but he soon discovers that the institution resembles more of a concentration camp than a summer camp, complete with
inmates and guards. A camp director costumed in an SS uniform, Franco,
seems intent on tormenting one particular inmate, Emma, who maintains
diva-like airs despite her shaved head and tattooed forearm. Martín pities
Emma and, naively trusting in Franco’s offer to let him take her away, he
takes her home with him. But before long, a group of SS men invades his
home. As the play ends, they are about to brand him with a hot iron, implying that he too will end up back in the camp, with a number on his forearm,
on equal footing with the subjugated Emma. Though El campo has been
perceptively read as an allegory about the stifl ing of political and/or artistic
expression, above all, the plot underscores the banality of villainy and the
near impossibility of heroism in an authoritarian society.
Through a combination of Aristotelian identification and Brechtian
alienation, the drama triggers a politically subversive dynamic by encouraging comparisons between on-stage and off-stage performances of power.
It encourages reflection on how the characters are willfully ignoring their
reality, which in turn spurs spectators to consider how they may similarly
be blinding themselves to certain difficult truths. The spectators are led
to see how, like the characters, they may also harbor certain delusions. In
order to analyze this process, I fi rst detail the self-delusions clung to by the
characters—primarily about where they are and what role they play in the
setting and story. Second, I juxtapose those delusions to the truths that the
spectator can clearly see from the start and that the protagonist belatedly
discovers. Third, I show how the characters’ delusions mirror the delusions that certain sectors of the Argentine population might have harbored
and speculate about what sort of connections a 1968 audience might have
made between the play’s world and the truths of the universe outside the
theater.
Against all evidence to the contrary, the three main characters behave as
if the camp were a benign institution. Consider the following exchange:
Emma: Concedo pocas entrevistas, mi tiempo está atrozmente ocupado. (Se detiene, abstraida) Atrozmente. (Silencio)
Martín: (Se acerca a ella bajo): ¿Qué le pasa? Yo no vi a ningun
secretario, no hablé con nadie. (Ella comienza a rascarse) No se
rasque.
Emma: No me rasco. (Se rasca. Sonrisa social, estereotipada) . . .
(Se acaricia la cabeza rapada, como si se acariciara una gran
cabellera) . . . (Se alza la falda) Lindas piernas.
Martín: (le baja la falda) ¿Qué hace? Quédese tranquila. Me muestra
las piernas y parece escapada de . . . (se detiene, atónito, como si
solo en ese momento se diera cuenta de que ella parece escapada
de un campo de concentración) (176)
[Emma: I don’t grant many interviews. I’m frightfully busy. (She
halts and seems to sink into herself.) Frightfully. (Silence.)
Martín: (coming up to her and speaking in a low voice): What’s
wrong with you? I have not seen a secretary. I have spoken to no
one about you. (She begins scratching.) Don’t scratch yourself!
Emma: I’m not scratching myself. (She continues scratching herself,
smiling all the while.) And anyway, that was a very rude thing
for you to say to me. Who would have thought? (She touches her
shaved head as if she were arranging a full head of hair.) You look
like such a gentleman! (She raises her skirt.) Lovely legs, aren’t
they?
Martín: (Pulling her skirt down): What are you doing? Now, stop
it! Here you are showing me your legs and you look like someone
whose escaped from a . . . (He halts, surprised, as though he had
Griselda Gambaro
149
not realized until that moment that she appears to be an inmate
of a concentration camp.)] (64–65)12
Martín never fi nishes his thought. Gambaro allows many of his most perceptive observations to trail off in ellipses, a technique she frequently uses
to indicate a character’s inability or unwillingness to face the truth. “Yo
vi fotos una vez . . . Chicos que iban a . . . ,” he drifts off as he looks at
some drawings made by children interred in the camp (168). [I saw photographs once . . . of children . . . being led to a . . .” (57).] He clings to the
fantasy that his new, well-paying job is in some sort of innocuous institution. Emma perhaps cannot bear to admit to herself that she has been taken
prisoner. The warden, Franco, has a vested interest in keeping his victims
from any thoughts of rebellion.
Indeed, the second delusion the characters conspire to maintain is that
Franco is a benevolent authority figure, Emma’s childhood friend, who
has nothing but her best interests at heart. This delusion is metatheatrically expressed in little shows of gentlemanly concern for Emma, in which
Franco showers her with flattery, kisses her hand, and so forth. But as soon
as she leaves the room, he speaks to Martín about her in demeaning terms,
giving an ironic edge to the “sincerity” hinted at by the name “Franco,”
which means “frank” or “sincere:” “No la aguanto! Siempre rascándose!
Y esos aires de primadona! ¿Quién se cree que es? Y pretende, cada vez
que la veo, que le bese esas manos podridas! A mí me tiene podrido, a mí!”
(203)
[I can’t stand her. Always scratching herself. And those airs she has. Like
a prima donna. Who does she think she is? And then every time I see her
she wants me to kiss those rotten hands of hers. And she’s rotting me, that’s
what she’s doing! Rotting me! (93)].
As for Emma, she steadfastly clings to an image of herself as a concert
pianist, a diva who performs before an audience that Franco describes as
“la flor y nata de nuestra sociedad” (188) [the cream of the crop of our
society].13 Every time Martín tries to get her to acknowledge her captivity
or mistreatment she denies it, even with her gestures, as the stage directions
at the end of the second act call for her to respond to his queries by covering her ears and then letting her hands slide down over her face with her
eyes shut, a personification of the proverbial monkeys in denial (185). And
yet even Emma cannot entirely keep up her pretensions. Here and there
she betrays self-knowledge of her own condition: “Es mi guardian. No. Mi
. . .” (178) [He’s my guardian. No. My, uh . . . (76)]. As in Martín’s speech
patterns, the ellipses hint that guardianship is not the entire truth about the
nature of the arrangement, that perhaps “my captor” or “my tormentor”
would be a more accurate description of Franco’s role in her life.
Martín’s delusion, and perhaps the audience’s as well, is the hope that he
might prove a hero. Of the three main characters, only he, the interloper,
appears to have the potential to change the course of the action through his
150
decisions—whether to stay or go, whether to intervene on Emma’s behalf.
Of the trio, he is also the least fragmented, most rounded, and naturalistically constructed, neither evil to the point of black humor, like Franco,
nor horrifically subservient, like Emma. Though his construction is still
far from psychologically realistic—for instance, we learn nothing about
his childhood, his inner life, or even his past before he came to work for
Franco as a bookkeeper—he nevertheless gives the impression of being a
rather ordinary contemporary person rather than a pastiche of past and
present atrocities. He wears regular street clothing, cheerfully chews gum,
enters the world of the play as an outsider from beyond the camp’s barbed
wire, and at fi rst, unlike Emma, appears free to leave at will (161). Coupled
with his outsider status, his initially self-confident demeanor creates the
expectation that he will serve as a melodramatic counterweight to the villainous concentration camp director and rescue the heroine. While Franco
and Emma are linked to the dark side of Argentina’s European roots, Martín remains untainted until the last moment, potentially free to escape the
vicissitudes of history.
The play fi rst encourages, then frustrates the spectator’s expectation
that Martín will successfully perform the traditional melodramatic role
of rescuer to the female lead. He is the character with whom the spectator
is meant to identify. The spectator’s expectations might be raised in part
by the name Martín, which recalls José de San Martín, the great national
hero of Argentina and symbol of South American liberty. Gambaro’s Martín is also set the task of liberating the Argentine nation, or at least its
downtrodden civilian population, as allegorized by Emma. Martín’s early
defiance of Franco feeds the hope that he may prove worthy of his name.
He ignores Franco’s demands that he spit out his chewing gum (165–166).
He calmly insults Franco’s predilection for the SS uniform, remarking that
its past is “de hijos de puta” (169) [of sons of bitches].14 He protests when
Franco drags his overcoat along the floor: “¡No lo arrastre por el suelo!”
“¡Levántelo!” (172) [Don’t drag it on the floor!” “Pick it up!” (61)]. And
most significantly, he tries to get Emma to acknowledge what has happened
to her, repeatedly demanding to know who branded her. He even decides to
leave but then changes his mind and stays, perhaps because of the monetary
reward he has received or perhaps out of pity for Emma, who begs him to
remain until her concert the following day (180). Taking back his decision to go, at the end of the second of the play’s five scenes, constitutes an
Aristotelian reversal that seals both their fates: The plot takes a 180-degree
turn in the direction of its bleak ending.
The self-delusions just discussed are juxtaposed to a series of actualities made abundantly clear to spectators through a variety of cues, including lights, sound effects, and hints in the text itself. Despite Emma’s and
Franco’s protestations to the contrary, the camp is of course a concentration camp. As Janice K. McAleer notes, the costumes, body language, and
sound effects all contradict much of the dialogue (160). In the background
Griselda Gambaro
151
we hear shouted orders, dogs barking, machine-gun fi re. Moreover, the
characters refer to the smell of burning flesh. What is left purposely ambiguous, however, is the location of the camp. Is it in Argentina? In Europe?
Franco too remains impossible to pin down precisely in space and time,
but it is clear to the spectator, despite his and Emma’s protestations to the
contrary, that he is a repressive authority figure. He amalgamates a variety
of different dictators, with bits of Hitler, Francisco Franco, Juan Perón, and
Onganía, all jumbled together. His character combines the Argentine present with Nazi emblems wrenched from their historical context: his beloved
SS uniform, his whip, his riding boots. His country of origin is never specified, yet he does not seem to be German. Despite his obsession with his SS
uniform, his name is “Franco,” after the Spanish dictator, and he speaks
in Argentine slang (Mendez-Faith 837). Then again, his references to the
Vietnam War clearly situate him in the 1960s. While this clue might suggest comparisons with Onganía, Franco is described in the opening stage
directions as “un hombre joven, de rostro casi bondadoso” [He is a young
man and his face is almost kind], which distances him, at least superficially,
from the retired general known for his stern demeanor (Potash 199). In
short, Franco embodies many dictators in one, elevating his character to
an archetypal figure of evil, evil so exaggerated that at times it descends
into parody.
Despite the dark humor surrounding Franco’s fascist accessories, which
have been dislodged from their original historical context, they have not
been emptied of their emotional charge. On the contrary, the strong negative associations of these items help create the play’s sense of horror. To
give just one example, both Francisco Franco and Juan Perón were known
for their athleticism and were frequently photographed in riding boots. El
Campo’s Franco, we learn as Emma sings his praises, is a skilled sportsman,
a swimmer, a rower, and a hunter. The playwright focuses attention on the
boots—the visual cue that links Franco to both the Spanish dictator and to
Perón—by having him struggle to take them off, then proceed to remove his
socks as well, and wiggle his toes in Martín’s face, a grimly comic sign of
disrespect that foreshadows much greater aggression to come (169). In Scene
Four, we discover that Franco hunts not only animals but also people (199).
The obvious truth about Emma is that she is Franco’s victim, not his
friend. The most clearly self-deluded of the characters, her rough sack of
a costume, her shaved head, her wounded hand, her itchy, vulnerable body
all serve to counter her self-presentation as a diva and to identify her with
victims of dictatorship, from the European Holocaust to the Latin American
holocausts. The “cream of the crop of our society” that Franco referred to as
her concert audience, we learn from reading the stage directions, or seeing
the costumed actors in performance, is actually composed of SS guards and
prisoners clothed in their respective uniforms (187).
Martín’s ostensible role as Emma’s savior is also thrown into doubt
right from the start through the use of costume. His overcoat, which is
152
emphasized when Franco drags it along the floor, signals the Eichmann-like
position that he might be expected to fi ll within the camp. The overcoat
suggests a bureaucrat who is not directly involved in assassination but nevertheless may play a crucial part in the administration of genocide. Though
Martín resists the role of victimizer, the role of liberator also eludes him:
He cannot live up to the promise embedded in the name.
Martín not only fails to reach the larger-than-life proportions of a tragic
hero, he does not even qualify as a melodramatic hero. In the Spanish and
Latin American one-act sainetes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much as in English and United States melodrama, the hero
either rescues the damsel in distress or dies trying. But ultimately, Martín
lacks the moral strength and dignity required by melodrama. The forces of
evil manipulating the situation are far greater than whatever resistance he
musters. While he occasionally displays courage or compassion, he is just
as often cowardly, passive, naive, or simply outnumbered and overpowered. Ambiguity about his reasons for deciding to stay in the camp even
allows for the possibility that he may be motivated by financial interest,
since he remains after Emma reminds him that he is well paid for his services (179).
Any sense of Martín as a hero is further undermined by moments
of Chaplinesque physicality. During the climactic concert scene, for
instance, Martín shouts at the disrespectfully loud audience of the performance-within-a-performance—SS guards and their prisoners—to shut
up. The stage directions read: “Dos SS se levantan silenciosamente, se le
colocan al lado, le ponen los brazos sobre los hombros, como en un gesto
amigable. Martín intenta sacárselos de encima, pero no lo consigue, le
tapan la boca con la mano y lo sientan” (189). [Two Gestapo officers rise
quietly and come to his side. They put their arms on his shoulders in a
friendly gesture. Martín tries to free himself, but he cannot do so. They
put their hands over his mouth and force him to sit down (78).] After the
guards release him, Martín moves to a different bench in an empty aisle,
but once again, the SS overwhelm him: “Poco a poco, los dos SS se irán
corriendo, en forma disimulada y subrepticia, como gente que se mueve
en una sala colmada durante un espectáculo, y lo rodearán otra vez. A
éstos se les agregan otros dos’’ (189). [Gradually the two officers will drift
toward him surreptitiously, the way people do who try to move from one
place to another in a full theater. As they do, they will be joined by two
more officers and fi nally they will surround Martín once more (79).] One
can imagine that the synchronized aggression of the SS, and Martín’s
futile efforts to evade them, could be performed quite comically, that is,
until the moment when they surround him and scratch his face so deeply
that they draw blood (191).15
As spectators watch Martín helplessly squirm, they may be led to reflect
on their own helplessness and their own delusions. Just as the characters
want to believe that the camp is a benign institution, Argentines have long
Griselda Gambaro
153
wanted to believe that their national institutions serve the people as a civilizing force.
The very word “campo” harkens back to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s nineteenth-century classic political biography, Facundo, and its argument that subjugation of the campo, in the sense of the pampas, the rural
areas of the Argentine nation, is required for civilization to triumph over
barbarism. That triumph of civilization, according to Sarmiento, must be
achieved through the importation of European people and European ideas.
Gambaro suggests the opposite, that the alleged savagery of the campo
came back to haunt Argentina from the very place that was supposed to
help eliminate barbarity: Europe. Gambaro further suggests that twentieth-century Argentina joined the rest of the world in what Zygmut Bauman
has called “the Century of Camps,” in which modernity is “not only about
producing more and traveling faster, getting richer and moving around
more freely. It is also about—it has been about—fast and efficient killing,
scientifically designed and administered genocide” (272). El campo is at
once about Argentina and about the less savory elements of the Europe it
sought to emulate; it is about Onganía and Perón, yet also about Franco
and Hitler, and the many little Hitlers around the world who believe that
order guarantees progress. As the play’s title implies, however, even more
significant than the individual tyrants are the lethal organizations they put
into place. The drama lays the blame on more than any single character: It
exposes the responsibility of the bureaucracy that controls all the characters, of the system of organized inhumanity that surpasses mere cruelty born
of passion. As Bauman explains: “Even a massive outburst of evil instincts,
always a fl ickering and brief event, could not sustain the institution of the
camps and that huge network of coordinated activities which were necessary for their operation” (269). Spectators are urged to ask themselves both
whether they are living in such a camp and whether escape is possible.
Even if one crosses national borders, Gambaro suggests, the camp
extends to a world divided into two Cold War blocs. Mid-1960s Argentina
is both on the sidelines of the United States–Vietnam confl ict and yet implicated as a Cold War pawn when Franco fi rst praises the United States as a
great nation, then babbles on about the Vietnamese in a dismissive manner:
“Mire, no hago distinción survietnamitas, norvietnamitas, es igual para
mi, quien los conoce, quien los ha leído? ¿En qué idioma hablan? ¡Un
asunto insoluble!” (165). [Now you take the Vietnamese and North Vietnamese. It’s all one to me. Who knows them? Who’s read anything they’ve
written? What language do they talk? The whole thing’s a mess! (54).] This
off-handed, apparent non sequitur draws a connection between the Argentine military’s domestic and international roles.
The character of the camp director, Franco, might lead spectators to
question whether the military is the nation’s childhood friend, as Franco
describes his relationship with Emma, or in fact more of a bully. Franco’s worship of his gleaming SS uniform, complete with riding boots and
154
whip, serves as a synecdoche for the entire history of the Argentine fascination with Germany and German fascism. “Siempre tuve la manía del
uniforme,” he confesses (169). [I’ve always had a quirk about this uniform
(58).] Later, he highlights the uniqueness of the uniform’s historical significance: “Son todos iguales. Pero este tiene un pasado” (169). [They’re all
alike. The only difference is that this one has a history (58).] Martín more
explicitly links the uniform to the violence of its past when he asks Emma,
“¿Le pegan? ¿Le pega ese hijo de . . . ? ¡Tiene la manía del uniforme!”
(177). [Do they beat you? Does that son of a bitch beat you? It would go
with the uniform (66).] By the early nineteenth century, some Argentine
leaders were already attracted to Germany as a counterweight to Britain’s
hegemony in the nation. In The Army and Politics in Argentina, 1928–45,
Robert A. Potash documents how military officers were routinely sent to
Germany for training, a tradition that was interrupted during World War
I but reinstated during the 1930s. German officers were in turn stationed
in Argentina to advise Latin American officers and to teach in its military academies (118). Embassy dispatches cited by Potash show that several high-ranking Argentine officers were sympathetic to Hitler and saw
Nazism as the only alternative to Communism (118). One Argentine officer
who had studied in Germany, General Juan Bautista Molina, went so far as
to openly admire Hitler and form a paramilitary organization that advocated molding Argentina in the image of Nazi Germany. Molina apparently
represented a far-right minority but he was not a lone eccentric. A group of
pro-Nazi officers pushed for a coup against the civilian administration of
President Roberto Ortiz (1938–1940), an insurrection that didn’t materialize until 1943, when Ortiz’s successor, Ramón Castillo, was pushed out of
power by an army-led coup that installed Juan Perón in the launching pad
for his subsequent rise to power, the department of labor.16
How fervently, if at all, Perón adhered to fascism is a hotly debated
issue. Some historians maintain that the British and Americans, for political and economic advantage against the Germans, created the myth that
Perón was a Nazi sympathizer during and after World War II. Others argue
that Perón actively supported the organized effort that succeeded in smuggling many prominent Nazi war criminals—including Adolf Eichmann and
Josef Mengele—from Europe to Argentina. Most agree that at the very
least, Perón ruled with a strong authoritarian streak, modeling some of his
declarations on Mussolini’s populist programs and maintaining a stubborn
loyalty toward Franco’s Spain, where he eventually sought political asylum
in 1955 and remained until his return to Argentina in 1973.17 The character
name “Franco” then evokes not only the Spanish dictator but also the long
Argentine connection with him.
The character of Franco is further linked to anti-Semitism, as well as
to persecution of Marxists and alleged Marxists, by two simple one-word
questions he directs to Martín: “Jew?” “Communist?” (163). The sequence
of the interrogation draws an elegant parallel between the genocide of the
Griselda Gambaro
155
Jews in the fi rst half of the twentieth century and the vicious repression
of communists that continued well into the second half. By the 1960s,
charges of communism had come to be used as an all-purpose justification
for state terror in Argentina. For instance, Onganía’s fi rst Minister of the
Interior, Enrique Martínez Paz, justified repressive measures against the
public universities by condemning them as “a focus of ideological disruption, a forward trench of the Cold War, an internal front that serves to hide
the enemy” (Rock, Authoritarian 203). Anticommunism came to be the
overriding factor in winning the Cold War support of the United States, a
relationship symbolized in the play by Franco’s admiration of the “North
Americans” as “strong, a great nation” (164). Whether or not the admiration was mutual, the United States was at least prepared to tolerate Argentina’s anticommunist military rulers. In a 1969 speech, President Richard
Nixon reassured the Argentine military: “We must deal realistically with
governments in the inter-American system as they are” (Jordan 87).
Franco oscillates between the personas of pitiless concentration camp
director one moment and solicitous gentleman the next, his wild swings
between terror and tenderness recalling anecdotes about how Perón, while
capable of ruthless extermination of political enemies, was also a generous
caretaker of dogs, horses, and lost kittens (Crassweller 186). Torturers and
dictators, it has often been noted, may be chivalrous yet cruel, generous to
their wives and children at home while merciless to their victims at work,
capable of sudden kindness in the midst of the most vicious repression. The
character of Franco exaggerates these disconcerting swerves to the point of
parody. For instance, one moment he coldly demands, over Emma’s protestations of good health, that she present both hands for an inspection of her
wounds. The next moment he breaks the tension. But then he quickly shifts
back to an intimidating posture:
Franco: (sigue mirando por un momento, se endereza y quiebra la
tension): ¿Que dice, querida . . . (una pausa, divertido) marquesa?
¿Que trabajo podrían hacer sus manos, sus queridas manos, sino
el que hacen? (Le toma las manos y se las besa. Pero el gesto
pierde poco a poco el aire amable y adquiere un carácter de
sujeción. La mira fijamente) ¿Que le pica? (181)
[Frank: (looking at her for a moment, and then standing up straight
and breaking the tension): What are you saying my dear . . . (he
pauses out of amusement) marquise? What kind of work would
your hands perform, your precious hands, other than the work
they do? (He takes her hands and kisses them. But the gesture
gradually loses its amiable air and acquires the character of a
struggle. He looks at her fixedly.) Is something itching? (70)]
The military dictator takes a similar stance toward the nation: fatherly
gentleman one moment, cruel tyrant the next. Franco even laments that the
156
real victim is he himself, recalling dictators who claim they do nothing but
sacrifice themselves for the good of their country (204).
The character of Emma has been variously interpreted as an allegorical
representation of the female artist exposed to public ridicule (Franco 108;
Holzapfel 11), the individual subjected to the will of the state (Molinaro 36;
Cypess, “The Plays” 106), the woman oppressed by authoritarian society
(Mendez-Faith 837), and the victim of torture (Zee 605). I would like to
suggest that she be read as well as the population of Argentina, awaiting rescue from a strongman, whether Perón, Onganía, or even a civilian
leader. When one would-be rescuer, Franco, proves untrustworthy, Emma
turns to another potential savior, Martín, who, though better intentioned,
proves equally ineffective. The play thus questions the validity of the continual search for political rescue, suggesting that it borders on masochism.
Argentine history during the previous thirty-five years provides ample
evidence of the repeated, doomed search for military saviors. Between
1930 and 1966, Argentina had seen six military takeovers, all arguably
ending in failure. Yet many historians agree that Onganía was nevertheless welcomed by the majority of the Argentine public. Enrique Peruzzotti
notes that the coup occurred “without major disturbances, in an almost
routine way” (104). “After years of praetorian struggle and ungovernability, the restoration of some authority became the main priority for a
society fearful of its own self-destructive tendencies,” Peruzzotti explains
(105). In Bureaucratic Authoriarianism, Guillermo O’Donnell agrees that
the coup was supported by “a considerable part of the popular sector, and
was endorsed by a majority of political and union leaders” (40). Onganía,
according to Wayne S. Smith, “tried once and for all to demonstrate that
the conviction which had motivated General José Félix Uriburu to lead the
seizure of power back in 1930 had been valid—that is, that only the armed
forces, with their code of honor, patriotism, and superior sense of organization and discipline, could provide the leadership necessary to bring about a
national revitalization” (98). It is precisely this misguided faith in the military that Gambaro satirizes and questions through Emma’s fierce loyalty
to her tormentor Franco.
The description of their relationship, enunciated fi rst by Franco (173) and
then repeated by Emma, that they were childhood friends (185), has chilling overtones when reflected upon in the context of Argentine history. The
military was indeed present during the “childhood” and even the “birth”
of the Argentine nation. But what sort of friend was it? “Los chicos me
corrían, él me defendía” (185) [The children would chase me and he would
defend me (74)], Emma maintains, as if Franco, like a military protecting
its citizens from random violence, had shielded her from schoolyard bullies.
Just as the military state paternalistically attempts to look after its citizens,
Franco protests to Martín that he takes good care of Emma (186). And
Emma colludes in the pretence. But in reality, the drama shows, it is Franco
who beats her, who has caused her skin to break out in an excruciating
Griselda Gambaro
157
itch, who engineers her public humiliations, pulling her wig off to reveal
her bald head to an audience of prisoners and SS guards during her “concert” at a soundless piano (193). Similarly, one could argue, it was always
the military strongmen, the caudillos, who from the nineteenth century on
extorted too high a price for order, stability, and protection from external
threats: unquestioning obedience and self-blinding to injustice.
Consideration of this historical context requires a new perspective on
Emma’s artistic pretensions. The fi rst act of the play culminates in the grotesque “concert,” in which Emma plops a bad wig over her shaved head,
assumes all the mannerisms of a grand diva, and attempts to play the piano,
only to fi nd that the instrument will emit no sound. As some critics have
argued, Emma thus epitomizes the impotence of the artist oppressed by a
totalitarian regime.18 But on another level, she also represents the nation’s
aspirations to European culture and civilization. Buenos Aires, as James
Scobie details, fancied itself the “Paris of South America” in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the city
boasted a thriving theater district, a massive opera house, elegant shops,
hotels, and restaurants (173). The architects who designed these buildings
were trained in Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, and England. Argentines
took pride in their European ancestry. At the same time, between 1829
and 1852, one of the earliest caudillos, Juan Manuel de Rosas kept an
iron-fisted grip on the province of Buenos Aires. In the twentieth century,
Argentina’s more notorious European imports included Nazi war criminals
themselves. The contrast between the artificially cultivated surface and the
brutal underside of Argentine life is embodied in Emma: The hand with
which she plays the piano is horribly wounded yet she protests that it has
healed (187). The flowers Franco gives her are plastic but she swears they
give off a delicious odor (187). Her “audience” is composed of SS guards
and prisoners, yet she goes along with Franco’s claim that they are the
cream of the crop of their society (188). The ironic subtext: The “cream”
of Argentine society is as subject to authoritarian control as the guards and
prisoners in a concentration camp. As self-deluded as Emma, they suspect
the truth but dare not face it.
Martín’s vain attempt to fi ll the role of middle-class hero reveals an error
in judgment that spectators may see in themselves: naiveté about how easily
authoritarianism can be escaped. Instead of devising some devious plan to
flee or fight, Martín accepts Franco’s insincere offer at face value, falling
into the camp director’s trap and condemning himself and Emma to perpetual enslavement. Martín’s ultimate failure is foreshadowed by an allegory-within-an-allegory: In the fourth scene, Franco alludes to the spoils of
his hunt as if they were animals. But when Emma returns from viewing the
remains, she appears so shaken that the implication is that she has actually
seen human victims but cannot admit it, even to herself (205). In the next,
fi nal scene, it is Emma and Martín who fall prey to Franco’s enthusiasm for
the hunt. Because Emma’s allegorical status encompasses the roles of artist,
158
woman, and nation, the stakes of Martín’s would-be heroism almost reach
tragic proportions: If he can save Emma, then the nation, its culture, and
its female population might also be saved. Because he fails, the fate of all
three is called into question. Aside from the interrogation of heroism, even
the belief that an ordinary person, such as Martín, could elude victimization by avoiding open confrontation with the authorities is subjected to
scrutiny, if not ridicule.
Throughout her body of work, Gambaro repeatedly proffers this last
moral lesson: passivity in the face of violence inevitably leads to disaster.
Truth and lies are fraught terms: one person’s moral certainty might be
another’s falsehood and vice-versa. Yet truth and lies are not relative in
Gambaro’s plays. A web of at least partially self-perpetrated delusions
perniciously hides the obvious truth from the characters, just as a web of
real-life delusions, or dominant ideologies, or what some would simply call
lies, obscures some real-life truths from us. Nevertheless, in Gambaro’s
theater, the precise nature of the malevolence to be resisted remains as
enigmatic as the origins of evil. In her abstract allegories, resistance is never
simple. Excess of meanings, fragmentation, and lack of direct representation, combined with strategic withholding of basic information about who
the characters are, what their relationship is to one another, and what is
happening to them, creates violent, mysterious worlds. Confused and paralyzed characters mirror confused and paralyzed spectators, some of whom
in 1967–1968 may have been saying, “Yes, one should resist, but how?”
EL DESPOJAMIENTO [STRIPPED]19
Stripped was a stone hurled at a political system that was taking away
civil liberties one by one. Yet what makes this play the kind of complex
allegory that I am calling “abstract” is its purposeful elusiveness. While I
would argue that the drama obliquely parallels relationships between men
and women to relationships between the citizen and the state, the work
never overtly speaks of political repression, or even of politics. The two
on-stage characters, in typical allegorical fashion, are identified only in
the most emblematic terms, “Woman” and “Young Man,” and interact in
an anonymous space furnished with only a chair, a table, and a sofa. The
always-silent Young Man subjects Woman, an aging former ingénue actor,
to an increasingly violent ordeal: At regular intervals he enters to carry
away some piece of furniture or to yank some belonging or piece of clothing from her. Before long, the set is almost bare, and the woman is almost
naked. Why this happens is mysterious. She believes that she is waiting for
an audition of some sort that will lead to work as an actress or model. But
no matter how eagerly she complies with the wishes of the young man, even
taking off her skirt and handing it to him, the situation never evolves into
the sort of happy scenario she desires. To the contrary, by the end of the
Griselda Gambaro
159
play, we sense that some unspecified horror (torture? rape? murder?) lies in
store for her; and the crowning irony is that her fi nal cry for help (“¡Pepe!”)
is to the off-stage man (boyfriend? husband?) who, we have learned from
her musing aloud, beats her. Catharsis is denied the spectators, who might
leave the theater sensing that the horror is not yet over for them either.
When the work was fi rst produced, in 1983, nine years after it was written, spectators knew that Argentina was on the brink of return to civilian
rule but were just beginning to acknowledge the full horror of what they had
experienced under dictatorship. Perhaps not coincidentally, Despojamiento
was fi rst staged not in the limelight of Buenos Aires but in the northern
provincial city of Tucumán, by a relatively unknown young director, Gustavo Geirola, who led a company, Teatro de Hoy (Today’s Theater), that
brought political works to a 120-seat theater located in the elegant Hotel
Metropol. Geirola recalls that rather than seek audience identification with
the protagonist, he tried to implicate the spectators as “voyeurs” of her
plight and as complicit with dictatorship and its authoritarianism (e-mail
to the author). In Geirola’s staging, Young Man, played by José Ricardo
Lobo, was dressed in a generic uniform that could have suggested anything
from a hotel employee to a military official. (The casting ironically highlighted Young Man’s muteness, since the actor was well known locally as a
television news announcer. Another coincidence, that Lobo was nicknamed
“Pepe,” heightened the parallel between Woman’s on-stage and off-stage
abusers.) At one point Woman, played by Elba Naigeboren, approached
the audience as if to appeal to the spectators for help; they offered none.
At the end of play, the panels of the waiting room revolved to reveal giant
pornographic posters of naked women, blurring the boundaries between
Woman’s fantasy world and her external reality and underscoring her commodification. As Woman strutted among the posters, fantasizing about her
future as a glamorous actress, the spectators were again put in the position
of voyeuristic complicity. According to Geirola, post-show discussions—
among a diverse audience that included intellectuals, university students,
and people from the poorest neighborhoods in the city—allowed for such
an intense release of long-gagged thoughts and emotions about dictatorship
that people fought, lamented, wept, and one woman even fainted.
In contrast to this fi rst staging, however, perhaps taking their cue from
the characters’ names and slighting the political context, U.S. critics have
primarily interpreted Despojamiento as a feminist condemnation of women’s oppression. 20 Yet an intriguing cluster of interpretations also arises
from reading the character of Woman as an appropriation, inversion, and
subversion of the nation-as-woman metaphor long used by the Argentine
military. 21 Might Woman also symbolize a brutally subjugated sector of
the Argentine nation in need of wherewithal to resist state brutality? But
to what citizen or group of citizens and to what element or elements of the
state might Woman and Young Man correspond? And how should one read
the off-stage characters of the abusive boyfriend and the absent director?
160
As I will argue, the way in which the characters are constructed and the
manner in which they interact precludes any definitive answer. Instead,
at least three possibilities suggest themselves with equal plausibility, frustrating conclusive interpretation yet nurturing an experience of the play’s
universe as mysterious and dangerous as the world of Argentine politics.
Just as any one of the fractured forms in an abstract painting might hint at
a landscape or a human figure, the relationship between Woman and her
persecutors simultaneously alludes to several antagonisms between powerless individuals and menacing authority figures: (1) women oppressed by
abusive men, (2) ordinary civilians at the mercy of low-level military torturers, (3) civilian leaders subjugated by military authorities.
On its most obvious level, Stripped depicts Woman struggling to construct a masterful performance of her gender in order to simultaneously
seduce Young Man, appease the off-stage boyfriend who beats her, and win
over a mysterious off-stage director whom she believes controls the circumstances of her “audition.” Yet the stage directions indicate that Woman’s
performance is so exaggeratedly stereotypical that it should strike the spectator as ludicrous. Though beaten and assaulted, she nevertheless smiles,
bats her eyelashes, slaps on heavy makeup, dons high-heeled shoes, and
adorns herself with dangling earrings (97). She rehearses a variety of feminine roles that she is too old or too inept to handle: the ingénue, the showgirl, the prostitute. Moreover, she constantly assesses the progress of her
performance—checks herself in a pocket mirror, evaluates her clothes, tries
out poses she imagines attractive, critiques her level of physical fitness, and
gauges how others must see her. Becky Boling has used Laura Mulvey’s
concept of the female constructed by the “male gaze” to read the character
as an example of woman oppressed by patriarchal society. “The violence
perpetrated on stage is the metaphor for the mistreatment of women in
society,” Boling concludes (“From Pin-Ups to Striptease” 64). And that is
indeed one strand of the work’s allegorical significance.
Gambaro’s depiction of Woman’s relationship to her male tormenters,
and, by extension, of women to their male tormenters, improvises on the
Argentine tradition of grotesco criollo, which deeply informs much of
Gambaro’s work. 22 The Argentine grotesque encompasses some characteristics of the European grotesque typified by the plays of Ramón del ValleInclán and Luigi Pirandello, such as an emphasis on the scatology of the
body, a mixing of the comic and horrific, and a start contrast between
the social “mask” or exterior self and the individual, or interior, “face.”
Woman’s humiliating scramble for money and the collapse of her self-delusion in self-destruction are typical of the plays of the Argentine playwright
Armando Discepolo (1887–1971), who often portrayed the collapse of the
Italian-Argentine immigrant dream. The confl ict between the social and
the individual traditionally comes as the (usually male) protagonist tries to
reconcile the cheerful mask he shows the world with the tragic interior of his
being. While keeping many characteristics of Discepolo’s heroes, Gambaro
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161
changes the gender of the central character of her grotesque drama. In this
case, it is Woman who wages an internal battle as she struggles to seduce
the male characters: She frantically tries on female “mask” after “mask” in
a futile effort to hide her face, even from herself. Her heavy makeup covers
the bruises infl icted by her boyfriend; her borrowed clothes are intended to
impress the Young Man and the off-stage director; her cheerful patter is an
attempt to hide her growing desperation.
The grotesque nature of Woman’s performance of gender is perhaps
most striking when she attempts in vain to seduce Young Man. Not just
her actions, her makeup, and her speech, but the awkward, bumbling body
movements called for in the stage directions are also rooted in Argentine
grotesque theater. This sort of physical movement evokes humor and pathos,
recalling the figure of the tragic clown hidden by his comic performance.
Woman entertains the thought of taking a role as a showgirl: “Vedette,
bueno, todavía sé levantar la patita. (Lo hace )” (177). [Showgirl, well,
I still know how to kick up my little leg. (She does so) (102).] Again, a
few moments later: “Una vedette en fotos puedo hacer, es como subir de
categoría. Me pagarán mas, seguro. (canta y baila torpemente)” (178). [A
showgirl in photos I could do. It’s classier. They’ll pay me more, surely. (She
sings and dances awkwardly) (103).] Later, she returns to the subject yet
again, with a remark that might serve a director as a stage direction: “Una
vedette baila, guiña un ojo, menea el trasero” (180). [A showgirl dances,
winks, wiggles her bottom (105).] An actor could easily elicit laughter with
this burlesque routine. But in a good production, the uncomfortable sense
that one is laughing at the contortions of an animal caught in a trap should
undermine the mirth. The linguistic equivalent of her physical gyrations
comes when she tries to rationalize Young Man’s violence or convert his
assaults into an opportunity for negotiation. For instance, after he steals
one of her shoes, she offers to give him the pair the following day, if only
he’ll return for the moment the one he has already stolen: “Estos se los
puedo regular. No valen nada. No ahora, naturalmente. Pero mañana se
los traigo” (175). [I can give you these. They aren’t worth anything. Not
now, naturally, but tomorrow I’ll bring them to you (101).] His only reply is
to wrench an earring from her. The rare moments when Woman seems less
deformed and regains a measure of dignity come when she resists Young
Man, moments that even occasionally succeed in getting him to back off,
though only temporarily.
In both her public and private life, Woman fails to sustain resistance and
unwittingly collaborates in her own oppression—a false consciousness that
calls attention to both her gender role and her status as a disenfranchised
citizen. Woman’s fruitless attempts to seduce and negotiate with Young
Man mirror her efforts to placate her off-stage boyfriend, Pepe, and hide
his beatings from the neighbors. The boyfriend typifies machista attitudes:
He demands that his clothes be ironed and his meals be served promptly;
he insults her for failing to meet his perfectionist housekeeping standards.
162
And yet he instills in her, his victim, the mistaken belief that his brutality
is motivated by love, so much so that the play ends with her chilling cry
for help to him, of all people: “¡Pepe!” (106). Sharon Magnarelli notes
how this ending subverts the traditional “happy ending” of a love story
and highlights the inadequacy of any of the narrow traditional social roles
offered to women, ingénue or seductress, virgin or whore, mistress or wife
(“Acting/Seeing” 27). Woman’s insecurity and fear certainly betray anxiety
about the instability of male-female gender roles.
Yet just as significant as Woman’s performance of gender is her performance of citizenship: Her desperation gestures toward civilians’ unfulfilled
desire for a code of behavior that would guarantee safety from the state,
its military and its extra-official (paramilitary death squad) persecution.
Besides personifying the forcing of women into the social roles of “virgin”
or “whore,” she symbolizes the citizen on the political stage who plays the
naive virgin, blind to the regime’s brutality, or the corrupt whore, willing
to prostitute her principles for the promise of financial and physical security. The subservient citizen who unquestioningly follows orders becomes
a “good girl” to the Big Brother or Big Daddy represented by the state. She
would be obedient, as woman and citizen, if only she knew the rules to which
she might conform: “¿Qué es lo que quieren? ¿Cómo debo comportarme?
(Se hunde) ¿En qué lugar dice cómo una debe comportarse? ¿En que lugar?
(178). [What do they want? How should I behave? (She sinks.) Where does it
say how I should behave? Where? (103).]
Similarly, the play’s focus on the female body, its pain and its decrepitude, may be read either as an allegory of the relationship between men and
women, or an allegory of the relationship between torturer and torture victim. The play associates the feminine with the body and its frailties; it links
the masculine to power and disavowal of the body. As Young Man freely
comes and goes from the stage, underscoring how unencumbered he is by his
clothed body, and Pepe’s body remains unscathed while marking hers with
bruises, Woman’s corporality acquires a larger yet more vulnerable presence.
It is she who undresses, contorts herself, and suffers both physical and psychic pain during the course of her attempts to please her male tormenters.
This power imbalance between the masculine and feminine recalls the power
imbalance between the person who wields the instrument of torture and the
defenseless subject of torment. Elaine Scarry describes the relationship of the
torturer to the feminized victim: “However near the prisoner the torturer
stands, the distance between their physical realities is colossal, for the prisoner is in overwhelming physical pain while the torturer is utterly without
pain; he is free of any pain originating in his own body; he is also free of the
pain originating in the agonized body so near him” (36).
In this reading of the play, Woman represents not only women-asgender, but also feminized civilians at the mercy of the military. Young Man
also then becomes more than an emblem of his gender: He embodies the
hypermasculinity of the soldier. His manner is described as “depersonalized,”
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163
“without emotional charge,” and “impassive.” His is the robot-like calm of
those who simply follow orders, who destroy with mechanical regularity
without meaning anything personal by it: the professional torturers, the
rank-and-file soldiers with orders to shoot. His silence underscores that he
has no authority of his own to make decisions, making his motives obscure
and therefore all the more menacing. He exemplifies a breed of men for whom
violence is just a chore like any other, men who have emptied themselves
of any moral scruples. Consider, for example, the disciplined obedience of
a former Navy captain, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, who confessed that he
found pushing prisoners out of airplanes into the waters of the Atlantic a
distasteful but necessary job:
[It] was something that you had to do. I don’t know what executioners
go through when they have to kill, to drop the blade or pull the switch
on the electric chair. No one liked to do it, it wasn’t a pleasant thing. But
it was done, and it was understood that this was the best way. It wasn’t
discussed. (quoted in Verbitsky 23–24)
Young Man no more negotiates with Woman than Scilingo would have felt
free to negotiate with one of his captives. One effective production choice
might be to costume Young Man in military garb indicating a low rank—no
stars or medals. In this reading, the off-stage “director” figure that Woman
alludes to may symbolize higher ranking military authorities in control of
lower ranking men.
The off-stage boyfriend Pepe, in this configuration, extends public humiliation into the private realm, suggesting that authoritarian rule penetrates the
most apparently sheltered recesses of our lives. Rather than simply exemplify male domination of women in pseudo-romantic relationships, he also
illustrates the power of the military to extort self-sacrifice, conformity, and
dependence from civilians in exchange for “protection.” Woman’s denial to
the neighbors that she has been beaten, “no pasa nada” [“it’s nothing” or
literally, “nothing is happening”] may allude to the inability or refusal of
many Argentines to acknowledge abuses such as “disappearances” perpetrated by the authorities. Marguerite Feitlowitz chronicles this phenomenon
extensively in A Lexicon of Terror:
I was there; I saw it; I couldn’t have known a thing. To my surprise,
this paradox emerged as a significant pattern in my interviews. Because the majority of victims were taken from their homes, lots of
Argentines saw kidnappings and knew perfectly well what they were
witnessing. What intrigued me were those who simultaneously saw
and didn’t see; understood and didn’t know. Who, years after the
trials of their ex-commanders, could not make sense of it all. Who,
when asked if they ever saw a kidnap, fi rst answered automatically in
the negative. (Feitlowitz 151)
164
The absurd paradox of knowing and not knowing, of superficial normality and profound abnormality, of the “happy home” that is not a happy
home, of the “office” that is not really an office, comes to climax with
the last word of the play. Woman’s fi nal cry for help, “¡Pepe!,” is both the
deluded battered girlfriend and the self-blinded citizen looking in vain for
protection from the police officer or the soldier who has turned against the
population he is supposed to serve.
Woman’s reaction to the Young Man’s “disappearances” of objects from
the stage—initial outrage followed by denial of his brutality—recalls the
reaction of the Argentine population to the disappearance of relatives,
friends and neighbors from their midst. Though some reacted with protests
and exhaustive efforts to find the missing people, the majority kept their
heads down and ignored the all-too-obvious absences. Sociologist Jo Fisher,
in Mothers of the Disappeared, interviewed many women who recounted
how friends and relatives would distance themselves from those searching
for the victim of a kidnapping:
When they broke into my house and took my daughter, in spite of the
violence of the attack and in spite of the cars and the noise, my neighbors acted like they saw and heard nothing. They considered it dangerous for their own children to associate with us. Most people avoided
speaking to us. (26)
In Despojamiento, Woman takes exactly the same ostrich-like approach,
both at home, “Aquí no pasó nada” (177) [Nothing happened here (103)],
and in public, “Me pagarán bien. En poses . . . agradables” (181) [They’ll
pay me well. In poses that are . . . pleasant (106)]. Only the ellipses hint
at her doubts about her self-reassuring patter. One can’t help but think of
Argentine citizens who clung to the official explanations that the concentration camps and torture centers sprouting up around them were actually
schools or rehabilitation centers.
Woman should be read as both an individual civilian and civilians, plural. Like all torture victims, she is stripped of her dignity as an individual.
And like the citizenry of a country ruled by an authoritarian regime, she is
progressively stripped of her civil rights—her right to protest, her right to
speak, her right to explanation of the charges against her. If Young Man
represents torturers in general, Woman represents a terrorized sector of
the nation too cowed or too misguided to resist not merely male, but specifically military/male brutality. Woman’s unintentionally grotesque performance is a representation not only of femininity but also of a middle
class overly willing to forsake civil liberties for a measure of physical and
economic security. Her attempts at seduction serve as an apt metaphor for
the attempt to curry favor with agents of repression in exchange for that
security, no matter how high the price. Woman comes from the working
or lower-middle class but has pretensions to upper-middle-class propriety.
Griselda Gambaro
165
Her cape is borrowed, her high-heeled shoes worn, her jewelry paste. She is
even afraid of sending someone to buy cigarettes for her for fear it will be
discovered that she smokes the cheapest brand. Her great hope from Young
Man, the reason she stays in an increasingly dangerous situation, is that he
will provide a job and thus help solidify her shaky middle-class status. In
exchange for docile behavior from feminized civilians, will the military in
fact provide this security? This is the subtext of Woman’s coy question in
her ingénue persona: “¡No señor, !no, señor! Mamá me prohibió hablar con
desconocidos. ¿Cuáles son sus intenciones?” (179). [No, sir, no sir! Mama
won’t let me talk to strangers. What are your intentions? (104).] On another
level, the question implicates the spectator, as if the playwright were asking
the audience: How much abuse are you willing to take? How much will you
prostitute yourself to appease authority?
Yet a third plausible allegorical reading of the play suggests itself, a reading that does not contradict either of the two interpretations outlined thus
far. Besides allegorizing female–male and low-level civilian–military relationships, might Woman and Young Man also be allegorizing the civilian rulers
who fruitlessly attempted to seduce military leaders?
As Diana Taylor has argued, seduction has long been a powerful metaphor for the relationship between Argentine strongmen and their subservient civilian helpmates. One of the most spectacular Argentine examples of
this phenomenon was the relationship between Evita and Juan Perón. Her
humble origins (like Woman’s) masked by furs and glamorous grooming,
Evita wielded enormous power while disguising herself as an adoring, passive
helpmate to the general. As Taylor has shown, Evita identified herself with
the “shirtless” masses upon which she bestowed charity, thereby feminizing
those adoring crowds as fellow worshippers of the general. The masses were
not expected to confront Perón as an equal. Instead, they tried to manipulate him with displays of submission.23 Like Woman, Evita was an actress
and a social climber who relied on seduction to navigate through totalitarian
waters, yet she was far more successful than Woman at manipulating those
in command.
Woman is even more reminiscent of a host of lesser Evita imitators, including Perón’s third wife, María Estela, who styled their speech and dress after
that of the “original” First Lady. After Perón ’s death in 1973, “Isabelita,” as
she was known, assumed the presidency and quickly showed that she could
not stand up to the military. In 1974, the year Despojamiento was written,
a paramilitary group calling itself the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance
(AAA) murdered some 70 prominent leftists. By 1975, as the paramilitary
forces grew increasingly violent, Isabelita suffered a “nervous collapse” and
withdrew into seclusion. Shortly after her recovery, the military abducted her
and for years kept her under virtual house arrest in a remote area of the country, until she was finally allowed to leave for Spain in 1981.24 It is not difficult
to see a parallel between Woman and those civilian rulers, most prominently
Isabelita, who mistakenly hoped to placate the military by fawning on it.
166
Woman’s pitiful seductive strategies mock civilian rulers such as Isabelita, who tried to hang on to power by styling herself after Evita, the supposed paragon of femininity. Consider the play’s fi nal stage directions:
Sentándose, se desabotona la blusa, se abre el escote en un gesto patéticamente provocativo, las piernas abiertas. Entra el muchacho y se
lleva el sillón. Ella no se mueve, lo sigue con los ojos muy abiertos y
una sonrisa estereotipada. (181)
[Sitting, she unbuttons her blouse, she reveals her cleavage in a pathetically provocative gesture, her legs open. The young man comes in
and takes away the sofa. She doesn’t move, she follows him with her
eyes wide open and an artificial smile.] (106)
When she met Perón, Isabelita was a cabaret dancer, which, perhaps not
coincidentally, is another one of the roles that Woman contemplates.
Woman is not Isabelita Perón; such a one-to-one correspondence would be
reductive of abstract allegory’s multiple possibilities. Yet Woman brings to
mind many failed civilian attempts to gently “lead aside” or “lead away”—
which is the Latin root meaning of “seduce”—the military from the role of
domestic terrorist into the traditional male role of protector. It is not difficult to see the relationship between Isabelita and the military as a civilian
fl irtation with military power that degenerated into a metaphorical rape of
Isabelita, the civilian rule she represented, and the country as a whole.
Reading the play as an allegory about civilian and military rulers shifts
the focus from Woman’s interactions with Young Man and with her boyfriend to a crucial relationship that might otherwise be overlooked: her
connection to the off-stage director. In this reading, as the staged violence
takes on a symbolic meaning—larger than just the torture of single individual, representing all the violence against the people of Argentina—the
off-stage director also looms larger. He acquires a symbolic significance
beyond that of the military rulers: He may represent the totalitarian system, the international world order that allows state terror, or even evil
itself. Like Godot, he remains unseen and inscrutable. Woman can only
guess at his motives: “¿Es que . . . ¿el director quiere saber cómo estoy
calzada?”(175) [Is it that . . . the director wants to know what shoes I’m
wearing?] (100), she asks, but gets no reply. One production choice might
be to link the director to the Argentine military institution as a whole,
perhaps through a stage property such as a framed photo of a military
ruler (Juan Perón?) on the wall. But on the other hand, he should perhaps
remain disembodied, as intangible as the logic of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. His silence, mirrored in Young Man’s silence, gestures toward the
refusal of evil to answer for itself: How exactly did the unaccounted-for
disappeared meet their end? Why do genocides continue to happen, despite
all the cries of “never again”?
Griselda Gambaro
167
Allegory need not minimize the importance of the individual in order
to gesture toward the social: Woman is both one battered woman and
her gender; she is one torture victim and many torture victims; she is one
civilian and all civilians deluded enough to think that they can manipulate authoritarian regimes to their advantage. I separated the three strands
and presented them in linear fashion, highlighting just two alternatives
within each strand—singular and plural. But the play in performance,
or performed in one’s mind’s eye, is far more complicated. From moment
to moment, the focus shifts from individual to collective experience and
back again, and simultaneously shifts among Woman’s different personas, with corresponding shifts in the significance of the male characters.
For instance, the stripping of objects from the room might one moment
highlight a single woman’s humiliation and the next recall the disappearance of people’s rights or of people themselves. The office setting might
one moment resemble a torture chamber and the next bring to mind the
entire nation of Argentina. Look at an abstract painting one way and you
focus on the suggestion of a landscape or a human figure or a geometric
pattern or an emotional effect. But tilt your head and squint and you may
see something else entirely.
LA MALASANGRE [BAD BLOOD] 1982
La malasangre was the fi rst full-length play Gambaro opened in Buenos
Aires after her 1980 return from a three-year exile in Spain. In 1981, she
contributed a short one-act, Decir Sí [Saying Yes], to Teatro Abierto, a new
movement started by playwrights, directors, designers, actors, and other
theater practitioners who organized a cycle of twenty-one plays intended
to defy military censorship. Because participants received no pay and the
Picadero Theater offered its space free of charge in the early evening, ticket
prices could be kept to half the price of a movie (Trastoy 107). A few weeks
into the project, Teatro Abierto was given an unexpected boost by a performance of terror: On August 6, 1981, a predawn fi re widely thought to
have been set by the military destroyed the Picadero Theater. Invigorated
rather than intimidated by the attempted repression, the theater community rallied, moved to another theater, and attracted larger audiences than
ever. According to the organizers, some twenty-five thousand spectators
attended 180 performances between July 28 and September 21, when the
cycle ended for the year (Trastoy 107). The following year, while Teatro
Abierto organizers restaged Gambaro’s 1963 one-act, Las paredes [The
Walls], her new full-length play, La malasangre, opened at the Teatro
Olimpia (Graham-Jones 172–173). 25 If a single production could prove my
thesis that dictatorship can be upstaged by theatrical performances in solidarity with dissident off-stage performances it would be La malasangre.
The production was perfectly positioned to take advantage the clash of
168
pro- and antidictatorship performances on the streets, a clash that spilled
over into the theater during one show.
Directed by Laura Yusem, the play was staged as the worst years of
repression had ended but democracy had not yet begun. The military had
just lost the disastrous mini-war to recover the Falklands Islands from the
British, a debacle that discredited it at home and abroad. The institutionalized state terror called the “Process of National Reorganization” had
all but concluded the work of disappearing thousands of people, a few of
them guerrillas, most of them guilty only of not supporting the dictatorship. One could be deemed an enemy of the state simply for practicing a
suspect profession, such as university teaching, psychology, journalism, or
the arts. Many people who were not even politically active were detained,
tortured, and assassinated, simply because their name turned up in the
personal phone book of someone else who had been imprisoned. Fear of
such an arrest had led Gambaro to abandon Argentina for Spain. Though
friends assured her that the worst of the repression was over, she recalls
that she nevertheless felt some trepidation upon returning to stage “a very
direct reference to the dictatorship” (personal interview).
Gambaro and Yusem struggled for months to find producers willing to
risk staging a politically charged work. Finally they succeeded and the play
opened on August 17. Yet about two weeks into the run, right-wing spectators staged a little counterperformance of their own as they began to throw
objects at the actors and broke into shouts of “Long live Rosas!” “Long
live the restorer of law!” “Down with the communists!” The only newspaper to publish an account of the disturbance, La Nacion, reported that
the protesters threw coins at the actors and slightly injured one spectator
who was hit on the head (“Desórdenes”). The police were called and about
twenty arrests were made. Meanwhile, other spectators who complained
that the play was “anti-Argentina” demanded, and were given, their money
back. The remainder of the spectators asked that the show go on, which
it did, though it started an hour late (“Desórdenes”). The director however, recalls something that she says the newspaper, out of self-censorship,
neglected to mention, that the protesters who were arrested were armed
and had approached the stage with their weapons drawn. “Lautaro [Lautaro Murua, who played the father] was on the stage alone, and I jumped
up there with him. As one of the men advanced with his gun drawn, I said
something rather foolish: ‘the stage is not to be touched!’” Yusem said.
“But he obeyed. I supposed they hadn’t really come with the intention of
shooting” (personal interview). Though Yusem attempted to press charges
against the men, who belonged to a well-known right-wing paramilitary
organization, police refused to follow up on the matter.
If Argentina resembles a concentration camp in El campo and recalls
the body of a battered woman in El despojamiento, in La malasangre the
nation is allegorized by the figures of a divided family and a doomed love
affair. Set in 1840s Argentina, at the height of the dictatorship of Juan
Griselda Gambaro
169
Manuel Rosas (1835–1852), the play improvises on an archetypal plot
familiar to readers of medieval romance, Shakespeare, and drawing-room
melodrama alike: the autocratic father pitted against the defiant daughter
who falls in love with an unsuitable suitor.
Sommer argues that in the novels of nineteenth-century Latin America
such obstacles to romance only serve to further encourage unification of a
divided territory: “Every obstacle that the lovers encounter heightens more
than their mutual desire to (be a) couple, more than our voyeuristic but
keenly felt passion; it also heightens their/our love for the possible nation in
which the affair could be consummated” (Foundational 48). The frustrated
love affairs in many contemporary plays written under twentieth-century
dictatorship indicate a more ambivalent relationship with the Argentine
nation, which developed political schisms unimaginable a century earlier
yet resorted to forms of violence that were all-too familiar. When the lovers in Malasangre are crushed, we feel disappointment and disgust with
the brutality of the nation, then and now. That their relationship is broken
by parental betrayal heightens the sense of a tainted political legacy and a
shattered social contract: The national “fathers”—Rosas in the nineteenth
century, Videla and his fellow junta leaders in the twentieth century—have
betrayed the country. Instead of encouraging further bloodshed for the chimera of national unification, the play metaphorically proposes the construction of a completely different kind of nation, one in which no blood is
spilt either for or because of one’s country.
On fi rst reading, in comparison with El campo and El despojamiento,
La malasangre seems so realistic that it might be difficult to view it as part
of the same theatrical strategy I have called “abstract allegory.” Unlike
Woman and Young Man, the characters have realistic names and appear
psychologically motivated. The time and place of the setting are clearly
stated in the stage directions: a drawing room circa 1840. The plot structure recalls Ibsen with its “well-made” series of complications, crisis, and
resolution. Yet a closer reading reveals that the structure is actually more
sophisticated than simple tragedy, or even simple allegory: It consists of
one allegory nestled inside another, as in concentric circles. The outermost
layer is the superficial domestic drama: a rebellious daughter and her lover
defy her overbearing father and are punished for it. This layer covers the
obvious allegorical reading closest to the surface—the family as a microcosm of life under the brutal Rosas regime. In the innermost layer, however, lies the most dangerous metaphor: the Rosas dictatorship as a figure
for the contemporary dictatorship led by a series of generals—from Videla
to Viola to Galtieri. The play’s structure allows for the image of the tormented family to connect the domestic abuses of patriarchy with both the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century regimes, showing how history repeats
itself in domestic and public spheres. 26 Rather than attempt to separate
and delineate the allegorical layers, as in my reading of Despojamiento, my
reading of Malasangre will instead trace a single key image—the human
170
body—in three different uses that permeate all the allegorical layers: as a
figure for the body politic, as an instrument wielded by abusive authority,
and as a potential site of resistance.
Like Martín and Emma in El campo, Rafael and Dolores try to run
away from the authority figure. But in this case it is the female protagonist who takes the lead. Though at fi rst Dolores displays disdain toward
Rafael, the hunchbacked tutor her father has hired for her, she soon makes
the transition from hate to love so common to nineteenth-century fiction.
While the father fi nds Dolores a predictably wealthy suitor, Juan Pedro, she
convinces a reluctant Rafael that they can flee to a place where the terror
has not struck, where dismembered heads are not dumped in the streets,
and where euphemism is not employed to disguise violence (96). But their
escape plan is foiled by Dolores’s mother, who, in the tradition of cowardly
snitches everywhere, reports the escape plan to the father. The creepy house
servant, yet another gothic convention, brings in Rafael’s body and drops it
on the floor before Dolores. As the play ends, the mother and the servant,
Fermín, drag a screaming, defiant Dolores off-stage.
Images of mutilated bodies—Rafael’s deformed body, the mother’s body
bruised by the father, Dolores’s body abused by Juan Pedro, the many headless bodies dumped in the streets—link the individual victim to the bloody
history of the body politic. Not enough has changed in Argentina since
the nineteenth century, the play suggests: not the false dichotomy between
civilization and barbarism; not the misguided desire to cleanse the polity
of “deformities,” whether in terms of ethnic origins, religious beliefs, or
political affi liations; not the inability to choose your leaders; not the status of servants and mothers, who must cower and manipulate those more
powerful than they in order to survive. The violence of the streets remains
mostly unseen and off-stage, in classical tradition, an ostensible contrast
to the plush drawing room interior setting. But again, the campo cannot
be escaped by taking refuge in European interiors, despite their soft velvet
drapes and muted candelabra lighting. As Gail A. Bulman and Natalie Joy
Woodall both have observed, the distinct inner and outer, “civilized” and
“barbaric,” worlds of the play are ultimately collapsed. I would add that
this collapse comes as an aftershock to a collapse among family, national
history, and national present.
Even before a word of dialogue is spoken, the shades-of-red color scheme
of the set, “las paredes tapizadas de rojo granate” [the walls . . . covered
in garnet-colored fabric], and of the costumes, “distintas tonalidades de
rojo” [various shades of red], called for by the stage directions serves to
blur the boundaries between personal and political, past and present. For
red is not only the color of individual blood and a symbol of erotic passion,
it is also the color of Rosas’s Federalist Party, which fought for a nation
constituted by a loose confederation of provinces rather than the tightly
unified provinces led by a strong-but-liberal central government favored by
the opposing Unitarian Party. According to historian John Lynch, under
Griselda Gambaro
171
Rosas, the color red became a sign of coercion, compulsory conformity,
and subservience to federalist authoritarianism:
The language of politics was charged with violence and designed to
terrorize. People were obliged to dress in a kind of uniform and to use
the federalist color, red. Women were expected to wear red ribbons
in their hair, men to have a fierce and hirsute look and wear red silk
badges bearing the inscription “Long Live the Argentine Confederation. Death to the Savage Unitarians.” (83)
The “bad blood” of the title then alludes not only to the individual taint
suffered by Rafael, who expresses a fear of passing his deformity on to
his progeny (82), it also refers to the national inheritance of dictatorship,
passed along from century to century like a hereditary disease.
In the original production, Graciela Galán’s set design dwarfed the bodies on stage and heightened the atmosphere of terror with a series of arches
in descending size that skewed upstage at odd angles, creating a labyrinth in
which Fermín could lurk and Rafael could try, without success, to escape.
A small window grated with iron bars and framed by institutional green
shutters provided the only sense of an exterior, highlighting the characters’ imprisonment. The coldness and emptiness of the family’s life was
accentuated by the sparseness of stage furnishings: two antique chairs with
red velvet seats, two candelabras, and a couple of small tables. Though
she dispensed with the drapes called for in the stage directions, Galán did
have the walls painted red and costumed all the characters in shades of
red, bandaging the mother’s arms with bloody rags, a hint of the abuse
she suffers at her husband’s hands that also links her to torture victims.
“Griselda’s characters always seem imprisoned to me and I wanted to give
the sense that these characters were imprisoned, whether under Rosas or
under Videla,” recalled Galán (personal interview).
Drama and literature sometimes employ the image of the physically
deformed individual in order to mirror psychological ugliness, such as
Richard III’s evil, or, conversely, to highlight a hidden inner beauty, as in
the soul of the hunchback of Notre-Dame. Rafael displays both physical
abnormality and great beauty, since his face is described as “muy hermoso,
sereno, y manso” (62) [very beautiful, serene, and gentle] (9). Yet the other
characters remark on his face in passing and focus on his misshapen back:
The father seems erotically fascinated by it; the servant ridicules it; and
Dolores shifts from disgust to acceptance of it. Within the domestic drama,
his hunched back marks Rafael as the outsider who disturbs the patriarchal
order by wooing the daughter away from the father. The deformity contributes to the gothic atmosphere of the play and at the same time serves an
ironic function, since as Sandra Messinger Cypess notes, the real monster is
the father (“dinamíca del monstruo” 58). In short, the character of Rafael
is constructed more in the tradition of Quasimodo than of Richard III.
172
More importantly, however, the hunchbacked body serves as a symbol of
what the Argentine body politic might have been had it not been misshapen
through generations of military mistreatment, from Rosas to Videla and his
successors after the 1976 coup. (Interestingly, diverging from characters
such as Emma or Woman, this time Gambaro uses a battered male body
to personify abuse of the nation.) The father has the servant Fermín beat
Rafael on the hump, as if to further humiliate the already-punished flesh
and bone, evoking the long history of how the human body was deformed
by straightforward beatings as well as by various methods of sophisticated
torture perfected over the years. At the same time, the national corpus was
mangled by lack of respect for the rule of law. Rosas ruled through a cult
of personality and staunchly opposed the movement to establish a constitution for the country. Many of the most vocal proponents of constitutional
rule were forced into exile in Uruguay and it was not until 1853, the year
after Rosas’s twenty-five-year reign ended in exile in England, that a constitution was fi nally ratified (Rock, Argentina, 123–124). Even that document, however, was “twisted” in the end and did not serve to guarantee
civil liberties. The once-liberal architect of the constitution, Juan Bautista
Alberdi, swung to the right at the last minute, arguing that an authoritarian government with strong executive powers would best guarantee stability and economic prosperity (Halperín Donghi 136).
At the end of the play Dolores demands to see Rafael’s corpse: “Necesito
que no me quiten eso, el cuerpo castigado” (108) [literally: I need that they
not take that away from me, the punished body (translation mine)]. Her need
to see the body recalls how the military’s favored method of social repression evolved from one century to the next: In the 1800s the exhibition of
the body was central to a performance used to taunt and warn spectators of
the consequences of rebellion; in the 1900s the disappearance of the body
was used to both eliminate evidence and create a performance intended to
torment and intimidate its spectators. The moment of Dolores’s request,
an informal habeas corpus, both fuses and juxtaposes the nineteenth and
twentieth-centuries styles of terrorizing performances. The play’s 1982
audience must have been spurred to reflect upon the many missing bodies
in their own historical moment. Rafael’s disfigured corpse served to commemorate the victims of Argentina’s many dictatorships and to embody the
fate of the nation’s prospects for democracy. Gambaro recalls that “reality
entered the work,” giving spectators the opportunity to express opposition
to right-wing terror “without leaving their seats” (Schanton).
The gruesome image of headless bodies and bodiless heads is a
motif running through Malasangre, as sound effects indicate that horsedrawn carts are regularly passing by, spilling a load of human heads on the
street (69, 77, 82, 104). Atrocity had become as ordinary as the dumping
of waste. Underscoring the ordinariness of evil, the heads are referred to
as “melones,” which only partially serves as a euphemism, since “melon”
is also an informal term for “head” in Spanish. Fermín brings the violence
Griselda Gambaro
173
indoors in scene two as he offers Dolores a bloody melon as a “joke” and
in scene six offers Dolores a bird he has strangled as a little “gift,” forshadowing the gift he will eventually make to her of Rafael’s body. In Rosas’s
time, the headless bodies came from a private terrorist force known as the
mazorcas, a band of men who patrolled the increasingly empty streets,
imposing order through fear. During the fi rst of two periods of terror, in
October 1840, decapitated bodies began mysteriously appearing on the
streets of the capital in the mornings. The heads would be stuck on long
poles and exhibited in public places (Lynch 99). April of 1842 brought yet
another Rosas purge of real and imagined opponents, fomenting the frightening atmosphere that Malasangre re-creates:
The terror now reached its climax. In the last days of March each morning at dawn, corpses were found with their throats cut in various parts
of the capital and this carnage continued into April. Many of these
killings were surrounded by mystery and committed at night. Others
took place during the day. Two or three men would walk up to a victim
in the street or in his house and shoot him at point-blank range or seize
him and cut his throat; they would then leave unmolested while those
nearby averted their faces. Assassins operated with impunity at dances,
in homes and offices, and on public thoroughfares. (Lynch 113)
The pressure to conform or risk a horrible death, what Guillermo O’Donnell
calls “a culture of fear,” was just as much an Argentine reality in 1982 as
in 1842. Though the worst of the repression was over by 1979, the revelation of what had happened was just beginning. On November 1, 1982,
for instance, a mass grave was unearthed that held 300 bodies, each shot
through the head (Graham-Jones 193).
State coercion in Malasangre extends even further than the question of
whether one lives or dies: it extends to how one lives everyday life. Almost
every character in the play is physically brutalized by the father, ironically named Benigno, though he is no more benign than Franco was frank.
Benigno repeatedly twists his wife’s arm until she changes her declaration
of hate, “Te odio,” to one of love, “Te amo” (61). [I love you (7)]. Likewise,
he squeezes his daughter’s shoulder until she remarks on the pain with a
cold restraint more terrible than a cry of pain (89). The suitor Benigno
handpicks for his daughter, Juan Pedro, tries to force himself on Dolores
sexually (100–101). Yet these are minor acts of torture that merely allude
synecdochically to the far worse horrors suffered by victims of beatings,
electric shock, cigarette burns, suffocation, starvation, and vaginal and
anal rape, which were eventually recounted in the government report on
the Dirty War, Nunca Más [Never Again]. The mother in Malasangre tries
to excuse her collaboration by admitting her fear of the bodily pain her
husband infl icts, “¡Es que tu padre es tan duro!” (109) [It’s that your father
is so harsh!” (translation mine)]. Under torture, and out of fear of torture,
174
people offered up the names of friends and family members in hopes of
saving themselves from further excruciating pain. The father, as a figure
for the repressive state, approaches the bodies within his realm as points
of vulnerability that he can manipulate to make others do terrible things
to each other.
The mother in Malasangre, however, is far from one of the mothers, or
grandmothers, who organized and publicly demonstrated for the return of
their missing children. Dolores’s mother instead recalls the long-suffering
companions of dictators who reluctantly but obediently collaborate out of
a mysterious blend of love and fear. Accounts of prisoners marrying their
torturers exist, though rare (Feitlowitz 79). More common were the family
members of torturers who didn’t know, or tried to pretend they didn’t know,
or rationalized what their husbands or fathers did for a living.27 During the
Rosas era, the prime example of such collaboration was Rosas’s daughter,
known as “Manuelita,” who operated as his secretary, personal assistant
and receiver of petitions for leniency in criminal cases (Lynch 125–126). José
Mármol, a major nineteenth-century Argentine novelist and the author of a
biographical essay about Manuelita, fictionalized the father-daughter relationship in his 1851 novel Amalia, published during his exile in Uruguay.
One scene in the novel, still disturbing despite its nineteenth-century hyperbole, describes how Rosas forces his daughter to endure unwanted advances
from a boorish priest who eats his meat with his hands and licks his dessert plate before assaulting Manuela’s “delicate lips” with his “monstruous
mouth” (58). This sort of erotic power game is re-created in Malasangre in
the relationship of both the daughter and the mother with the father: Their
more vulnerable female bodies are constantly subjected to assaults from more
powerful male bodies, whether that of the father or of one of his surrogates,
Juan Pedro or Fermín.
The sadistic servant far exceeds the mother’s reluctant collaboration. Perhaps named “Fermín” in an ironic allusion to the loyal good-hearted servant
of the same name in Mármol’s Amalia, he delights in causing pain. Fermín
is the torturer who enjoys his work, as epitomized by his self-exculpatory
remark over Rafael’s corpse, “Yo le hubiera pegado nada más. (Se le escapa
la risa) ¡En la joroba!” (108) [I just would have hit him. (An involuntary
laugh . . . ) On his hump!]. (67). At the opposite end of the spectrum from
rebels like Dolores and Rafael, Fermín is safely in the employ of the repressors. And yet his body is also under authoritarian control, as he comes and
goes, delivering beatings, committing murders at the behest of the father/dictator.
Both the Rosas and the 1980s juntas, despite their claim to uphold Western, Christian values, destroyed many families by exercising control over the
bodies of others, seizing a husband, a wife, a parent, or a child for kidnapping, torture, or murder. One of the most horrific forms of torture employed
during the Dirty War was the torture of one family member in the presence
of another who was forced to watch, powerless as a loved one was beaten
Griselda Gambaro
175
or raped or mutilated (Nunca Más 172). At a secret detention center in Mar
del Plata air base, for instance, a psychologist taken prisoner was tortured
together with her husband, a lawyer, on the last day of his life in 1977:
In the middle of my interrogation they brought in my husband, telling
him that if he wouldn’t talk, they would kill me. They began to apply
the electric shocks to me so that he could hear my cries, and he called
out to me: “My love, I love you. I never dreamed they would bring you
in to this.” These words enraged them. The last phrase was cut short as
they were applying the electric prod to him . . . they were driven wild
by him, his interrogation was unending. All at once there was a single
piercing, heart-rending shriek. It still resounds in my ears. I will never
be able to forget it. It was his last cry; and suddenly there was silence.
My husband died on 28 June, a victim of their tortures. (file No. 7305,
Nunca Más 172)
When children were kidnapped from prisoners who gave birth and “adopted”
by childless military or police, the trauma spilled over into subsequent generations, as grandparents searched for their grandchildren after the dictatorship and children sometimes faced the terrible realization that their adoptive
parents were not only not their biological parents, they were sometimes
implicated in the disappearance of their biological parents. When Malasangre’s protagonist says her father offers hate but calls it love, she alludes to
the national “fathers” who claimed they were disciplining the country for
its own good but were in fact ripping apart both individual families and the
national “family” (95).
While on the one hand the body serves as an instrument of state control,
on the other hand it can also become a site of resistance to state repression. Malasangre’s concentric circles visit and revisit the desire to determine
one’s own physical destiny, adding layers of meaning with each return to
the theme. As the father denies the daughter’s right to select her mate, Rosas
denied Argentines the right to choose their leaders. Elections were out of
the question, under both Rosas and the 1980s junta. The verb “elejir,” in
Spanish, means both to choose and to elect, as in to cast one’s vote, a double
meaning that Dolores and Rafael riff on as they playact an idiosyncratic wedding ceremony:
Dolores: “¡No! No me asusta ningún maldito carro! ¡No sólo te elijo a
vos, elijo cabezas sobre los hombros!” (104)
[No! I’m not scared of any damned cart! I not only choose you, I choose
heads upon shoulders! (translation mine)]
Reversing traditional gender roles, Dolores then asks Rafael to marry her.
He agrees, and in the manner of a marriage ceremony, responds with the
176
identical phrase: “No sólo te elijo a vos, elijo cabezas sobre los hombros”
(104) [I not only choose you, I choose heads upon shoulders]. Immediately
after Rafael’s vow, the sound of the cart passing by outside is heard again:
Public violence intrudes on their private moment of peaceful happiness.
Yet the public turmoil has already invaded the very structure and content
of their vows, since they agree to choose not only each other but also a
world without beheadings. They thus implicitly acknowledge that public
and private responsibilities, like public and private freedoms, are ultimately
inseparable.
The desire to escape state control of the body was epitomized during
the Rosas era by an infamous event in Argentine history that may have at
least partially inspired Gambaro and has since been further mythologized
by Maria-Luisa Bemberg’s 1985 fi lm Camila. When the daughter of a provincial governor, nineteen-year-old Camila O’Gorman, fell in love with her
local priest, Uladislao Gutiérrez, the couple eloped. Camila’s father was a
staunch Catholic who, rather than seek clemency from Rosas, wrote the
dictator to urge him to punish the couple harshly. The young lovers had
fled to a small village where they found work as schoolteachers, but they
were soon discovered and imprisoned. Though Camila was pregnant, upon
orders from Rosas, both she and Uladislao were executed by fi ring squad
in 1848 (Lynch 124). Certain private passions may prove so threatening to
the state (and to the church) that they must be eliminated. In Gambaro’s
play, private passions represent more than just a desire for individual freedom; they also represent passion for the “wrong” beliefs, in the view of the
repressors, whether political beliefs such as Marxism, socialism or liberal
democracy, or religious beliefs such as Judaism. 28
Like the couple in Varela’s Alfonso y Clotilde, Rafael and Dolores fantasize about an idyllic exile that will elude state persecution and restore their
control over their own bodies:
Dolores: Nos iremos juntos.
Rafael: ¿Dónde?
Dolores: Afuera. (Se abre la puerta, Dolores aparte rápidamente la
mano. Entra Fermín, con una bandeja, la jarra y una sola taza.
Deposita todo sobre la mesa, los mira curiosamente y sale. Dolores) Donde nos sirvan dos tazas de chocolate y podamos beberlas juntos. Donde no griten melones y dejen cabezas. Donde mi
padre no exista. Donde por lo menos el nombre del odio sea odio.
(95–96)
[Dolores: Let’s run away.
Rafael: Where?
Dolores: Away. (The door opens. Dolores quickly pulls back her
hand. Fermín enters, carrying a tray, the pot, and a single cup.
He puts it all down on the table, looks at them curiously, then
leaves.)
Griselda Gambaro
177
Dolores: Where they’ll bring us two cups so we can drink together.
Where they don’t shout “Melons!” and leave heads. Where my
father doesn’t exist. Where at least the name for hate is hate.]
(50–51)
At another moment, the couple dreams of fleeing to a land where the color
red has been eliminated and only white, the color of peace, remains (103).
The realities of exile, however, are far from lovers’ daydreams. Some who
thought they had found safety abroad were hunted down and killed in a
foreign country. 29 Even those who did fi nd safety in exile, like Gambaro
herself, often paid a high psychological price for that physical security—
the disruption of relationships with friends and family, the interruption of
careers and education, the psychic dislocation engendered by confronting a
new culture and sometimes a new language. And many more victims, like
Dolores and Rafael, never even made it to the illusion of safety.
Malasangre’s last word underscores the stillness of the slaughtered body:
silencio [silence]. Rafael, like the nation, has been silenced, but for how
long? In the play’s fi nal lines the word is repeated four times:
Padre: ¡Silencio!
Dolores: (con una voz rota y irreconocible): ¡El silencio grita! ¡Yo me
cayo pero el silencio grita! (Fermín, junto con la madre, la arrastra hacia afuera y la última frase se prolonga en un grito feroz.
Una larga pausa.)
Padre (mira de soslayo el cuerpo de Rafael. Se yergue inmóvil, con
los ojos Perdidos. Suspira): Qué silencio . . . (110)
[Father: Silence!
Dolores: (Her voice is broken, unrecognizable.) Silence screams. I
am quiet but the silence will scream! (Fermín and Mother drag
her out. Dolores’s last line is prolonged in a furious scream. A
long pause.)
Father: (Looking sideways at Rafael’s corpse. He is utterly still, lost.
He sighs:). What silence. . . . ] (69)
The father gets the last word, making the ending ambiguous. Does Dolores survive or is she too permanently silenced? Though either way the
ending is grim, it is nevertheless far more optimistic about the prospects
for successful resistance than any of Gambaro’s earlier works. Unlike the
powerless Martín, in El campo, about to have his arm branded with a
number, or the pathetic Woman in Despojamiento, offering herself to her
tormentors, Dolores earns the spectators’ respect and admiration. Whatever her physical fate, her defiance has repercussions: if nowhere else,
its echoes cannot be erased from the memory of the spectator, which is
perhaps the significance of her enigmatic line: “¡Yo me cayo pero el silencio grita!” (110). [I am quiet but the silence will scream!] (69). Just as
178
the dead may live in the memories of the living, the silenced may scream
through the words of others.
ANTÍGONA FURIOSA (1986)
“Silence” is also the last word of Antígona furiosa. Four years after Malasangre, Gambaro creates another heroine who speaks for the dead in
another play that explores the tension between silence, speech, and resistance. By 1986, however, abstraction was no longer required to hide a dangerous political stance: The duty to conceal had shifted from an ethical to
an aesthetic imperative. Following its humiliating defeat in the Falklands
War, the military junta, now led by Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, had reluctantly
agreed to cede power to civilians. The democratically elected government
of Raúl Alfonsín, who took office in 1984, had begun to prosecute and try
military leaders for crimes against their own people. Rather than function
as protective disguise, then, abstraction in Antígona serves to encapsulate
a full range of human response to repression in a single poetic figure. While
the shape of abstraction in Malasangre recalled concentric circles, and in
Despojamiento brought to mind a braid, this Gambaro allegory functions
something like a kaleidoscope. As fragments spin out from the center, they
expand into a complicated pattern that displays the wide range of roles
one assumes, the rich range of emotions one displays, when confronted
with tyranny. Antígona, an allegorical character pieced together not only
from Sophocles’ tragedy, but also from Shakespeare and contemporary
Argentine political life, accomplishes this wealth of expression far more
effectively than could a realistic character constrained by unity and consistency. Antígona speaks for a broad spectrum of the traumatized nation:
the mourner and the mourned, the living and the dead, the brave and the
prudent, the grief-stricken and the furious. Her antagonists, Creon (an
eviscerated figure represented only by a scrawny waist-up coat of “armor”)
and a two-man chorus of cynics, by contrast, are limited in their range
of speech. They remain locked in a single fleck of the kaleidoscope, as
Gambaro inverts the actual power relationship between men and women,
tyrants and tyrannized, in her nation.
Antígona is unique among Gambaro’s plays in that it began as an
improvisation between a dancer and a director, with the playwright’s text
incorporated only later, a process that recalls Varela’s collaboration with
Duffau and Jones on Interrogatorio. In 1985, Bettina Muraña, a modern
dancer, was taking an acting class with director Laura Yusem, when she
began to improvise body movements that would personify Antigone. As
she circled around the edge of the playing area, repeatedly falling and
recovering, Muraña recalls, she was suddenly moved to shout, “Corpses!
Corpses! Murderers!” (personal interview). Thus surfaced the idea that
Antigone could symbolize the anguish of the Mothers of the Disappeared.
Griselda Gambaro
179
After several months of rehearsals, Yusem and Muraña had managed to
craft only fragments of a performance using Antigone as a figure for the
Mothers, and they called on Gambaro for help. 30 While Gambaro did start
from Sophocles’ text, and respected Yusem’s desire to pay tribute to the
mothers, her drama far exceeds a simple equation of the mothers with
Antigone. Moreover, it is also a significant departure from the Sophoclean
version. As Gambaro writes in the program note to the opening in Buenos
Aires’s Goethe Institute:
Esta Antígona furiosa no es una adaptación ni una versíon de la Antígona de Sófocles. Ciertas obras no lo permiten sin que el intento caiga
en la pretensión.
Antígona furiosa toma el tema de Antígona, entresaca textos de la obra
original y de otras obras; arma una nueva Antígona fuera del tiempo
para que, paradójicamente, nos cuente su historia en su tiempo y en el
nuestro.
[This Antígona furiosa is not an adaptation nor a version of Sophocles’s
Antigone. With certain works, such an endeavor is certain to fall into
pretentiousness. Antígona furiosa takes the theme of Antigone, blends
texts from the original work with those of other works; constructs a
new Antigone outside of time so that, paradoxically, she can tell us her
story in her time and in ours.]
Gambaro compresses Sophocles’ drama into one act and three actors.
While she adheres to Sophocles’ basic plot—Creon’s edict, Antigone’s defiance, Ismene’s refusal to help, Antigone’s suicide, Haemon’s suicide—the
action is set in a Buenos Aires café. The actor playing Antígona also at
times assumes the roles of Ismene and Haemon, as well as snippets of
Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Two male characters, Corifeo and Antinoo, serve as
a quirky chorus divided into strophe and antistrophe, respectively. Corifeo
also assumes the role of Creonte [Creon] when hidden under a rust-colored
armor-like shell that covers the face and torso. In the original production,
the shell was designed by Gambaro’s husband, the sculptor Juan Carlos
Distéfano. While the top of the shell consisted of a traditional helmet, the
lower half revealed bony ribs and skeletal arms instead of a smooth chest
plate and thick arm covering, giving the figure a grotesque, almost comic
scrawniness. Graciela Galán designed a pyramid-shaped iron cage that
rose high above the stage, with cross bars sturdy enough to hold Muraña’s
weight. Muraña’s arms and feet were bandaged with bloody rags, which
while evoking victims of torture, also offered some protection from abrasion as she scrambled up and down the inside of the cage. The play begins
with Antígona hanging from the outside of the top of the cage. In production, Muraña removed the noose from around her neck, climbed down
the outside of the cage and let herself back in through a chained door at
180
the bottom, thus underscoring her conscious decision to accept the consequences of her defiance (personal interview). While Muraña’s performance
blended naturalistic acting with dance, accompanied by musical selections from Mozart, the characters of Corifeo-Creonte (Noberto Vieyra)
and Antinoo (Iván Moschner) remained fi rmly planted in a more realistic
world. Thus Buenos Aires and a more mythical realm, not ancient Greece,
but the universe of imprisonment suggested by the cage, coexisted in the
same space and time, much as people leading ordinary lives coexisted in
parallel universes with disappeared prisoners tortured in clandestine centers just out of sight of the everyday world. The staging also implicated the
audience in Antígona’s fate: Spectators were seated on all sides of the cage,
as if to secure the perimeter around the caged protagonist. Even when the
work was restaged in 1988 in the much larger proscenium theater in the
San Martín, Buenos Aires’s municipal theater complex, Yusem subverted
the traditional actor-audience distance by seating the spectators onstage on
benches surrounding the cage.
One of Gambaro’s most-studied works, Antígona has attracted much
critical analysis of its allusions to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Carlson, Pellarolo, Taylor, Wannamaker). During the so-called “Dirty War,”
the Mothers fi rst encountered each other in government offices as they
searched individually for traces of relatives abducted by security forces. In
1977, they defied the ban on public demonstrations and gathered in Buenos
Aires’s government square, the Plaza de Mayo, to demand the return of
their missing children, in most cases adolescents and young adults. 31 Antígona is indeed an apt figure for the mothers, some of whom still pace in a
circle around the center of the square every Thursday afternoon, signature
white kerchiefs tied under their chins, photos of missing loved ones taped
to their bodies. They are elderly women now who slowly shuffle around the
short obelisk marking the center of the square. And their cause has become
an unremarkable part of the landscape, so much so that neatly painted
silhouettes of kerchiefed mothers are permanently emblazoned in white on
the concrete ground. Yet their banners demanding “memoria, verdad y justicia” [memory, truth and justice] signal how little the return of democracy
has satisfied their need, like Antigone’s, to bury their dead. In a literal sense,
burial is often impossible because the bodies of the dead were destroyed,
disposed of at sea, or were secretly buried and have by now decomposed
beyond the point of identification. Metaphorically, “burial” as a sense of
closure has been denied because of postdictatorship political maneuvering
that allowed most military officers, even those tried and found guilty of
horrendous crimes, to escape with little or no punishment. 32
Taylor details the many similarities between Antígona and the mothers:
They both long to bury their dead; they both defy authority and honor
family ties above national law; they both endure insults and physical punishment; they are both confi ned by their gender; they both move in circular
fashion, whether around the cage or around the square (Disappearing Acts
Griselda Gambaro
181
209–222). Morever, the circularity of the play’s structure, which begins
and ends with Antigone’s hanging, evokes the mothers’ endless footsteps,
their endless search for their children. Other critics have stressed how
Antigone simultaneously embodies the disappeared. Building on Jennifer
Schirmer’s work, Annette Wannamaker persuasively makes the case that
much as the Mothers in the plaza represent both themselves and their children, Antígona creates a “double presence,” representing both herself and
the missing.
Though Antígona’s affi nity with the Mothers is undeniable, nevertheless,
it seems to me that Antígona is also a mourner on a much broader scale.
In fact, certain elements of the play discourage identification of Antígona
with the mothers. First of all, while Gambaro eliminates many elements of
Sophocles’ text that do not mesh with her project, she retains the lament
in which Antígona bemoans that she will die a virgin: “No conocí noche
de bodas, cantos nupciales. Virgen voy. Mi desposorio sera con la muerte”
(210) [I did not know the wedding night or marriage hymn. I go a virgin. My marriage will be with death (151)]. And Gambaro also keeps the
famous speech in which Antígona stresses her status as sister to Polynices:
Si hubiera sido madre, jamás lo hubiera hecho por mis niños. Jamás por
mi esposo muerto hubiera intentado una fatiga semejante. Polinices,
Polinices, sabes por qué lo digo! Otro esposo hubiera podido encontrar, concebir otros hijos a pesar de mi pena. Pero muertos mi padre y
mi madre, no hay hermano que pueda nacer jamás. (212)
[If I could have been a mother, I never would have done this for my
children.
Never for my dead husband would I have attempted such hardship.
Polynices,
Polynices, you know why I say so! I could have met another husband,
conceived other children, in spite of my pain. But mother and father
dead, no brother can ever be born.] (153)
The inclusion of these speeches does not dissolve Antígona’s connection to
the Mothers; it merely complicates it, making Antígona a mother and a sister,
highlighting that the Mothers are of course also more than mothers, more
than parents who lost children. Though their social status as mothers granted
them a certain freedom to demonstrate without incurring the same level of
repression that a group called, for instance, “Sisters of the Disappeared”
might have attracted, the mothers were in fact also sisters, wives, and friends
of the disappeared. By calling attention to these multiple roles, Gambaro’s
play broadens the limited persona of virginal self-abnegation that the Mothers adopted for the sake of protection from persecution. Taylor argues that
because Antígona sacrifices herself, becoming a symbol of death and a vessel
for her brother’s male individuality, she does not entirely escape the “bad
scripts” that the Mothers were forced to employ (Disappearing Acts 218–
222). Even if we accept that self-sacrifice is expected more of women than
men (after all, doesn’t Haemon sacrifice himself for Antigone?), Taylor does
not take into consideration the fact that Gambaro’s Antígona never “dies”
as she would in a naturalistic performance. Because the spectators see her
remove the noose from her neck, they are always aware that her sacrifice is an
artifice, as temporary and illusory as performance itself.
The mother–Antígona equation is further complicated toward both the
beginning and the end of the play when Antígona morphs into the character
of Ophelia. Shakespeare’s heroine is a sister, a daughter, and a lover, but not
a mother. When the play opens, according to the stage directions, Antígona
wears Ophelia’s signature “crown of withered white flowers.” In the very first
line, Coryphaeus asks, “¿Quién es ésa? ¿Ofelia?” (197) [Who is that? Ophelia? (137)]. She responds only with Ophelia’s song: “He is dead and gone,
lady/ He is dead and gone . . .” (137). Why Ophelia? Hamlet’s lover epitomizes everything that Antígona and the mothers do not convey: While they
are strong, she is vulnerable; while they are defiant, she is obedient; while
they display “crazy” courage, she actually goes mad. Invoking Ophelia brings
to mind the many women who were permanently damaged by their experiences during the dictatorship. It reminds us that not all the Dirty War victims
were able to triumphantly resist. For every mother who survived to march
in the Plaza de Mayo, many other women, especially younger women, were
destroyed, when not literally, sometimes figuratively, by being raped repeatedly, by being forced to give birth in captivity without medical care, by having their newborns wrenched from them.33 Even the mothers themselves were
vulnerable to attack, were themselves sometimes disappeared.34
And yet Gambaro’s Antígona is more than a woman destroyed: She shares
with Sophocles’ heroine a supernatural ability to exist in both the world of
the living and the dead.
In Sophocles’ version, the demands of the dead, of the gods of death, of
death itself, consume Antigone and isolate her from the other characters. She
explains her compulsion to perform the funeral rites for her brother:
The time in which I must please those that are dead
Is longer than I must please those of this world.
For there I shall lie forever. (86–88)
In explaining her defiance of Creon’s edict, she once again invokes the spirits
of the underworld: “The god of death demands these rites . . .” (570). When
debating with Ismene, she takes pride in her proximity to the underworld,
declaring in something between a lament and a boast:
Take heart; you are alive, but my life died
long ago, to serve the dead. (614–615)
Griselda Gambaro
183
Finally, Antigone invokes the dead again in a less defiant, more wistful tone
during her fi nal lament before being taken away to her prison-cave:
Pity me. Neither among the living nor the dead
do I have a home in common—
neither with the living nor the dead. (905–907)
She describes her death as a journey, “to join my people, that great number that have died” (947). Her death, in turn, triggers others, Haemon’s
and Eurydice’s, converting Antigone from a follower to a leader into the
underworld.
Gambaro’s drama literalizes and intensifies the heroine’s communion
with the dead by starting and ending the work with her hanging. Yet as
noted earlier, unlike her Sophoclean counterpart, who is isolated and rendered tragically vulnerable by death, Antígona is endowed with immortality and supernatural powers: She has the ability to come to life and remove
the noose from her own neck. In contrast to Antigone, who disappears
halfway through the action, leaving the remainder of the drama to the male
characters, Antígona remains on stage from the beginning to the end of
the drama. Within the play’s circular structure, her death acquires a metatheatrical quality, as if it were nothing more than an intermission between
performances. The spectators are forced to confront that her role is played
by an actor who will “live” and speak again at the start of the every show.
Because she can die but cannot be permanently silenced, Antígona becomes
a figure for more than one individual: She represents a chain of people, a
chain in which the living sometimes have to substitute for the dead: “Los
vivos son la gran sepultura de los muertos!” (202). [The living are the great
sepulchre of the dead! (142).] The metaphor of the chain surfaces again
when Antígona says, “tambien se encadena la memoria” (202) [memory
also makes a chain] (142). In Gambaro’s drama even more than in Sophocles’, by repeatedly substituting for the dead in what Wannamaker calls
“the performance of absence” Antígona personifies memory and the power
to speak about what one remembers (73).
The contrast between speech and silence, courage and caution, is represented through the contrast between Antigone and her sister Ismene, who
refuses to help perform the funeral rites for Polynices. In Sophocles’ version, the debate between the two characters is fairly balanced, with Ismene
arguing passionately for an end to the cycle of violence that has plagued the
descendents of Oedipus. As George Steiner documents, several major twentieth-century versions of Antigone follow Sophocles and portray Ismene
as the voice of reason, the sane one in a crazy family and a crazy world
(144–151). Gambaro, however, compresses the debate between Antigone
and her sister—which in Sophocles includes a 23-line speech by Ismene—
into five short sentences, delivered by the same actor who plays Antígona,
and culminating in Ismene’s decision: “Prestaré obediencia” (205) [I shall
be obedient (145)]. Law-abiding Ismene is thus portrayed as only slightly
better than the mother in Malasangre, cowed into submission by unjust
authority. During the course of Antígona’s four stagings during the three
years from 1986 to 1988, “obedience” became an extremely charged concept in Argentine society, giving new import to Ismene’s line. After military leaders threatened the fragile civilian government of Raúl Alfonsín,
the president agreed to support controversial legislation, The Law of Due
Obedience, that would allow mid- and low-level military officers to defend
themselves against charges of human rights abuses on the grounds that
they were following what they believed to be legitimate orders. Only the
crimes of torture and assassination were exempted. The law was passed
by the Argentine congress in 1987, despite demonstrations and protests by
human rights groups, including the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. 35 Yet I
am not suggesting that the figure of Ismene symbolizes a military officer.
On the contrary, especially since her speech is delivered by the same actor
who plays Antígona, she functions more like an alter ego, epitomizing the
fear that gnaws at even the most courageous of people, the fear that must
be overcome in order to speak or act. Antígona, speaking in her own voice,
admits that such fear motivates her suicide: “Temí el hambre y la sed. Desfallecer innoblemente. A último momento, arrastrarme, suplicar” (217). [I
was afraid of hunger and thirst. Afraid I would weaken ignobly. At the last
moment, crawl and beg (158).]
As the character of Antígona subsumes Ismene, she also subsumes Haemon, appropriating his grief and rage as her own. This exaggerates an identification of Haemon with Antigone that can only be glimpsed in Sophocles’
version of the drama. Creon insults his son: “It seems this boy is on the
woman’s side” (802) and “You woman’s slave, do not try to wheedle me”
(820). In Gambaro’s version, however, it is the emotion of fury, rather than
empathy or grief, that most tightly binds Haemon to Antígona. According
to the stage directions, for instance, Haemon spits in his father’s face, an
expression of contempt not present in Sophocles’ version (156). Haemon’s
fury in turn recalls the avenging spirits of the furies, the winged spirits who
pursued Orestes after he murdered his mother. As the play’s title implies,
Antígona has been infused with their thirst for revenge. Missing from Antígona furiosa is the rule of law and the promise of justice, which according to
Aeschylus was imposed by Athena at Orestes’ trial, when she acquits him
and converts the angry erinyes into the eumenides, or “kind ones” (Lass
81). Antígona’s fi nal speech and the fi nal stage directions underscore the
impotent rage of those who like Haemon, like Antígona, cannot bring the
victims back to life, cannot even obtain punishment for their killers: “Nací,
para compartir el amor y no el odio. (pausa larga) Pero el odio manda.
(Furiosa) El resto es silencio!” (Se da muerte. Con furia) (217). [I was born
to share love, not hate. (long pause) But hate rules. (furious) The rest is
silence! (She kills herself, with fury.) (159)] Even after the end of dictatorship, Gambaro suggests, justice is still lacking in Argentina.
Griselda Gambaro
185
By contrast to the wide spectrum of characters compressed into the figure of Antígona, the character of Creonte is not even granted a full-time
actor. He comes to life only when the actor playing Corifeo picks up the
empty shell that symbolizes the ruler, thus embodying not only the authoritarian leader but also the passive collaborators with his crimes. Wannamaker is one of the few scholars to stress the significance of this doubling
(78). Far less sympathetic than Sophocles’ Creon, Creonte never repents. In
Gambaro’s hands, his pardon of Antígona becomes an occasion for parody
of the pardon of Argentine military officers by Alfonsín’s successor, Carlos
Menem. The pardon came only after military officers threatened uprisings,
blackmailing civilian leaders into an extremely unpopular amnesty (Nino
95–101). In essence, Gambaro suggests, the military leaders pardoned
themselves. Antinous, the sycophantic sidekick to Coryphaeus/Creonte,
flatters him, “Posee un gran corazón que indulta fácilmente . . .” [You have
a big heart that easily pardons . . . ]. And Antígona fi nishes the sentence for
him: “Sus crímenes” (216) [His own crimes (157)].
In performance, Bettina Muraña recalls, she pushed Antigona’s kaleidoscopic range as far as possible, not only embodying the major characters in
the drama, but also using dance to create additional images. One moment
she would roll around on the ground, her body twisted into the shape of
her two fighting brothers. Another moment she would become the birds
that peck at Polynices’ flesh: knees bent in a second-position plié, arms
out, wrists bent upward, her fi ngers bunched together into sharp beaks.
Traditional allegory would have restricted Antígona’s character to a simple equivalence between Antígona and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo;
abstract allegory allows a single performer to flash upon the entire panorama of national tragedy.
ATANDO CABOS [PUTTING TWO
AND TWO TOGETHER] 1991
The task of this allegory differs significantly from that of its predecessors.
Written seven years after the end of the dictatorship, for a performance
before a London audience in 1991, the short one-act Atando cabos uses
naturalism to educate foreigners about the Argentine holocaust and abstraction to elevate the struggle between the victims and the victors into an allegorical battle between good and evil. The protagonist operates in both a
naturalistic world and in a shadowy mythic realm. Though she displays an
Antígona-like affi nity for the dead, entrapment in a cycle of trauma, and
ghostly powers of rebirth, we never learn exactly who she is or where she
comes from. Her male antagonist also straddles naturalism and myth, at
times departing from the language of a real-world military man to indulge
in a lofty rhetoric of cruelty befitting an antagonist of larger-than-life proportions. The characters, then, operate simultaneously on three different
levels: fi rst, as realistic characters, victims of a shipwreck; second, as allegorical figures for the opposing sides of the dictatorship; and third, again
allegorically, as personifications of two sides of a struggle for control of history. Because of the circumstances of its creation, the allegory in this play
is less abstract than in any of the Gambaro works previously discussed. In
fact, its moral position is so clearly stated that the work does not meet all
the criteria for abstract allegory that I have set forth. The allegorical levels
of Atando cabos do not, as in the other Gambaro allegories discussed here,
conceal subversion; instead they openly celebrate it. Nevertheless, its use
of allegory bears study for how it interweaves memory, imagination, testimony, and history so as to imbue everyday subversion with mythic status.
Commissioned by Britain’s Royal Court Theatre and directed by James
McDonald, Atando cabos opened as part of London’s International Theatre Festival. 36 The work once again takes up the plight of the mothers of
the disappeared, this time combining Greek myth, Biblical imagery, contemporary politics, and original poetry into a mother’s ritual lament for
her missing daughter. Like a Demeter mourning Persephone, Elisa roams
the globe grieving for her daughter, a fi fteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped and “disappeared” after taking to the streets in a political demonstration. When Elisa’s cruise ship sinks, she fi nds herself sharing a lifeboat
with Martín, a traveling companion with a military demeanor. Though
he begs her to be quiet and at one point threatens to throw her overboard if she doesn’t shut up, she speaks incessantly—in elevated, lyrical
language—about her daughter and the meaning of her daughter’s death.
Even the death of a single, anonymous high school girl has significance,
she insists. No, he counters in the logic of dictatorship, history is written
by the victors, who have absolute authority to decide who will be remembered and who will be forgotten. Their debate is interrupted by a rescue, which in turn is interrupted by another shipwreck, ending the play
as it began, with a disaster. That fi nal shove back into apocalypse prods
one to reconsider the entire play in more symbolic terms, much as when
Antígona puts the noose back around her neck at the end of Antígona
furiosa. Atando cabos’s circular structure suggests that Elisa and Martín’s
encounter may be part of an endless cycle, a Sartrean hell glimpsed only
in mysterious fragments.
At the same time, however, the drama is grounded in specific historical
events and real people, in particular, “the youngsters from the Night of
the Pencils” to whom Gambaro dedicates the work. On the night of September 16, 1976, security forces rounded up seven high school students
(hence “pencils”) who had briefly taken to the streets to protest the abolition of bus fare subsidies for students. None of the seven survived. But
Pablo Díaz, a nineteen-year-old participant in the same protest, kidnapped
a few days later and kept prisoner for almost four years, lived to testify
that he and the others were tortured: “They applied the electric prod to my
mouth, my gums, and my genitals. They even tore a nail off one of my toes
Griselda Gambaro
187
with tweezers” (Nunca Más 320). Among the disappeared students were
two girls, sixteen-year-old María Claudia Falcone, and seventeen-year-old
María Clara Ciocchini. Though it is not known how the girls died, they
may have been among the many prisoners who were thrown, drugged but
alive, from military aircraft into the River Plate. Nunca Más cites almost
250 cases of young people between the ages of thirteen and eighteen who
disappeared during the dictatorship (312). 37 Some infants born in captivity
were illegally given up for adoption.
Many of these details make their way into Elisa’s account of what happened to her daughter, as she fulfi lls the injunction that Ricoeur calls the
“the basic reason for cherishing the duty to remember:” “to keep alive
the memory of suffering over against the general tendency of history to
celebrate the victors” (“Memory and Forgetting” 10). Like Antígona performing the burial rites or the Mothers communing with their dead as they
march in the Plaza de Mayo every week, Elisa uses memory to maintain
the presence of those who are no longer physically present. In the absence
of facts about exactly what fate her daughter suffered, Elisa undertakes the
task suggested by the play’s title and “puts two and two together,” using
imagination to construct a kind of benign false memory grounded in supposition rather than in proven fact. Imagination substitutes for memory in
order to reconstruct the story of her daughter, which is in turn a part of
the history of the nation. Imagination employed thusly does not constitute
an attempt to escape grim realities: on the contrary, it seeks to establish
a truthful relationship to the past. Unlike, for example, the protagonists
of Varela’s Alfonso y Clotilde, Elisa confronts rather than hides from her
country’s violent underside.
Just as imagination forces the artist to confront painful historical realities with fictional accounts that nevertheless addresses a truth of that reality, imagination forces Elisa to relive her daughter’s painful torment and
death. She surmises that her daughter was probably frightened, that she
must have been tortured and raped before her assassination (16, 22). Like
Antígona, Elisa has in some ways already joined an underworld, a Hades
she describes as a radically egalitarian community in which having experienced injustice is the common denominator:
. . . en la muerte no hay número, ni tiempo, ni siquiera lugar. Todas
están unidas, del sur al oriente, del oriente al norte, como si los puntos
cardinales hubieran enloquecido en esta tierra triste . . . Una cadena
infi nita donde cada muerto está abrazado a otro, uno de piel clara con
otro de piel oscura, un niño con una mujer desconocida, todos culpables de ser débiles, de no tener voz, culpables de haber muerto . . . (21)
[ . . . in death there is no number, nor time, nor even place. All are
united, from south to east, from east to north, as if the cardinal points
on this sad land had gone crazy . . . An infi nite chain in which each
188
dead person embraces another, a light-skinned one with a dark-skinned
one, a boy with an unknown woman, all guilty of having been weak,
or not having a voice, guilty of having died. . . . ]38
Elisa’s description resonates with the account given by the founder of the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafi ni, of why the Mothers took
to the Plaza: “We were each the same as the other; they had taken our children from all of us; we were all going through the same thing; we had all
been to the same places. And it was as if there was no difference or distancing . . . That’s why the Plaza consolidated us” (14–15). Like the Mothers
in the Plaza, Elisa’s empathy with the dead allows her to identify with her
daughter, to feel closer to the girl, and to identify with other victims in a
similar position. “Caí con mi hija al río. Miraba salir los peces fuera del
agua y caer, y trataba de imaginar . . . Usted nunca imaginó nada” (24). [I
fell with my daughter into the river. I watched the fish leap out of the water
and fall, and I tried to imagine . . . You never imagined anything.] Martín’s
lack of imagination speaks to his lack of ability to empathize with his victims, an empathy that would perhaps have made his crimes impossible, an
empathy that makes Gambaro’s play possible.
From the duty to remember follows Ricoeur’s “duty to tell,” an imperative to keep traces of events for future generations (10). Yet it is, paradoxically, the impossibility of fi rsthand memory that makes Elisa’s testimony
possible. She assumes the guilty burden of the survivor, to live for the dead,
to recount their fate: “No me occurrió a mí. Si no, no contaría el cuento.
No estaría aquí, bajo este cielo, bajo este sol . . .” (10). [It didn’t happen
to me. Or I wouldn’t be telling the story. I wouldn’t be here, under this
sky, under this sun. . . . ] She tells her daughter’s story to the spectator,
thus informing the ignorant and confronting the indifferent. And she forces
Martín to listen, thus turning him into both the accused and a reluctant
witness to her witnessing.
Elisa’s testimony adopts an elevated tone and stylized form, distinguishing it from the more common ordinary language of traditional testimonial theater, such as Radrigán’s. Instead, her testimony takes the form of
a ritual lament, closer in style and spirit to the speech of mourning mothers in Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, in which the memory of the injury
suffered often leads to curses and revenge. The power of lament lies in
its rhetorical force, a force created through repetition and exaggeration.
Elisa’s repetition of two key words—“naufragio” and “daughter”—allows
her to connect her personal grief with the damage suffered by her country.
Gambaro plays with the various meanings of the word naufragio, which
may be translated as either “shipwreck” or “failure” or “disaster.” The
relationship between its literal and figurative meanings in Spanish is similar
to how in English “dash” may refer to a physical blow or to the collapse of
one’s hopes. Used nine times during the course of the short work, naufragio at fi rst refers only to the literal shipwreck. But as the action grows and
Griselda Gambaro
189
Elisa grows more aggressive, it more often summons at least two or even
all three of its denotations, culminating in a curse: “I will speak so much
that I will flood you with my memory and you will not be able to breathe,
and you will drown on land, in the naufragio!” (15). In this case, naufragio
means at once: shipwreck, (your) failure, and (our) disaster. Elisa similarly
invokes the phrase “my daughter” five separate times, wielding it almost
as a weapon against Martín until he explodes: “¡Cállese! ¡Estoy harto de
su hija!” (21) [Shut up! I’m fed up with your daughter! (11).] Fending off
Martín’s repeated attempts to silence her—including a threat to throw
her overboard—Elisa insists on recounting her daughter’s idealistic political activity in minute detail, down to the type of tree (banana) that lined
the streets where she demonstrated. Along with the repetition, the level of
detail underscores the surrogate testimonial authority of the lament: It is as
if Elisa had been there and seen it with her own eyes.
Elisa’s lament constitutes a ritual, as opposed to a mere expression of
grief, because of its expression in a public space as part of a communal performance of memory. These three elements—community, public expression, recourse to memory—performed with a defiant rather than, say, a
celebratory or compliant attitude, give lament its potential for political
resistance. Margaret Alexiou defi nes a ritual lament as “a social duty for
the whole community, to be performed for all alike” (50). Her definition
complements Victor Turner’s description of the purpose of ritual, to transform “social and personal life crises (birth, initiation, marriage, death)
into occasions where symbols and values representing the unity and community of the total group were celebrated and reanimated” (157). Ritual
perpetuates memory. And as the perpetrators of the Dirty War discovered,
an interrupted ritual may perpetuate memory even more than a completed
one, as the demand to be allowed to complete the ritual becomes a rallying
cry justified by traditional roles. Like Antigone, Elisa and other mothers
of the disappeared are simply asking to perform their traditional role in
the funeral rite. 39 But when the completion of their performance is forever
impeded by the lack of a body, that interruption in turn justifies an eternal
struggle and heightens the potential for political resistance. “I still want
to bury Polynices. I will always want to bury Polynices,” says Gambaro’s
Antígona (158). The lament may even serve as a model for spectators,
much as the classical lament served as a model for the Athenian audience.
In ancient Greek theater, according to Gregory Nagy, Athenian audience
members could assume that the lament they heard in a state theater voiced
the views of the state:
The songs of lamentation heard by the civic audience of the Athenian
state theater are taken to be archetypal, not derivative, in relation to
the real-life laments of real-life people. Far from being an imitation
of real-life genres, the dramatized lament of Athenian state theater is
taken to be a model. (x)
Among Argentines, by contrast, Elisa’s lament would be heard as a subversive challenge to the state. Though it might not change the minds of
spectators who shared the state’s support for forgetfulness and amnesty,
the lament might inspire those with dissenting views to similarly challenge
the state’s would-be erasure of memory. It is memory, coupled with imagination and testimony, that may allow us to serve as adequate witnesses for
something that did not happen to us.40
Atando cabos not only challenges the spectator to witness, it connects
that witnessing to the creation of history and poses several important questions that relate historiography to artistic creation: Who will tell the history of the dictatorship and how it will be told? What will be included and
what will be omitted? Was the Dirty War the military’s dutiful eradication
of a communist menace that threatened to destroy the nation? Or was it
not really a war at all, but instead the military’s genocidal gesture against
a largely unarmed civilian population?
Allegory functions in Atando cabos so as to interlock personal tragedy
with national disaster, compressing much of recent Argentine history into
a series of metaphorical images: a sinking ship, a rescue, and a lifeboat.
The general panic as the ship goes down—the people running, the man
in an overcoat and pajamas, the little girl crying—epitomizes both Elisa’s
emotional anguish in the wake of her daughter’s murder and the collective
psychology of a country “sunk” by eight years of military rule. Significantly, it was a naval defeat at the hands of the British that precipitated the
end of that rule, a fact that perhaps resonated with the London audience
for whom the play was fi rst staged. If the sinking ship recalls the country
under dictatorship, a smaller, more claustrophobic vessel provides the symbolic setting for the post-dictatorship confrontation between the surviving
victims and the military—a life raft. The precarious rescue highlights the
precariousness of Argentina’s democracy, the fragility of its civilian rule.
Meanwhile, the image of the life raft heightens the sense of emergency,
raises the stakes to life-and-death, and stresses that victims and victimizers
are now stuck in the same boat, their fates as inexorably linked as Elisa
and Martín’s.
The metaphor of the ship (or life raft) of state also forges a link between
Martín and the figure of Creon from Sophocles’ Antigone, which balances
the affi nity between Elisa and Antigone. Creon expresses his loyalty to
the state, even at the expense of its individual inhabitants, through a ship
metaphor: “If she sails upright/ and we sail on her, friends will be ours
for the making” (l. 208–209). Martín clearly identifies with the Creons of
Argentina, the military rulers, the makers of history. His speeches echo not
only Creon’s, but also some of the most well-publicized self-aggrandizing
remarks of the Dirty War commanders. For example, during his trial in
1985, one officer, Lami Dozi, quoted Napoleon: “He who saves the nation
does not break any law” (Nino 86). Another officer, Lucio Menéndez, said:
“We need no amnesty; we acted in the defense of society, performing our
Griselda Gambaro
191
duty as soldiers” (Rock, Argentina 386). Nor did the passage of time do
much to change their views. On the twentieth anniversary of the coup,
one of the three original junta leaders, Emilio Massera, still maintained
that “the so-called victims had brought it on themselves” (Feitlowitz 190).
Gambaro deftly encapsulates the military’s triumphalist discourse in Martín’s bragging:
No necesito imaginar. Yo hice la historia, la grande y la pequeña. Todas las historias que usted cuenta, yo las hice. Y los que hacemos la historia somos los únicos libres y podemos ensalzarnos. No necesitamos
ninguna absolucion ¡Alégrese! ¡Volveremos a tierra! (24)
[I don’t need to imagine. I made history, great and small. All the stories
that you tell, I made them. And those of us who make history are the
only free ones, and we can sing our own praises. We don’t need any
absolution. Rejoice! We will return to land!]
While Martín usually speaks in more down-to-earth, naturalistic language
than Elisa, conveying the sense of a practical military man, at certain climactic moments such as this, he switches to rhapsodies that match Elisa’s
lyricism. His imagery here is Biblical, recalling Noah and the ark that
with God’s blessing survived an apocalyptic flood. He needs no absolution
because he himself has assumed God-like powers of life and death over
others; his divine status guarantees that his words, and no one else’s, may
be used to defi ne reality. This philosophy of language was perhaps best
expressed by Massera, who elegantly summed up the military’s desire to
control narrative: “Unfaithful to their meanings, words perturb our powers of reason . . . The only safe words are our words” (quoted in Feitlowitz
19).
Martín repeatedly makes the word “historia” his by manipulating its
double meaning in Spanish: either “history,” or “story,” as in the story of
what happened to an individual. “Las historias,” plural, refers to individual
stories; “la historia,” singular, refers to History with a capital “h.” As in
the monologue cited earlier, in the following exchange, Martín purposefully conflates the two meanings:
ELISA. ¿Conoce la historia . . . ?
MARTIN. (la interrumpe): No conozco ninguna historia. Ni me
interesa, señora. (20)
[ELISA. Do you know the history/story . . . ?
MARTIN. I don’t know any story. Nor does it interest me, ma’am.]
Elisa seems about to recount the events that led to her daughter’s
disappearance, which could be considered both personal and historical
narrative; Martín denies the historical import by relegating it to the status
of uninteresting personal anecdote. While Martín’s claim to control both
histories and History betrays his megalomania, it also reminds one that
there is more than one history, that history need not privilege the victors
over the vanquished, and that alternative histories may be crafted from the
experiences of ordinary people.
A crucial part of Martín’s self-abrogated power to make history is the
power to decide what events lack historical significance and may therefore be ignored or forgotten. The murder of Elisa’s daughter, according
to Martín’s end-justifies-the-means logic of Dirty War commanders, was
part of an inexorable Darwinian process in which the weak were naturally
destroyed by the strong. He repeatedly dismisses the murder as insignificant, not even momentous enough to “stir the grass,” trivial as the death
of a bird crushed under the foot of an elephant (18, 19, 21). Elisa counters
that even the death of a single person can be a “hecatomb,” drawing an
equivalence between the individual and the collective that can be found at
the heart of both testimony and allegory (22). In traditional testimony the
equivalence is usually explicitly declared; in allegory it is implicitly suggested.
Because Elisa and Martín’s debate about the nature of history is conducted in allegorical form, it calls attention to how history itself is often
recounted as allegory, what Hayden White, building on Ricoeur, has called
an “allegory of temporality,” in other words, a symbolic representation of
the human experience of time (White 180). Gambaro overlaps three kinds
of time in the play—the real-world time of Elisa and Martín on the life raft,
the historical time about which they debate, and the infi nite/eternal time
in which the work’s circular structure encloses them—to undertake what
Ricoeur fi nds at the heart of the historian’s task, to use allegory to represent the past truthfully. Despite the use of fictional characters, Gambaro’s
work displays a historian’s consciousness of the present as the history of
the future. For instance, Elisa places herself in the future, looking backward at herself as a historical agent, when she asks: “Es que la historia
es esta reconciliación absurda y miserable?” (25) [Is history this absurd
and wretched reconciliation?]. Elisa’s fi nal answer to her own question is,
implicitly, “no.” She refuses to create a history of false reconciliation: “No
contar con mi resignación es su fracaso. No conseguir borrar mi memoria,
su naufragio. En esta tierra que transito usted no puede vivir. En estas
aguas, usted no sabe nadar” (26). [Not being able to count on my resignation means your downfall. Not being able to wipe out my memory, your
disaster. On this land that I travel, you cannot live. In these waters, you
do not know how to swim.] Elisa, like Gambaro herself, undertakes what
Ricoeur describes as the duty of the historian to “give expression to the
voices of those who have been abused, the victims of intentional exclusion.
The historian opposes the manipulation of narratives by telling the story
differently and by providing a space for the confrontation between opposing testimonies” (16).
Griselda Gambaro
193
In postdictatorship Argentina, Gambaro suggests, the survivors continue to fight with the only weapon most of them ever had: language. In the
land of language, in the waters of imagination and memory, of testimony
and history, the military may not fare as well as it did when armed with
submachine guns and cattle prods. Though the dead are gone and cannot be brought back to life, making it clear to subsequent generations, in
Argentina and abroad, that for the most part they were innocent civilians,
guilty only of “having been weak, of not having a voice,” belatedly gives
them a voice and constitutes Gambaro’s lament, Gambaro’s revenge.
4
Hay cosas de las que no se habla. Si digo que estoy con indigestión,
nadie pregunta detalles. Es feo. Y la tortura es fea. [There are things
you don’t talk about. If I say I have indigestion, no one asks for details.
It’s ugly. And torture is ugly.] (Felipe Agüero, quoted in Verdugo, De la
tortura no se habla [We Don’t Talk about Torture])
No line clearly demarcates the boundary between allegorical and testimonial
theater: Allegory does not conceal everything and testimony does not tell all.
Some allegories, like Gambaro’s Atando cabos, slip into a testimonial mode,
and many testimonial plays, including some of Juan Radrigán’s best works,
rely on allegory for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. So how can one
distinguish the Latin American testimonial genre known as testimonio from
allegory, and what is at stake in that distinction?
Under dictatorship, allegory signals urgently but discreetly through the
flames; testimonio, while it might also employ discretion and disguise, nevertheless propels the playwright toward open revelation and fosters a communal obligation to listen attentively to the revelation, in other words, to
witness. It seems no accident that testimonial theater was not common in
Argentina under the most repressive of the Southern Cone military regimes,
and that it flourished in Chile only after the harshest repression had lifted.
Testimonial theater requires a higher degree of tolerance from would-be censors and a greater sense of confidence on the part of the artists that their
expression will not be a short suicidal cry, silenced before anyone can hear
or understand it. And while allegory can be ideologically flexible, used by
the Right or the Left, testimonio’s twentieth-century consecration in socialist Cuba has imbued the form with an aura of working-class opposition to
social injustice. More than any of the other Southern Cone regimes, Chilean
dictatorship singled out the poor as potential adversaries; it seems fitting,
then, that their stories should form the basis of some of the most powerful
attempts to artistically subvert dictatorship. Like torture, poverty can be ugly
and uncomfortable to speak about. In fact, as Radrigán’s testimonios show,
extreme poverty is a slow form of torture involving hunger, social isolation,
exposure to the elements, and a myriad of other daily humiliations.
195
By situating Radrigán’s theater within testimonio, I am purposely
stretching the traditional defi nition of the genre in several directions at
once, to include fiction, theater, and even works that do not have a single,
fi rst-person narrator. Consider John Beverley’s description of testimonio:
a novel of novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed
as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the fi rst person by a narrator who
is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts,
and whose unit of narration is usually a “life” or a significant life experience. Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of
the following textual categories, some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel,
oral history, memoir, confession, diary, interview, eyewitness report,
life history, novella-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or “factographic
literature.”(Margin 24–25)
By Beverley’s criteria, theater, much less theater that is not entirely documentary, would not seem to qualify as testimonio. Yet I would argue that
many of Radrigán’s plays, both as literary texts and in performance, belong
to the testimonial genre.
More central to the definition of testimonio, in my view, is another set
of complementary criteria, culled from other of Beverley’s extensive writings and also from other theorists: fi rst, that testimonial subjects denounce
an actual social injustice; second, that they position themselves as speakers
for a class or community; and third, that they give the reader (or spectator) the sensation of experiencing the real. While Radrigán’s characters are
fictional, their dramatic universes are nevertheless rooted in actual social
injustices suffered by real people. In one sense, of course, all fictional characters are based on actual people who engage in a variety of activities typical of human beings. But testimonio’s characters, including Radrigán’s, are
not, say, merely falling in love or climbing mountains. In the plays written
between 1979 and 1986 to be analyzed here, they lose their livelihoods
because of bureaucratic indifference, Testimonio de las muertes de Sabina;
lose their friends and lovers to political crimes, Isabel desterrada en Isabel,
Sin motivo aparente; lose their jobs to free-market economics, El invitado,
Hechos consumados; and lose their communities to government evictions,
El pueblo del mal amor. While these are not documentary plays based
on word-for-word transcriptions of interviews, such as Peter Weiss’s The
Investigation or Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, they are nevertheless intended to testify to specific historical events, namely, the persecution of the poor under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990).
The most significant difference between testimonio and autobiography,
Doris Sommer notes, is that testimonial subjects see themselves as speaking
for a class or community. “The important thing is that what has happened
to me has happened to many other people too,” Sommer quotes Menchú
(“No Secrets for Rigoberta” 129). One classic testimonio, the Biografía de
un cimarrón [The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave], written by Miguel
Barnet in 1966 and based on the life of the Cuban former slave Esteban
Montejo, speaks to the horrors of slavery and the desire for freedom.
Another landmark testimonio, Rigoberta Menchú’s I Rigoberta Menchú,
An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984), narrated to the anthropologist
Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, relates the near annihilation of Menchú’s family
as a microcosm of the Guatemalan military’s genocidal war on indigenous
communities. While the term testimonio has subsequently expanded from
as-told-to narratives transcribed by academics to include the fi rst-person
writings of literate narrators as well, these writers also tend to identify with
a larger, often persecuted, group, such as people who were imprisoned,
tortured, and/or exiled under dictatorship.1 “While sharing this part of my
experience, I pay tribute to a generation of Argentines lost in an attempt to
bring social change and justice. I also pay tribute to the victims of repression in Latin America. I knew just one Little School but throughout our
continent there are many schools whose professors use the lessons of torture and humiliation to teach us to lose the memories of ourselves,” writes
Alicia Partnoy in the introduction to The Little School, her 1986 fi rst-person memoir of her illegal detention in an Argentine torture center (18).
In a similar fashion to Menchú or Partnoy, Radrigán’s characters speak
for an entire class of disenfranchised people, an underclass further marginalized by Pinochet’s embrace of free-market economic policies and violent
repression of political dissent. Consider how the protagonists of El invitado [The Guest] introduce themselves:
PEDRO. (Terco.) D’el principio. (Toma posición. Cuenta al público.)
Un día un hombre que trabajaba en una construcción s’encontró
con una mujer que trabajaba en una fábrica: ahí nací yo. Me
llamo Pedro, como mi padre; pero si voy pasando por cualquier
parte y alguien dice José, Mario, Guillermo, Pancho, Tito o Antonio, doy güelta la cara y miro, porque es a mí al que llaman. Soy
el que nunca jue a la escuela, y el que apenas llego hasta sesto
nomás, porque túo que salir a ganarse los porotos; soy el que se
cae de arriba de los andamios y el que lo recoje . . . (257)
[PEDRO. (Stubbornly.) From the beginning. (Strikes a pose.
Addresses the audience.) One day a man who worked on a construction job met a woman who worked in a factory: that’s when
I was born. My name is Pedro; like my father, but if I go passing
by anywhere and someone says José, Mario, Guillermo, Pancho,
Tito, or Antonio, I turn my head and look, because it’s me they’re
calling. I’m the one who never went to school, the one who only
got up to sixth grade, cuz he had to go out and earn a living; the
one who falls from the scaffolding and the one who picks him
up. . . . (125–126)]
197
Sara’s self-introduction positions her as representative of and in solidarity
with an entire class of women who work in factories, housekeepers, seamstresses, and other low-paid manual jobs:
SARA. Yo me llamo Sara, pero es lo mismo que si me llamaran Carmen, Rosa o María, y es lo mismo que si juera más chica, o más
grande, más negra o más blanca; es lo mismo nomás, porque
aentro de los guesos tengo pegás las mismas risas y los mismos
llantos . . . Quedé así después de un milagro; milagro económico e
oío que le llaman . . . (257)
[SARA. My name is Sara, but it’s the same as if it was Carmen,
Rosa, or María, and it’s the same as if I was smaller or bigger,
more black or more white; it’s just the same, cuz inside my bones
is stuck the same laughter and the same troubles. . . . I ended up
this way after a miracle, an economic miracle, I’ve heard em call
it. . . . (126)]
Though Pedro and Sara are not actual people, allegory and testimonio
intersect in the construction of their characters so as to make them figures
who can speak for actual victims of social injustice. Their denunciation of
the unjust economics of dictatorship is testimonial; their self-proclaimed
representation of others is both testimonial and allegorical. Because one
individual (whether fictional or not) stands for many, testimonio always
has an allegorical dimension—but only some allegories venture into the
realm of testimonio.
The sensation of experiencing the Real with a capital “R” that Beverley, riffi ng off of Lacan, identifies as a kind of defamiliarization that calls
attention to the limits of representation, does not entirely depend on factual
accuracy. In his response to questions about the truth of some of the details
of Rigoberta Menchú’s autobiographical narrative, Beverley himself argues
that the accuracy of detail matters less than her authority as a survivor of
atrocity (“The Real Thing” 276). “The Real,” Beverley writes, was “the
voice of the body in pain, of the disappeared, of the losers in the rush to
marketize, that demystified the false utopian discourse of neoliberalism, its
claims to have fi nally reconciled history and society” (281). That is precisely
the voice, or voices, that Radrigán channels through his characters. 2 The
names may be fictional but the situations of emergency—children without
enough to eat, people without homes—transcend text or performance and
refer to real-world social struggles.
When testimonio is performed, rather than presented through a text,
the sense of the Real is heightened. If textual testimonio derives some of its
resistant potential from its strong link to oral tradition, then performative
testimonio has even more resistant potential. The oral, and ephemeral,
nature of performance creates the illusion that one is actually face-toface with a previously voiceless voice, unedited and unencumbered by
198
anthropologists or novelists or other intellectual helpers. In the theater,
because there is no permanent text for the spectator to leave and return
to, the mediation of the written text is hidden, relegated to the rehearsal
process. The theatrical focus on the voice and the body eliminates the
apparent contradiction of reading something supposedly “written” by
someone who is illiterate and backgrounds the troubling questions raised
by the relationship between the “native informant” and the writer: How
much of this did the informant actually say and how much of it is the
invention of the mediator? What was changed or eliminated? In fact, much
like the ghost-writers of narrative testimonios, the playwright has artfully
selected and crafted a theatrical text. The characters cannot entirely deceive
the spectators, who are of course aware that they are observing theatrical
conventions and watching actors, not real people. Yet the physical presence
of the actor nevertheless creates a greater sense of immediacy and urgency,
a higher level of suspension of disbelief, and a sense of excitement about
the disclosure in a communal forum of what may in fact be an open
secret, a widely known truth that is nevertheless usually voiced only to
trusted friends. The excitement of the revelation may be accompanied by a
heightened sense of responsibility, as spectators begin to see themselves as
witnesses to a significant event, witnesses with a duty to acknowledge its
significance and respond accordingly.
Just as importantly, performance has the advantage of being able to create the illusion that buried truth is being publicly revealed for the first time.
Political scientist James C. Scott calls such moments of open refusal to
comply with rules set by social superiors “the declaration of the hidden
transcript” (206). In other words, what some people have been thinking
or whispering to each other in private suddenly erupts in a public sphere,
creating what Scott says is “an enormous impact . . . on the person (or
persons) who makes the declaration and, often on the audience witnessing
it” (206). 3 Radrigán’s theater is full of these revelatory moments, moments
that had an electrifying impact on audiences fed up with Pinochet’s long
rule but fearful of publicly expressing dissent. The direct confrontation
between actor and spectator provides greater opportunity to challenge and
subvert the official stories propagated by dominant elites. For one thing, it
is much easier for a reader to close a book than it is for a spectator to leave
a theater in the midst of a performance. The audience is held captive in a
way that the reader is not. Radrigán says that he began to write theater
precisely because under dictatorship it seemed like the most effective way
to reach people directly, with a minimum of mediation or censorship (personal interview).
His plays revealed hidden transcripts so brazenly that at the conclusion
of some performances spectators would sometimes shout obscenities and
death threats to “Pinocchio” or “el hijo de puta” [the son-of-a-bitch], as
the dictator was referred to in popular code (Brodt personal interview;
Radrigán personal interview).The political slogans that were eventually
199
shouted in the streets were fi rst symbolically stated in the theaters at least
five years earlier, maintains Chilean sociologist María de la Luz Hurtado.
Some of the people who in the late 1980s ventured from the safety of their
homes to gather in the avenues and plazas, braving tear gas and bullets to
chant “He will fall! He will fall!,” were the spectators who in the late 1970s
and early 1980s fi lled not only theaters, but also clandestine performances
of music known as peñas, attended secret showings of fi lms, circulated
banned texts, and generally swam in a stream of oppositional discourse
(Hurtado 13).
Though the language with which Radrigán assailed his spectators was
among the strongest of its day, it is important to keep in mind that he and
his spectators nevertheless lived in an era in which the coded language
of allegory had pragmatic as well as aesthetic advantages. For instance,
Radrigán never refers to the dictator by name in any of his works. Even as
late as 1989, during the state-tolerated campaign for the “no” vote leading
to Pinochet’s defeat, opponents avoided pronouncing his name. Everyone
knew who “he” was. An anti-Pinochet song frequently played on the radio
only needed to say, “No, no me gusta, no. No, no lo quiero, no.” [No, I
don’t like him, no. No, I don’t want him, no.] The object of dislike was
obvious to all.
Testimonio has been criticized by scholars who note that the voice of an
illiterate narrator must necessarily be mediated by that of the literate transcriber, who may err either by standardizing speech patterns and grammar,
resulting in a “neutralized” and “whitened” language, or by reproducing
idiomatic language, resulting in a folkloric caricature of a narrator (Denegri 232). It’s difficult to see how the interlocutor, however well-intentioned,
can win. Yet I would argue that Radrigán pulls off a delicate balancing
act, creating characters who are neither folkloric caricatures nor whitened
versions of the subaltern. He always treats his characters with the respect
accorded to social equals: He lovingly pokes fun at times, but never condescends nor denigrates them. Whether confronting poor spectators in neighborhood gymnasiums or confronting middle-class audiences in comfortable
theaters, whether in South America or in North America, these characters
retain the capacity to challenge the legitimacy of class privilege.
Because of his own working-class experience, unlike many universityeducated Chilean playwrights, Radrigán does not have to do research to
replicate the speech patterns of the poor.
After his father, a mechanic without stable employment, abandoned the
family, he began to work at the age of twelve. His mother, an elementary
school teacher by training, was forced to support Juan and his three older
siblings by taking in laundry. She taught him to read and instilled a love of
literature in him, a passion he pursued on his own, since his opportunities
to attend school were irregular at best (personal interview). On my way to
meet Radrigán for the fi rst time, in the summer of 2001, I found myself
lost in downtown Santiago and borrowed a map from a newsstand vendor,
200
a stout man wearing an apron over his clothes. “Quiero ver donde estoy”
[I want to see where I am], I told him as I scanned the confusing jumble
of crisscrossing lines on the large sheet of paper unfolded before me. “Ahí
po. ¿Que no se ve?” [You’re right there. Can’t you see yourself?], he said
and burst into laughter at his own cleverness. My jaw dropped too, not
in amusement, but with the shock of recognition. He had just spoken a
line from Radrigán’s play, Isabel desterrada en Isabel [Isabel Banished in
Isabel].
Radrigán’s theater, however, provides more than accurate transcription
of jokes and street slang of the urban poor—rich as it is with grammatical mistakes, missing consonants, added vowels, and habitual interjections
used as verbal exclamation marks. To that brew he adds his own invented
malapropisms, humorous colloquialisms, piercing metaphors, violent similes. “Pensar es igual que si te jueran degollando la esperanza delante de
los ojos” (233) [Thinking is the same as if they was to slash hope’s throat
right in front of your eyes (9697)], says Isabel. In this image, thought is
not only personified, it is given the corporal presence of a murderer. Yet
Isabel, who barely feeds herself by cleaning houses and is so lonely that
she makes friends with a garbage can, is neither neutralized nor rendered
folkloric by her poetic yet colloquial speech. If anything, the poetic image
gives her tragic status, imbuing her despair with a dignity that transcends
the grubbiness of her daily struggle, which is all that a spectator might see
if she were to look and talk exactly like a “real” woman on the verge of
homelessness and mental illness.4
As Beverley notes, the word testimonio evokes the idea of telling the
truth in a legal or religious context, as in testifying in court, or testifying
to the presence of God (Testimonio 3). The irony of Radrigán’s theater is
that while his characters search endlessly for a God, because He is always
silent, indifferent, or cruel, in the end they testify only to his absence. Radrigán’s characters—whether they are homeless, close to homeless, hungry
children, working poor, petty criminals, drunks, prostitutes, or murderers—yearn for divine intervention to bring them love, or at least justice. But
the ultimate Witness doesn’t seem to be paying adequate attention. Some
of the funniest and most achingly beautiful moments in Radrigán’s plays
stem from his characters’ attempts to articulate overwhelming pain and
win salvation. But there is no salvation to be had from the false prophets,
blank bureaucrats, and dutiful repressors who are always lurking in the
background, usually relegated to off-stage roles. It is the victims, not the
victimizers, who are privileged with a stage presence, even though their
hopes are usually frustrated. In Las brutas, Luciana begs her older sister
Justa to tell her what sensual love is like: Justa responds with a description
of her one and only experience of sex, which turns out to have been a rape.
In Hechos, Emilo decides to take a heroic last stand against repression:
He pays for it with his life. In Isabel, the protagonist entertains herself by
pretending to give God a good talking-to; God does not respond.
201
God’s conspicuous absence shifts the responsibility of witnessing back
to the playwright, the theatrical practitioners, and the spectators. By staging their experience of injustice, whether fi rsthand or vicarious, the playwright and other practitioners involved in a production fulfill what Ricoeur
calls the “duty to tell,” the obligation to transmit memory to future generations (“Memory and Forgetting” 9–10). Building on the insights of psychoanalyst Dori Laub (and transposing the location of testimony from the
psychoanalyst’s office to the theatrical space), I would contend that theatrical testimonio, from the perspective of the practitioner, involves experiencing trauma, either directly or indirectly, grasping a certain truth from the
experience, and then restaging that truth so that others may also struggle
with it. The spectator, then, may become something like that “authentic listener” that Laub identifies as key to the process of witnessing (“Event Without a Witness” 91). While such listeners, Laub notes, cannot restore losses,
they may accompany individuals as they put their world back together in
spite of irrevocable losses. In a theatrical context, attentive listeners/spectators, or in other words, adequate witnesses, do not usually form part of a
therapeutic process. Yet they are part of a political process. Whether or not
a particular production moves one to social action, in successful testimonial theater the exchange between practitioners and spectators leads at the
very least to a greater appreciation of losses suffered and thus changes one’s
understanding of the world.
***
Unlike Argentina and Brazil, and like Uruguay, Chile had a tradition of
democratic stability that gave many of its citizens a false sense of security
about the loyalty of its military to civilian leaders. 5 Yet even before Salvador Allende took office on November 3, 1970, the Nixon administration
had identified the democratically elected Marxist as the enemy and joined
forces with right-wing Chileans to destabilize his government.
Allende quickly nationalized a wide variety of foreign enterprises, including the copper industry, and implemented land reform far more aggressively
than had the previous Christian Democratic government. His administration held down prices and raised wages, spurring an economic boom that
lasted just a year before a dramatic crash. Price controls failed, inflation
spiraled crazily, shortages of consumer goods, including food, soon followed, and a black market flourished. Strikes began to paralyze the country—organized by the very workers who were the intended beneficiaries of
Allende’s policies. Opponents on both the left and the right undercut his
authority: The extreme left agitated for armed revolution; the extreme right
called for a military coup. In the countryside, a guerrilla group, Movimiento
de Izquierda Revolucionaria [Movement of the Revolutionary Left] (MIR),
organized illegal land seizures to “accelerate the reform process,” thus pitting Allende against both the landowners and the peasants (Collier and
202
Sater 337–338). From Washington, the Nixon administration drastically
cut economic aid, encouraged international corporations to withdraw their
investments, and secretly assured military leaders of support in the event of
a coup (Kornbluh 114).
Like many Chileans, Radrigán (b. 1937) remembers exactly what he was
doing on the day of the coup, September 11, 1973. That morning Radrigán,
a union leader and a textile worker, was getting ready to go to work at the
factory when he got a phone call from a friend who told him that a military
coup had taken place. Despite earlier pledges of loyalty to Allende, the
army commander, General Augusto Pinochet, had seized power. Radrigán
knew that as a labor activist, since labor activists were Allende’s natural
allies, and anyone who supported Allende was now the enemy, he was in
danger of arrest. He decided not to go to work that day and soon realized
he would never be able to go back to that place of employment. As the
morning progressed, the armed forces, commanded by Pinochet, fi red a
round of rockets into the government palace, then attacked the building
with tanks and infantry troops. Allende broadcast his last speech to the
nation and took his own life (Constable and Valenzuela 15–16).
Perhaps because the Chilean military had long kept itself out of civilian
politics, after the coup did indeed take place, a few key performances of
state power instilled enough terror quickly enough to keep people in line
fairly easily. As in Uruguay, at fi rst some people sought by the authorities
were so certain that rule of law would prevail that they turned themselves
in to national police and military officials. Some of those people, like many
of the more than seventy prisoners who were rounded up from various local
prisons and executed during what was dubbed the “Caravan of Death,”
were never seen again. A sense of Chilean immunity to strongman rule
was quickly exploded and replaced by a generalized fear of Pinochet, his
network of spies, and his secret police agents.6 Spectacular displays of force
took place during and immediately after the coup—the presidential palace
bombed and in flames; thousands of suspected opponents of the new regime
rounded up in the National Stadium-turned-prison, photographed and
fi lmed with their hands behind their heads. Among its most famous prisoners was the guitarist and folk singer Víctor Jara, whose fi ngers were broken
before he was executed. As Pinochet extended his rule throughout seventeen years, performances of terror accumulated: The fi rst corpse washed up
on a beach, a woman who had been tortured and sexually assaulted (1976);
the ex-foreign minister’s car blew up on a street on Washington, D.C.’s
embassy row, killing him and his American assistant (1976); the remains
of fi fteen massacred farm workers were found in lime ovens near a mine in
Lonquen (1978); the bodies of nineteen labor leaders who had been massacred were exhumed in Laja (1979); the bodies of three communist leaders
whose throats had been slit were discovered in a roadside ditch outside of
Santiago (1985); a young couple, a photographer and his girlfriend, were set
on fi re by an army patrol (1986).7 Not to mention the thousands of people
203
tortured during detention, the women who were routinely raped as part of
their interrogation, the people who were not even accused of anything who
were sometimes tortured or even killed simply to punish a friend or family
member who would not talk during his or her own torture sessions. Yet the
number of documented assassinations, at least some three thousand, was
low compared to Argentina’s tens of thousands.8 And while the mass media
was carefully controlled, censorship of the fi ne arts was light compared to
that of Uruguay and Brazil at its worst.
Repression was harshest during the fi rst three years following the coup.
Roundups and summary executions eliminated any possible resistors before
they had a chance to act.9 Labor activists, academics, psychologists, and
journalists were all targeted for investigation as suspected communists.
Radrigán watched in helpless horror as some of his friends were killed or
“disappeared” by the secret police. One friend, an actor and teacher who
was active in the left-wing guerrilla group MIR, Ana María Puga Rojas,
was shot and killed along with her husband Alejandro de la Barra Villarroel by government agents on December 3, 1974, as the couple went to
pick up their son from nursery school (Rettig 541–559). Thirty years later
Radrigán still fi nds it difficult to speak about what he or those close to
him suffered during that era, both because he was fortunate compared to
others and because in retrospect some Chileans are now exaggerating their
supposed opposition to the regime: “People whose grandmothers weren’t
even chasing them are now claiming that they were persecuted during the
dictatorship. I don’t want to talk about it. It was a terrible disgrace that was
visited upon us. That’s all” (personal interview). And yet not all Chileans,
perhaps not even the majority of Chileans, agree with him. Plebiscites in
1978 and 1980, while tainted by charges of fraud, appear to confi rm that
a majority of those Chileans who voted were willing to keep Pinochet in
power until 1989.
Theater during the dictatorship was knocked out for a time, yet stumbled to its feet within a few years. During what some have dubbed a “cultural blackout,” university theaters and theater departments were closed or
reorganized (Boyle 51). Some actors and directors were arrested; others fled
the country. The new government imposed a 22 percent tax on any work
that could not win the government stamp of approval: “cultural.” Theater historian Juan Andrés Piña recounts that among those works deemed
unworthy of the “cultural” classification was Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
(44). Theatrical activity was further discouraged by the strict enforcement
of a 9 p.m. curfew. And most importantly, self-censorship kept many playwrights, directors, and producers cautious for fear of triggering repression:
No organized oppositional theater movement like Argentina’s Teatro Abierto appeared in Chile. One theater company, Aleph, that in 1974 dared
defy the dictatorship with Y al principio existía la vida [And in the Beginning There Was Life], a transparent allegory depicting the nation as a sinking ship, quickly found itself raided and disbanded, its members detained by
204
the secret police, some imprisoned while others were forced into exile (Piña
85). In an interview with Ariel Dorfman, the company’s artistic director
Oscar Castro recounts how during his two-year detention in a concentration camp his interrogators tried to get him to name names by threatening to kill a fellow company member, Juan McCleod, and, incredibly, his
mother, an elderly, politically conservative housewife who was taken prisoner after she came to visit him. After Castro refused to name names, both
his mother and his friend were killed in retaliation (121).10
Piña identifies a rebirth of theater, however, by 1976, just three years
after the coup, with the appearance of the fi rst works that explore taboo
themes: unemployment, censorship, political corruption, and human rights
abuses (45–50). David Benavente’s 1976 collaboration with the company
Ictus, Pedro, Juan y Diego, was the fi rst antidictatorship theater to escape
persecution. The work alluded to misguided government policy with an
allegory about three construction workers forced to build a wall in the
wrong position. Benavente’s next collaboration, Tres Marías y una Rosa,
with the Taller de Investigación Teatral (TIT) in 1979, about a group of
women who weave and sell tapestries to help keep their families afloat, was
the subject of an internal government memorandum that argued that it was
not worth censoring alternative theater because at best it would reach only
a small audience (Lepeley, “Avatares del teatro” 121–124).11
Radrigán soon realized that even if it had been safe for him to return to
work, his job most likely no longer existed. After the Pinochet government
adopted the ultra-free-market economic policies favored by Pinochet’s U.S.
advisors, a flood of foreign imports decimated the domestic textile industry.12 Since he had little formal education and no formal training in any
vocation, Radrigán became a street vendor of new and used books, running a book stall by day and writing by night until the early morning.13
In 1979 he completed his fi rst play, Testimonio de las muertes de Sabina
[Testimony to the Deaths of Sabina]. Though Radrigán had almost no contacts in the theater world, and rarely went to the theater himself, he had
heard of a young director, Gustavo Meza, who founded Teatro Imagen in
1974 in an attempt to produce theater that would loosen the dictatorship’s
death grip on cultural life. A prominent actor and mutual friend, Tennyson
Ferrada, passed the text along to Meza, who quickly staged it in a small
Santiago theater. Radrigán was 42.
As if to make up for his late start, a creative torrent of work followed:
a dozen plays in the next five years, some short and others full-length.14 In
1980 he cowrote Viva Somoza with Meza, contributing a darkly humorous vignette, Cuestión de ubicación [A Question of Placement], in which
a young girl dies of malnutrition while her family squabbles about where
to put the new television set. The drama slyly poked fun at consumers who
grabbed at the cheap electronic imports flooding the country while ignoring the long-term consequences of the economic policy that allowed in the
goods: unemployment and hunger for many Chileans. In the same year,
205
Radrigán wrote two full-length dramas: Las brutas [The Beasts] and El
loco y la triste [The Crazy Man and the Sad Woman]. In El loco, a drunk
and a prostitute holed up in a shantytown hut resist the authorities’ determination to raze their dwelling in the only way they can: a suicidal dance of
death amid the bulldozers demolishing their shack. Despite the harsh ending, the play displays the dark poetic humor that often rescues Radrigán’s
plays from slipping into sentimentality: “Parece que me tragué un temblor”
(176) [Seems like I swallowed an earthquake], says Huinca as he tries to
control his morning shakes.
In November 1980 Radrigán started his own theater company, Teatro
Popular El Telón [The People’s Curtain], together with the actor/director Nelson Brodt. Later they were joined by Pepe Herrera, Carlos Alberto
Muñoz, Nancy Ortíz, Mariela Roi, Jaime Wilson, and Silvia Marín, who
became Radrigán’s longtime companion. Radrigan, Brodt, and Herrera
met in the “Escuela de Estudios Superiores,” one of the Santiago spaces
available for “alternative” theater, alternative being a code word for antidictatorship. The couple who ran the school, Guillermo Opaso and Patricia
Davis Urzua, offered free rehearsal space to El Telón. Brodt and Herrera
recalled how they were sometimes watched by unfamiliar men who arrived
in pairs, wearing the classic dark glasses and wandering the halls of the
school with no apparent purpose for being there other than to examine
the posters on the walls (personal interviews). But unlike in the rest of
the Southern Cone dictatorships, no official government representative was
sent to openly monitor their rehearsals, no last-minute demands that they
cancel the show or ban a particular actor were issued, no “editing” of the
text was forced upon the company.
To encourage open expressions of dissent, El Telón held post-show discussions, something that would have been unthinkable on the Uruguayan
theater scene under dictatorship. Brodt recalls that the conversations were
sometimes halting: “It was as if the very act of deciding to stay for the postshow discussion was such an act of protest that going further and actually
speaking was unnecessary. But eventually some guy would raise his hand
and say this or that, almost always carefully limiting his observations to
the content of the play, though of course the play dealt with the reality we
were living. There was always the fear that someone in the audience might
be a spy” (personal interview).
In the early 1980s, El Telón developed a system of touring and a staging
aesthetic designed to resist dictatorship while maintaining a low profile.
Advertising in newspapers and other media was out of the question, both
because of the prohibitive cost and because of fear of reprisals. Even handing out fl iers was dangerous because the company had learned from personal experience that the authorities imposed stiff fi nes on distributors of
unofficial propaganda. And besides, none of the company members wanted
to risk having their names in print. Instead, the cast, director, and playwright would walk around a neighborhood knocking on doors and telling
206
people there would be teatro later that day. In order to gather the largest
possible audiences in church halls, gymnasiums, or outdoor plazas, as well
as avoid the 22 percent tax on profits, the company charged very little or
granted free admission. An El Telón handbill from January of 1982, typed
in faded ink on Radrigán’s old manual typewriter, promises free admission
for two to a performance of the trilogy Funeral Drums for Lambs and
Wolves at the Bulnes Theater in Santiago but pleads for donations from
those who can afford them.
Radrigán’s emphasis on character and on the spoken word, as opposed to
visual effects, has led some critics to compare his work to Jerzy Grotowski’s
Poor Theater (Valenzuela 9–10). But Radrigán was only vaguely aware of
Grotowski when he began to develop his aesthetic and says he was shaped
more by the exigencies of Chilean life under dictatorship than by European
theories. For instance, the makeshift sets and costumes that never cost
more than a total of 5000 pesos (about $100 dollars)—a table, a bench, a
boulder—allowed for quick set-up and hasty departure, if necessary (personal interview). The not entirely intentional result was an extraordinary
emphasis on the actors, their words, their bodies, and their relationship
with the spectators.
While mass media was heavily censored throughout the almost seventeen
years of dictatorship, by the 1980s the secret police seem to have accepted
the logic of the internal government memo on Tres Marías that dismissed
theater as marginal. The authorities may also have decided that crackdowns
would only mobilize opposition. With the exception of the imposition of
fi nes for leafleting or hanging posters, and the occasional anonymous telephone threat, Radrigán’s theater was tolerated by the authorities. In fact,
the year 1982 brought Radrigán recognition by critics and mainstream
journalists alike, as the Chilean Circle of Arts Critics awarded the prestigious award for best play of 1981 to Hechos consumados [Finished from
the Start]. The next year, El toro por las astas [The Bull by the Horns] won
both the Circle of Arts Critics award and the city of Santiago’s prize for
literature (Albornoz Farías 9). Chilean newspapers published profiles of the
newly discovered playwright but refrained from any mention of his antidictatorship message. Similarly, in interviews, Radrigán himself, asked about
the “mission” of his theater, would say only that El Telón hoped to make
people think, so that they would leave the theater internally changed.15
El Telón was neither prevented from touring Europe, twice, nor from
making excursions to other parts of South America. In 1983, fi nanced
in part by the French government, the company traveled for two months
through Italy, Sweden, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland, performing Hechos and El toro (“A Francia”). The highlight of the trip was
their three performances of Finished from the Start in a crowded 450-seat
theater at the international theater festival in Nancy, France. After one of
the shows French journalists tried to elicit opinions about the dictatorship
from Radrigán and the actors: Pepe Herrera, Nancy Ortíz, Mariela Roi,
207
and Jaime Wilson. Company members circumspectly replied that it wasn’t
their role to comment on their country’s political situation (“Con Exito”).
El Telón’s second European tour, between January and August of 1988,
featured sixty-two performances of a single play, La contienda humana
[The Human Struggle], on a tour that took the company through Germany,
Switzerland, Italy, Sweden, France, England, Scotland, and Luxemburg.
Radrigán himself directed the two-character play, which featured Hugo
Medina as Eladio, a writer stricken with guilt over his inability to protect
his wife from being “disappeared” from their own home, and Pepe Herrera
as José, the writer’s literary character come to life. Contienda opened in
Chile only after the European tour, on October 17, 1988.
Ironically, Pinochet’s defeat in a 1988 plebiscite and the subsequent
return of democracy to Chile in 1990 contributed to the demise of Radrigán’s theater company. While under dictatorship El Telón’s company
members had been willing to sacrifice economic security for the sake of
subverting authoritarian rule, under democracy the actors began to feel the
need to take better paying work. Some career opportunities took company
members far from Chile: One actor, Jaime Wilson, moved to Australia.
Another, Carlos Alberto Muñoz, relocated to Sweden. Radrigán, meanwhile, was deeply disturbed by terms under which Pinochet manipulated
his own departure from power. The former dictator had himself installed
as commander-in-chief of the army until 1998; neither could the other
military commanders be replaced before then.16 During his last months in
office, he packed the Supreme Court with his allies, making it seem doubtful that many human rights violations would ever be prosecuted (Constable and Valenzuela 317–318). The newly elected president, the Christian
Democrat Patricio Aylwin, who led a coalition of fourteen parties called
“La Concertacion,” was seen by many Allende supporters as a Judas, who
had betrayed Allende at the last minute by withdrawing support from the
beleaguered leader’s failing government. While much of the country was
celebrating the return of democracy, Radrigán felt depressed rather than
jubilant. Sensing that the new political reality called for a different dramatic style but uncertain of how to respond creatively, he went into what
he calls his period of “self-exile,” during which he holed himself up in his
apartment and stopped writing (personal interview).
Between 1989 and 1993, El Telón remained dormant. Its fi nal production, in 1993, was Islas de porfi ado amor [Islands of Stubborn Love], in
which a man and a woman who for twenty years have exiled themselves
in a remote, uninhabited desert are so isolated that they wonder whether
Allende won the presidential election. They have so little to do that their
primary form of entertainment is to dress up and go watch a train speed
by them. Like the train, time, life, and history itself have passed them by.
While the protagonists are perhaps emblematic of Radrigán’s psychological state as he wrote in the aftermath of the return to democracy, they
also epitomize the exclusion from history of many Allende supporters,
who struggled with the reality that a president as determined to lead the
nation into socialism was unlikely to ever come to power in Chile again. In
the spirit of many Radrigán characters, the female protagonist, Micaela,
laments: “¿Con todo lo que Dios es, no comprende que paso algo que
nadie puede olvidar? ¿No entiende que hay cosas que una persona no
puede perdonar, porque dejaria de ser persona?” (269). [Since God is all
that he is, doesn’t he understand that something happened that no one
can forget? Doesn’t he understand that there are things a person cannot
forgive, because she would cease to be a person?]17 In Chilean history, for
someone of Radrigán’s political bent, the unforgivable includes the coup
that deposed Allende and led to his suicide, the torture, exile, and “disappearance” of thousands of civilians, and the imposition of a neoliberal
economic program that produced a “miracle” in terms of economic growth
but proved catastrophic for the poorest 20 percent of the population.
Radrigán fully emerged from his self-imposed seclusion in 1995 with the
play El encuentramiento [The Match], a radical departure in form from his
earlier works. A popular opera in verse set in colonial Chile, with music
composed by Patricio Solovera, it highlights the class and ethnic antagonisms between Europeans and Mapuche Indians present since the foundation of the nation. One of its last lines, “el duelo no ha terminao,” puns
on the double meaning of “duelo” as both “duel” and “mourning”: “The
duel/mourning is not over yet.” Neither the battle for social justice that
Allende’s government represented for many nor the national mourning for
the atrocities committed under dictatorship seemed over to Radrigán.
TESTIMONIO DE LAS MUERTES DE SABINA
[TESTIMONY TO THE DEATHS OF SABINA] 1979
The one-word cliché to sum up Testimonio is “Kafkaesque.” Yet the parallels between the bureaucratic maze in which the old fruit sellers Sabina
and Rafael fi nd themselves trapped and the plight of K. in The Trial cannot
go unremarked. “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for
without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fi ne morning,”
begins Kafka’s novel. One fi ne morning, as she hawks her fruit from her
street stall, Sabina is issued a citation, leading to a chain of events almost
as grim as K.’s fate. Like K., Sabina and her husband Rafael have no idea
what they have done wrong. But as in Kafka’s universe, lack of guilt is
no defense against punishment. More salient than situational similarities
between the novel and the play, however, is the atmosphere of terror evoked
by both, the sense of frustration and impotence in the face of a mysterious,
superior, malevolent bureaucracy. Radrigán creates that atmosphere with
a single eerie sound effect repeated at the end of each of three acts: heavy
footsteps drawing closer to the characters’ one-room dwelling and growing
more threatening each time.
209
The authentic witness in Testimonio is as absent as a real trial is missing
from The Trial. Sabina’s tragedy is that no one but she herself is capable of
testifying to her despair. Rafael doesn’t understand her. Their grown children don’t come to visit. The neighbor she yells at through the wall doesn’t
respond. Each failure to witness leads to another one of her metaphoric
deaths. Sabina’s lament for herself uses deceptively simple words to express
profound existential anguish: “¡No, de mí no se va’cordar nadie! ¡Nadie me
va’ir a ver o va’hablar de mí; yo me voy a morir mas que toda la gente! ¡Me
voy a morir tanto cuando me muera!” (90). [No, no one’s gonna remember
me. No one’s gonna go see me or talk about me; I’m gonna die more than
everyone else! I’m gonna die so much when I die! (29).] In an interview published the day after the play opened, Radrigán enumerated Sabina’s deaths
as the deaths of faith, hope, and future (“Anoche Debutó”).
What Radrigán and the reviewers who lauded the play in the heavily
censored press could only hint at was that the work strongly suggests that
these deaths represented more than an individual trauma: They were a
social consequence of the 1973 coup. When Gustavo Meza directed Ana
González and Arnaldo Berríos in the premiere of the play at Santiago’s
Teatro Los Comediantes, all three were conscious of that subtext (Berríos
and Meza personal interviews). One of Meza’s directorial decisions created
a sense of lost time: At several key moments, the actors would freeze, as if a
snapshot were being taken of them on the brink of an abyss (personal interview). At the same time, according to what reviewers did publish, González
and Berríos skillfully maneuvered the full range of emotions related to their
mutual blend of love and personal betrayal, from tenderness to rage. One
reviewer praised the depiction of the marriage but complained that the
actors tended to break the intimacy of that relationship by directing too
many of their lines to the spectators (Silva 30). It is precisely those moments
that break the fourth wall that implicate the spectators for their failure to
function as effective witnesses, not just on Sabina’s behalf, but on behalf
of the economically disadvantaged they encounter in daily life. The play’s
fi nal lines, for instance, could easily be directed toward the spectator as a
commentary not only on the loss of a fruit stand, but also on the loss of
Allende and the hope he represented for many poor people:
SABINA. (Vacía) Si no nos respetan, si no los escuchan, no poímos
vivir . . . Toa la vía viví engañá; nunca ía a poer tener na que juera
mío pa siempre . . . Cualquier día venían y me lo quitaban too . . .
¿En qué mundo vivimos? ¿En qué mundo de mierda vivimos? . . .
(Llora.) (101)
[SABINA. (Emptily) If they don’t respect us, they don’t listen to us,
we can’t live . . . I lived my whole life in a pipe dream; I couldn’t
never have nothing that was mine forever . . . They could come in
any day and take it all away . . . What world do we live in? What
shitty world do we live in? (Sabina weeps.) (40)]
210
The other significant allusion to the Pinochet dictatorship that audiences
in 1979 would have immediately recognized is Sabina and Rafael’s economic reality. Though on the one hand Pinochet’s government attempted
to address some of the problems of the very poor, on the other hand, the
authorities suspected the economically disadvantaged, particularly if they
betrayed any tendency toward labor activism, as a possible communist
threat.18 Meanwhile, economic “shock treatment” administered in order
to shift the economy from the road to socialism to the road to free-market
capitalism caused unemployment and subemployment to skyrocket. Constable and Valenzuela describe an informal sector composed of vendors of
every conceivable product and service:
People invented an astonishing array of survival tactics: raising plants
to barter for used clothes, cooking empanada meat pies to sell at soccer
games, playing the guitar on buses at rush hour. A society of peddlers
sprang up, lining the downtown Ahumada Promenade and chanting
out their prices as they scanned the block for foot patrolmen. At the
sound of a whistle, they snatched up their displays of socks or nail fi les
and vanished into the crowd. (225)
As Constable and Valenzuela note, women tended to fare better than men
in the informal sector, exacerbating tension within couples who held traditional gender role expectations (225–226). Radrigán depicts the excruciating humiliation of the man who is not living up to his role as provider
in Sabina’s lapses into contempt for Rafael. “¡Piensa, voh soy el hombre!”
(96) [Think, you’re the man!], she reminds him, as if it is his responsibility
to save their livelihood. When angry, she calls him “cafiche” (99) [pimp],
because the fruit stall was originally her business: He only began to work
there with her after being fi red from his job as a textile worker for trying to
supplement his meager income by stealing raw materials from the factory.
Not only has Rafael failed in the workplace; he has failed as a man.
The old couple about to lose their livelihood is just one interlocking
piece in the giant dramatic puzzle of Radrigán’s early plays. The prostitute
with a limp from El loco y la triste is resuscitated as an off-stage character
in Sin motivo aparente. The protagonist and plot of La felicidad de los
García [The Happiness of the García Family], about a thief who pretends
to win at the races so that he can treat his family to the luxuries for which
they long, resurface in Hechos consumados as an anecdote Marta tells
about her father.19 Marta and her friend Emilio evolve into Micaela and
Diego in Islas de porfi ado amor [Islands of Stubborn Love]. Reading or
watching a series of Radrigán plays offers a pleasure similar to that of the
traditional Latin American children’s game of lotería, in which stereotyped
images on cards are matched with their corresponding images on a board.
As in the lotería cards, certain identifiable archetypes recur regularly: the
prophet, the drunk, the lonely man, the self-doubting creator, the woman
211
hungry for love. Yet it is as if the images on the cards were to vary slightly
each time they come up: The differences among the later reincarnations
make the game more interesting. In the lotería deck of Radrigán characters, the unemployed textile worker will come up again as Emilio in Hechos
consumados, in which the thieving Rafael has been reworked as a far more
noble character defeated not by his own dishonesty but by free-market
economic policies beyond his control. Sabina, without Rafael and without
her fruit stand, one imagines, might lose her hold on sanity and turn into
Isabel.
ISABEL DESTERRADA EN ISABEL [ISABEL
BANISHED IN ISABEL] 1981
The fi rst of two monologues and a dialogue collected under the title Redoble fúnebre para lobos y corderos [Funeral Drums for Lambs and Wolves],
Isabel personifies the human craving to speak and to be heard. As the title
indicates, the protagonist is exiled within herself, and also exiled from the
mainstream of society. A survivor of the Pinochet dictatorship, Isabel, like
the survivors of an earlier disaster, the Holocaust, described by Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub, needs to tell her story and needs a witness to listen
to it:
The survivors did not only need to survive so that they could tell their
stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive. There
is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to know one’s
story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past against which one has to
protect oneself. One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able
to live one’s life. (Laub, “An Event” 78)
As isolated as Sabina, Isabel incarnates an archetypal figure that a Radrigán
lotería game card might title “the lonely woman.” Even more violently than
Sabina rejects her husband, Isabel turns against her boyfriend, Aliro. His
habit of mortally injuring the birds they sell to earn a living, his way of trying to ensure a steady supply of return customers, proves too much for her to
tolerate. Isabel reports him to the police in hopes of preventing further deterioration of her world into a place where no birds sing: “Ahora nadie habla,
nadie se ríe, nadie salúa; los pajaros son los unicos que cantan, si ellos se
callan toa la vía se va a quear callá, y nosotros que no tenimos ná, los vamo a
morir aplastaos por el silencio . . .” (238). [Now no one talks, no one laughs,
no one says hello; the birds are the only ones that sing. If they’re quiet, all of
life will be quiet, and us that don’t have nothin, we’s gonna die crushed by
the silence . . . (102).] But after Aliro’s imprisonment, which as sometimes
occurred under dictatorship, continued for a mysteriously long time, Isabel’s
fear becomes her reality: Like the birds, she is slowly crushed by silence. When
212
at the monologue’s conclusion she kicks and screams at a garbage can because
it will not speak to her, it is unclear whether her fit of rage is temporary or
whether loneliness has finally driven her mad.
Isabel’s address to the garbage can, a reflection of her degradation, also
reveals a desperate desire to tell her truth. Her steady stream of speech,
unbroken by pauses, combats the general silence she complains of, a silence,
the work hints, imposed by dictatorship’s culture of fear. In response, like
Radrigán himself, producing play after play, Isabel talks relentlessly; she
speaks, therefore she is. She talks to herself, she talks to the garbage can, she
talks to God, she tries unsuccessfully to talk to a stranger, and she talks to
the audience:
Pucha, si yo juera la mujer de Dio, le diría: “Oye, viejo, tú que le pegai
a la cuestión de los Milagros, ábreles los ojos a los giles de allá abajo.
Tan hacienda pueras cabezas de pescao con la vía que les diste. O sea que
repartieron la risa y el billete pa unos y a los otros les dieron el silencio
y las patás.” (237).
[Damn, if I was God’s wife I’d say; “Listen up, my old man, you’re so
into the miracle thing, open the eyes of the dopes down there. They’re
making a mess of the life you gave them. They dished out the laughter
and bucks to a few, and to the others they gave silence and kicks in
the ass.’” (101).] In performance, God’s silence is underscored by the
audience’s silence: humanity also refuses to witness.
If Isabel’s speech represents a failed attempt to compensate for loss, her
silences indicate an even more dire victimization. As Felman’s explains,
despite the need to talk in order to reestablish a sense of self, trauma victims
may also suffer a loss of language, a sense that language is incommensurate with their experience (“Education” 50). At several key points in her life,
spectators learn, Isabel endures abuse without being able to speak in her own
defense. She doesn’t know how to respond to the employer who wants to pay
her for house cleaning with a bottle of wine instead of the food she needs.
Words are inadequate to the task of righting wrongs. Words fail to describe
emotional longings or physical hunger. When she looks into the eyes of a
hungry child eagerly devouring a rotten apple, words prove insufficient: “Me
queó mirando nomá, no me dijo ná. Y pa que quería hablar si con los ojos
taba gritando too lo que le pasáa . . .” (237). [She just stared at me, didn’t say
nothing to me. And what did she need to talk for, cuz her eyes was screaming everything that was happening to her . . . (101).] The child’s silent hunger
mirrors Isabel’s own muted childhood and her inability to find language that
even begins to address the magnitude of the injury suffered. No matter how
much she speaks, what she says, or how eloquently she says it, like many
Chileans under dictatorship, Isabel is destroyed by a series of losses—of her
parents, of her life partner, of her ability to earn a living—none of which can
be restored by lament.
213
In the tradition of testimonio, the silence Isabel complains of extends
beyond her individual world to Chilean society at large. When she tries to
bum a cigarette from passers-by, she is ignored. When she responds to a
stranger who she thinks is talking to her, he curses her. Near the end of the
play, the stage directions indicate that she breaks the fourth wall—(mira
al público) (241) [she looks at the audience]—as she asks: “¿Como puímos
permitir que pasara esto? ¿Como puímos permitirlo?” (241). [How could
we let this happen? How could we let it happen? (105).] The trauma is
social as well as individual; the blame must be shared with the spectators.
Presumably already listening, and looking, by virtue of their role as spectators, the audience members are implicitly asked to keep their senses alert
after they leave the performance and to assume the responsibility of listening to people like Isabel.
The mute public is depicted in Isabel as something new, happening
“now,” as opposed to during some unspecified time in the past. The implicit
comparison is between a “then” before dictatorship and a “now” under
dictatorship, when talking might lead to one’s imprisonment or imprisonment of a loved one. The birdsong that Isabel protects at great cost to
herself recalls the voices of protest to dictatorship, in particular folksingers,
who were especially prominent in Chile. 20 Chilean voices of dissent were
sometimes ignored, sometimes brutally repressed, and sometimes self-censored. Though Isabel is no folk singer, no savvy political leader agitating
from exile against dictatorship, her voice nevertheless poses a threat to the
prevailing order. By focusing on the symptom, the silence, she encourages
the spectator to consider the disease, dictatorship. The simple act of drawing attention to the silence in a public forum breaks it. Isabel’s voice, and
Radrigán’s drama, then become a kind of birdsong piercing the general
stillness.
Isabel is one of Radrigán’s most frequently staged plays, with more than
a dozen different productions in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Sweden, Belgium, Australia, and the United States. The earliest productions, beginning
with the El Telón version in 1980 directed by Nelson Brodt and featuring
Gloria Barrera and Miriam Pérez alternating as Isabel, tended to stress
the pathos of the protagonist. Later versions tend to depart from realistic portrayals. One particularly whimsical Isabel, Alexandra Von Hummel
directed by Mariana Muñoz, performed the monologue in the parking lot
of the University of Chile’s theater school in 2000. Reviewers found Von
Hummel refreshing for her lack of self-pity and youthful energy (“Un Radrigán Juguetón”). Yet that superficial cheer imparted more than a hint of
irony about contemporary consumer society: Von Hummel entered on a
giant tricycle, wearing a Barbie-doll pink dress and waving as if she were
a beauty queen greeting the crowds from her parade float. The use of pop
music, along with a circus-like wealth of kitschy props and costume elements, further transformed the play from a critique of Chile-as-a-terroriststate to a comment on the terror of Chile today as an ultra-capitalist state.
SIN MOTIVO APARENTE [WITHOUT
APPARENT MOTIVE] 1981
This monologue undertakes the difficult task of depicting the mind of a
criminal without judging him and yet without sentimentalizing or romanticizing him either. The apparent “senselessness” of an act of random violence
is peeled away to reveal that it is not in fact senseless, but rather a product
of the dictatorship. Like Isabel, Pedro speaks to an inanimate object: the
corpse of a stranger he has murdered, in retribution for the killing of his
friend. He recounts to the corpse the tragicomic story of the events leading
up to both deaths. After learning that his hard-drinking loner of a buddy
is dying of cirrhosis of the liver, he devises an elaborate plan to “marry”
him off to a prostitute in a sham wedding ceremony. To his horror, he then
discovers that his friend would rather not marry but prefers to remain in
solitude. The wedding plans canceled, the friend, drunk again, is reaching
into his pocket to get some cash when he is shot by a man we are given to
understand is a member of the security forces. Enraged, Pedro vents his
fury on the fi rst passing stranger he encounters.
The action takes place close to an 18th of September, Chilean Independence Day, which the military symbolically linked to the September 11 date
of the coup by staging a week of patriotic festivities essentially celebrating
themselves as the nation’s saviors, what Steve J. Stern calls a performance
of “memory as salvation” (70). Between the lines, Sin motivo challenges
that link, instead provoking memories of the coup, and of the violence that
followed, as perdition.
Witnessing, I have been arguing, based on the work of theorists of
both testimonio and the Holocaust, has a redemptive value: It can feed
the viewer’s determination to survive, strengthen his or her identity, speed
the psychic healing process, disseminate evidence of atrocity to the entire
world. But seeing has its dangers too. In Motive, Radrigán depicts witnessing as a corrosive force that can destroy the viewer’s ethical core. On the
one hand, Pedro mocks the physical contortions some will engage in to
avoid acknowledging an act of violence: “¿no na cachao usté que cuando
pasa algo en la calle, la gente da güelta la cara y empieza andar así como
pegá a la paré? Hay algunos que parecen que se hubieran güelto curcos de
repente, de tanto que se agachan p’andar” (248). [Haven’t you noticed that
when something happens in the street, people turn away and start walking
like they was glued to the wall? Some people seem like they turned into
hunchbacks all of a sudden, they walk so bent over.] But on the other hand,
the play recognizes that there are good reasons why people fear confrontations with violence, reasons that transcend the desire avoid an unpleasant
experience. Witnessing, in this case, far from giving Pedro insight into his
own buried truth, turns him into a killer.
Pedro is a witness, but he is neither an innocent survivor nor a worker in
what Primo Levi calls “the gray zone,” forced to serve a repressive regime
215
in order to survive. Instead, he is at once a victim and an alienated product
of such a regime: Touched by the machinery of violence, he too learns to
kill as casually as if the lives of others hold no value. More marginal than
even the lowest rung in the official structure of repression, he maintains his
independence, freelancing violence, so to speak, without any control from
above. Felman divides witnesses of the Holocaust into three groups: those
who witnessed it as victims, those who witnessed it as perpetrators, and
those who witnessed it as bystanders (“Return” 207). Pedro embodies the
complexities of all three vantage points: He is a victim and a bystander to
his friend’s killing, yet also a perpetrator of revenge killing. Like Isabel, and
like most Radrigán characters, Pedro witnesses from the perspective of the
subaltern: uneducated, impoverished, underemployed in casual, unskilled
labor. And like many Radrigán characters, Pedro fails as a witness in that
his testimony neither redeems nor heals. Though at one point Pedro begs
his victim for forgiveness, in the end he assumes a defiant attitude, refusing
to even give the corpse the dignity of a proper burial.
The irony of Pedro’s stance is heightened by what he tells us about the
friend we meet only through his narrative. The nameless friend seems like a
cross between a hard-drinking urban cowboy and a more traditional Christ
figure. To Pedro’s schemes for duping people seeking taxis, he responds
with lofty maxims about how “a la vía yo le peleo a mano limpia nomá”
(246) [I fight with life above the belt (113)]. When confronted with the consequences of violent confrontations immediately after the coup, referred to
only in popular slang as “la Pelotera,” the friend preaches nonviolence on
all sides. The character is so exaggeratedly loving and morally upright that
he might prove unbearably self-righteous if it weren’t for his tragicomic
flaw—his drunkenness. His fondness for the bottle gives him a Falstaffian
vulnerability that softens the edges of his probity. His lessons of honesty,
nonviolence, love, and rugged independence are lost on Pedro, however, as
he stubbornly employs all manner of underhanded scheming to fi nd his pal
a mate. Much like those who kill in the name of religious icons, Pedro violates all of his would-be spiritual leader’s teachings. His friend would not
have approved of revenge killing, he concedes. The character who couldn’t
hate is the one who must die, leaving as witnesses a much less loving and
lovable sort. Despite the friend’s Christ-like demeanor, he was no martyr
and his death was not a sacrifice: Nothing was gained by it.
The nameless friend fits a type that can be found in at least three other
Radrigán works, Aurelio in Hechos consumados, Moisés in Pueblo del mal
amor [The People of Bad Love] (1986), and a character called “The Miracle
Worker” in El toro por las astas [The Bull by the Horns] (1982): the powerless prophet whom others look to in vain for salvation. Aurelio delivers his
wisdom in such a convoluted manner that no one understands him. Moisés, far from leading his people to the promised land, fails to prevent their
massacre. And the ironically named Miracle Worker is a comic Christ figure—a carpenter with a girlfriend named Magdalena, who has no wisdom
216
to impart to his disappointed and angry would-be followers other than,
“la vía’sta aentro de ustedes, así que si no la viven ustedes, ¿quien puee
vivirla?” (360) [Life is inside of you, and if you don’t live it, who can?].
To the people hungering for his miracles, he bluntly declares: “¡No hay
Milagros!” (360) [There are no miracles!]. Perhaps Radrigán characters
must testify to their own despair because neither other mortals nor supernatural forces will ever serve as the perfect witness that one might hope for.
Much as Allende’s promise never came to fruition, the longed-for savior
is always elusive. The witnesses who matter most to Radrigán are not the
characters, but rather the spectators, who are always implicitly invited to
assume responsibility for improving the world the characters depict. In a
1989 essay introducing La contienda humana [The Human Struggle] Radrigán writes, “cuando . . . [agrupados bajo El Telón] presentamos un país
desgarrado y desgarrador, estamos diciendo que ese es el estado actual de
coasas, que es desde allí donde debemos empezar a construir, no estamos
diciendo que debemos quedarnos lamiéndonos las heridas por los siglos
de los siglos” (7) [when . . . (united within El Telón) we portray the country
as broken and heartbreaking, we are saying that that is the actual state of
things, that we should start to build from there; we are not saying that we
should keep licking our wounds for all eternity].
EL INVITADO O LA TRANQUILIDAD NO SE PAGA CON
NADA [THE GUEST, OR TRANQUILTY IS PRICELESS] 1981
More than any other Radrígan work, this last play of the Redoble funebre trilogy openly confronts the spectators with their responsibility to witness. The dialogue between Pedro and Sara consistently breaks the “fourth
wall” between actor and audience, as the performers turn the tables on the
spectators and make them the object of their scrutiny. Under the actors’
gaze, the spectators become conscious of themselves as performers:
SARA. (Llamando) Ya po, entra. (Entra Pedro. Forzado, intranquilo). Habla. (Señala al público) ahí’stán. (255)
[SARA. (Calling.) All right then, come in. (Pedro enters, unwillingly,
not at all tranquil.) Speak. (Gesturing toward the audience.)
There they are. (124)]
The middle-aged couple, we learn, has something to ask us. But before
they can bring themselves to do so, Sara and Pedro must fi rst tell us the
story of their relationship’s decline. They perform a series of flashback skits
that speak to various episodes in their struggle to survive since a mysterious, malevolent, off-stage “Guest” invaded their lives, robbing them of
their paychecks, of desire to have children, of hope for a better future. The
flashbacks are such discrete entities that one could imagine them staged in
217
Brechtian style, with placard titles: The Television Appearance, The Boxing
Match, The Welfare Job Office, Hiding from the Guest, Fighting, The Day
We Met. In the two flashbacks that explicitly deal with types of performances, singing on a variety television show and boxing as entertainment
for a middle-class audience, we see the couple struggling to carve out their
own performances within prescripted structures that deform their truth to
conform to mass media consumerist ideology. As witnesses, while Sara and
Pedro fail each other, the media fails them both.
Their self-introductions, typical of testimonio, reinforce their connection to the other working poor of their socioeconomic class. The long list of
common names with which the characters identify indicates that they speak
for the common woman and the common man (257). The wide variety of
occupations and range of physical attributes they describe, however, also
counters a tendency to lump all the poor together. The poor are at once all
the same, all victims of Pinochet’s right-wing economic policies, and all different, individuals with divergent identities involved in an alienating struggle
for survival.
The media, heavily censored under Pinochet, is mocked as a laughably
inadequate witness to the grim reality experienced by people like Sara and
Pedro. Radrigán satirizes the escapism of an actual, immensely popular television program, Festival de la Una, and its host Enrique Maluenda’s trademark shout of “¡Afírmese usted compadre!” [Buck up buddy!] to announce a
segment of the show that always ended with prizes for the guest.21 Faint from
lack of food, Sara competes in a segment with the parodic title of “¡Anímese
usted, Muerta de Hambre!” (260) [Cheer Up, Ms. Dying-of-Hunger!
(130)]. Her attempt to win cash by singing a song is interrupted by an emergency news flash that turns out to be nothing more than a society wedding
announcement, the playwright’s jab at how government-controlled media
slighted reporting on dire economic news in favor of lighter fare. The media
machine pretends that the obscene gap between rich and poor does not exist,
that the lives of the rich and famous are the general rule. Ignoring Sara’s obvious poverty, the show awards her an absurd consolation prize: a windshield
cleaner for the personal vehicle she, of course, does not own (261).
At the same time as the media ignores poverty, it sponsors performances
that exacerbate inequalities: If he wins his boxing match, Pedro learns, he
will be beaten up rather than rewarded, because it is his opponent who
is being promoted as the rising star. Yet television’s illusory glamor easily
seduces the disenfranchised: A woman who prepares martini mix on a TV
commercial fuels Pedro’s sexual fantasies. The characters, however, are not
totally duped. Alluding to one of the regime’s favored performance opiates,
the cult of soccer, Pedro jokes that if 500 lives were lost in an earthquake,
the headlines would trumpet the national soccer team’s “heroic deed” in
winning despite 500 fewer fans.
An even more inadequate witness than the media is the Guest himself. Asked who or what the Guest symbolizes, Radrigán answers with a
218
refreshing lack of authorial coyness: “Pinochet” (personal interview). To
call Pinochet “the Guest” emphasizes a single fact about the dictator’s rule,
that a large percentage, perhaps the majority, of Chileans at least initially
supported the coup that brought him to power. 22 The same public that
“invited” him, the play suggests, has the responsibility to oust him. At
the same time, the moniker “The Guest” uses dark humor to warn that
dislodging the military dictator will prove far more difficult than ridding
oneself of unwanted company. Finally, by implicitly asking “Who is it that
really wants him here?” the play calls attention to how the majority of
Pinochet’s supporters came from the upper middle and upper class.
El invitado prods us to contrast the role of an adequate witness with
that of a repressive spy. Both the witness and the spy rely on their sense of
sight and hearing. Yet while the former uses information gathered in order
to tell the truth of what happened to a victim, in order to dress the wound,
the latter uses information in order to further victimize, to pour salt in the
wound. During his long self-appointed reign, Pinochet appeared to have
eyes and ears everywhere, a sinister presence dramatized by the scene in
which Sara and Pedro move their chest of drawers to try to block his view
of their bed, thus ending his intrusion into their most intimate moments.
The play both denigrates Pinochet as a Peeping Tom and magnifies him as
an Orwellian force that makes privacy obsolete. A big man with a welltrimmed mustache that evoked Hitler to his detractors and grandpa to his
supporters, Pinochet’s image was ubiquitous: on television, in the media,
on billboards, and even in unflattering graffiti depicting him as a pig or as
“Pinocchio,” as opponents nicknamed him. His incongruously thin, high
voice could often be heard on the radio (Timerman 70). On the one hand,
the middle-of-the-night raids in working-class neighborhoods, the houseto-house searches, the beatings and arrests of “vagrants” begging for food
were all associated with Pinochet. And on the other hand, the free candy
handed out to poor children, the cartoons shown to entertain them, the
makeshift jobs organized to keep their parents busy, the enforced order in
the streets were also linked to him (Timerman 67–77). As Catherine Boyle
notes, Sara and Pedro’s home serves as a metaphor for a nation under surveillance (128). Chilean opponents of dictatorship, like the inmates in the
prison cells arranged around a central spy tower, the panopticon famously
described by Michel Foucault, might never know for sure whether they
were being observed at any particular moment, but they always had the
sense that someone might be checking up on them.
The most important witness in El invitado, however, is neither the guest
nor the characters: The frame of the action implicates the spectator. At the
beginning the characters announce that they have a question for the audience; at the end they fi nally spit out their concern: “querimos que los digan
como se acostumbraron a vivir con el Invitao . . . (274) [we want you to
tell us how you got used to living with the Guest . . . (143)]. In effect, they
demand that the spectator testify to his or her own experience. During the
219
dictatorship, according to Radrigán, the vast majority of audience members
simply responded with silence, implicating themselves as absent would-be
witnesses. Yet in one recent postdictatorship production that I saw staged
by the tiny “No Mas” [No More] theater company in Santiago in August
2005, some members of the audience of less than a dozen people felt moved
to actually call out and respond with brief, disjointed confessions such as
“I left the country” and “I became a poet.” In the wake of physical and
psychic violence, sometimes testimony, however awkward, may be the only
possible self-defense.
HECHOS CONSUMADOS [FINISHED
FROM THE START] 1981
Hechos consumados adds a mystical complication to the problem of witnessing: Who will serve as witnesses to the “disappeared” victims of political
repression? And are we witnesses to them or are they witnesses to us? Where
are the souls of those who were executed and hastily disposed of, never to be
seen again, or to be identified only years later when their remains are recovered from unmarked graves? A surreal motif laced through an otherwise
naturalistic plot—a constant stream of mysterious people that walks by for
no apparent reason—reminds us that the disappeared have never been erased
from social memory. The stage directions describe the parade of humanity as
invisible to the spectators. They are, however, visible to the main characters,
who react with a blend of wonder, fear, and empathy. The spectators can only
“see” the disappeared through the descriptions of Marta and Emilio, two
homeless strangers squatting on an empty lot. Marta and Emilio’s testimony,
however, proves insufficient: They describe the invisible essences only in the
most general terms—male and female, young and old—leaving the spectators
free to picture them as they will. Asked to witness something they cannot literally see, the spectators are therefore challenged to fill in the memory blanks,
to consider how they can use their imagination to testify to violence most of
them never experienced directly.
Besides being asked to witness the atrocity of “disappearance,” the spectator to Hechos is also prodded to acknowledge the less spectacular but also
devastating violence inflicted by the dictatorship’s neoliberal economic policies. Both the male protagonist, Emilio, and his antagonist, Miguel, come
from an underclass that grew larger and more desperate, even as the national
economy’s growth and low inflation won international recognition as a supposed “economic miracle.” The two characters share a history of work in
textile factories, an industry that Radrigán knew intimately from years of
experience on its machinery and in its unions, an industry devastated by sudden elimination of tariffs on cheap foreign imports and by new pro-business
labor laws. Suddenly union organizing was banned, wages slashed, and working days extended at times to twelve hours. Meanwhile, high unemployment
220
made it easy to replace any workers who protested (Winn 127–132). Emilio is
the worker who has already lost everything. Since many firms, especially those
that had made the decision to train workers on new technologies, refused to
hire people over the age of thirty, a middle-aged man like Emilio faced a lifetime of unemployment (Winn 134). When a factory went bankrupt, as many
did (particularly in 1982–1983, making Radrigán’s play seem prophetic of a
devastating trend), workers could lose severance pay and pensions overnight.
Miguel is the worker who is barely hanging on, working longer and longer
hours only to fall further and further behind. Though he clearly feels some
sympathy toward the defiant Emilio, their very similarities terrify him. Miguel
dreads ending up like his counterpart: hungry and humiliated despite a savage
defense of his dignity as a human being. Under different circumstances, they
might have been friends. Instead, when Emilio defies Miguel’s order to move
along, economic desperation pushes them into mortal conflict.
Though Emilio proves perceptive and courageous, he cannot serve as
the play’s ideal witness because he is marked for death, and in a sense has
already died. He exists in a kind of purgatory, neither fully alive nor truly
dead, yet already identifying strongly with the dead, bringing to mind the
ghostly characters in the Latin American classic Pedro Paramo, by Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo. When Emilio and Marta recount the loss of their
loved ones and livelihood, the folksy lyricism of their language, though
inflected by urban Chile rather than rural Mexico, nevertheless recalls
how Rulfo’s characters use deceptively simple turns of phrase with heavy
symbolic and emotional loads. For example, the narrator of Rulfo’s 1953
short story “Nos han dado la tierra” [They Gave Us the Land] takes a look
around at the barren stretch of earth his people have been deeded by the
government and laments:
No, el llano no es cosa que sirva. No hay ni Conejos ni pájaros. No
hay nada. A no ser unos cuantos huizaches trespeleques y una que
otra manchita de sacate con las hojas enroscadas; a no ser eso, no hay
nada. (40)
[No, the plain is no good for anything. There are no rabbits or birds.
There’s nothing. Except a few scrawny huizache trees and a patch or
two of grass with the blades curled up; if it weren’t for them, there
wouldn’t be anything] (12–13).]23
In an urban variation on Rulfo’s metaphor, Hechos’s setting on an empty
lot on the outskirts of the capital city also uses barren land as an image for
a people bereft of hope:
EMILIO. ¿Jardines? . . . ¿Quedan?
MARTA. Casi na. (Pausa) Es la rabia más grande que tengo contra
la gente: s’encerraron en las casas y dejaron morirse los jardines.
221
EMILIO. Hubiera sío eso nomás.
MARTA. Pero jue lo peor . . . Ahora era el tiempo de los claveles, de
los medallones y de las dalias; después venia el tiempo de los gladiolos y de los crisantemos dobles. Se veía too tan bonito lleno de
colores . . . Pero dejaron secarse los jardines y yo digo ¿que v’hacer
la gente cuando llegue la primavera y no haya ninguna flor? (287)
[EMILIO. Gardens? . . . There any left?
MARTA. Almost none. (Pause.) That’s what makes me real mad at
people: they locked themselves up in their houses and let the gardens die.
EMILIO. If only that was all they did.
MARTA. But it was the worst . . . This was the time for the carnations, for the mums, and the dahlias, afterwards came the time
for the gladiolas and the giant mums. Everything looked so pretty,
full of color . . . But they let the gardens dry up. And I say: what’s
folks gonna do when spring comes and there ain’t no flowers?
(159–160)]
Rulfo’s influence shows in both the plaintive tone and in the importance
placed on the relationship with nature, as evidenced by the insistence on
the key word, “gardens.” For Radrigán too the desiccated earth serves as a
figure for the inner death of the characters.
In both Rulfo’s and Radrigán’s work, the characters speak in short,
repetitive sentences that cut to the heart of whatever matter they discuss.
In the Rulfo passage cited earlier, the word “no” occurs seven times in
four short sentences, underscoring the hopelessness of the situation for the
would-be farmers. The Radrigán passage similarly repeats the announcement of the death-by-neglect of the gardens twice and employs a phrase
that doubles negatives (grammatically correct in Spanish), “no haya ninguna flor,” underscoring both the dire plight of urban workers and the
consequences of the middle class’s abdication of responsibility.
Emilio’s physical death ensues from his adamant refusal to compromise
his principles, recalling Salvador Allende, who refused to abandon the presidential palace even as it was bombed and invaded by Pinochet’s troops. In
a similar act of suicidal defiance, Emilio refuses to budge, refuses to move
even a few feet to the other side of a property line. Yet it would be a stretch
to read the penniless Emilio as a figure for Allende, who was a cultured
politician, an eloquent speaker from Chile’s privileged class. And Miguel is
no Pinochet. A victim of forces more powerful than he, if anything, his inadequacy as a witness stems from his habit, like the lowest ranking soldier, of
following orders without question.
The prophetic figure of Aurelio cannot witness because he focuses almost
entirely on the future, not the past nor the present, foretelling the death of
Emilio. And besides, he speaks in such conundrums that his testimony cannot be understood by ordinary people.
That leaves Marta, a witness who embodies the will to live, as evidenced
by her affinity for flora and her narrow escape from drowning. Accidental
witnessing almost costs Marta her life, as she is thrown in a canal by some
men whom she accidentally spies disposing of a body. As in Sin motivo, witnessing has its dangers. Nevertheless, in the end Marta once again assumes
the function of a witness, watching powerlessly as Miguel clubs Emilio to
death, screaming the final question to the audience: “¿Qué hicieron con
nosotros? ¿Qué recrestas hicieron con nosotros?” (315). [What did they do
to us? What the hell did they do to us? (187).] The most comprehending witness of the disappeared has himself disappeared, leaving Marta as a witness,
who then turns to the audience, passing the responsibility along to us and
planting the question in the spectator’s mind: Who will be the next victim?
The original production of Hechos was performed by El Telón in some of
the poorest shantytowns of Santiago: La Victoria, La Pintana, Lo Hermida,
San Gregorio. Under the direction of Nelson Brodt, with a production budget of less than $100, there was no set, sound, or lighting design. The stage
properties consisted of a clothesline, a few items of clothing, two large cloth
sacks, four logs set in a square and surrounded by stones, and a couple of
empty tin cans from which the characters drink their tea. When the play was
performed outdoors, if a stray dog wandered onto the playing area, the actor
playing Emilio (Pepe Herrera) would improvise and pretend that the dog
was part of the action (personal interview). When the play was performed
indoors, the company indulged in a single low-tech “special effect”: a black
wire to hang the clothes across the stage so as to suspend them in the air as if
by magic. Silvia Marín, who played Marta, prepared for the role by spending
some time with a couple who were homeless yet nevertheless took the trouble
to gather rainwater in order to carefully hand-wash their clothes in a nylon
bag dug into a hole in the ground. Despite their difficult circumstances, the
woman had an air of optimism about her that Marín admired. On stage,
Marín recalls, she tried to reproduce that optimism, down to the woman’s
gesture of clasping her hands in front of her lap as she spoke, as if she were
respectful of her husband and respectful of life itself (personal interview).
In 1999, the Chilean National Theater staged a well-funded and technologically sophisticated production of the play. Directed by one of Chile’s
most innovative and well-respected young directors, Alfredo Castro, Hechos
was thus consecrated as part of the national dramatic canon. Castro’s production adopted a minimalist aesthetic that gave the production a sleek,
clean look. 24 Rodrigo Vega’s set consisted of a bare raked stage and a slanted
ceiling that mirrored each other, creating the shape of a book on its side,
its “spine” upstage, its “covers” opening downstage, toward the audience.
The characters entered and exited from upstage, where a moat allowed the
security guard, Miguel, to approach while visible only from the waist down.
His work boots and the club he carried in his hand, as well as the threat they
posed, were thus emphasized. The moat was also used as a trench along the
entire back of the stage to “float” past black-and-white drawings of heads
223
and hands symbolizing the disappeared. The gulf between the world of the
disappeared and the world of the living thus appeared simultaneously tiny
and infinite.
Since the stage was devoid of any furnishings or other properties, except
for a pile of Marta’s clothes, the lights, designed by Sergio Contreras, took
on great significance. Light on the stage floor and ceiling emphasized a warm
ochre floor that recalled both earth and sun. Blue light along the gap created
the effect of a horizon. The warm stage colors contrasted with costumes,
designed by Pablo Núñez, that assigned each character a symbolic color:
black for Emilio, white for Marta, and gray for Miguel.
In accordance with the scenic design, rather than attempt a realistic depiction of poverty, the actors represented stylized indigence. Amparo Noguera
was a glamorous Marta, clad in a white coat with beautifully groomed tresses
that dangled to her waist, her hands and bare feet perfectly manicured. As
Emilio, José Soza wore a white shirt and a black suit; his polished black leather
shoes only revealed holes in the soles when he sat down on the stage floor, his
feet stretched out ahead of him. As he delivered the play’s climactic speech,
Emilio (Soza) clutched Marta (Noguera) to him and spoke his lines over the
back of her shoulder, as if they were the leads of a television soap opera:
“Somos hechos consumaos, no tuvimos arte ni parte en nosotros
mismos; los hicieron y los dijeron: ‘Aqui están, vayan p’allá, pero no los
dijeron porque los habían hecho ni a qué teníamos que ir a ese lao que
no conocíamos . . . A ese lao aonde lo único seguro que había, era que
teníamos que morir . . . ’” (310).
[We’re finished from the start, we didn’t have no say in ourselves; they
made us and they told us: ‘Here you are, go over there,’ but they didn’t
tell us why they had made us or why we had to go over to that side that
we didn’t know . . . to that side where the only sure thing was that we
had to die . . . (182).]
Marta’s retort, “¿De qué ’stai difariando ahora?” [What you delusionating ’bout now?], which could be delivered in a light, offhanded manner,
was instead loaded with the weight of forced emotion underscored by heartstring-tugging music. Poverty was cleaned up and sentimentalized, making it
more attractive but requiring less of the spectator-as-witness.
Perhaps the most remarkable change from the original staging was in the
portrayal of Aurelio, the mysterious prophet of Emilio’s death who speaks
entirely in poetic metaphors that recall one of Shakespeare’s fools on a flight
of wordplay. Played by Benjamín Vicuña in Castro’s production, Aurelio was
dressed as a schoolboy in a tattered school blazer and short pants, and made
to look as if he’d been beaten and bloodied. Aurelio had unambiguously
become one of the disappeared, a directorial decision underscored by having his image flash in black-and-white across the upstage area, in the same
manner as the rest of the victims. The character thus lost his other-worldly
224
dimension and became more tightly integrated into the rest of the play. The
tighter knitting of the plot created a more naturalistic, apparently less random and chaotic theatrical universe, which may have made the work more
accessible yet sacrificed some of its strange beauty.
PUEBLO DEL MAL AMOR [PEOPLE OF BAD LOVE] 1986
The mysterious off-stage stream of people visible to the characters in Hechos
consumados takes center stage in one of Radrigán’s next major plays, Pueblo
del mal amor. The seventeen characters in Pueblo at once recall the disappeared, the Jews of the Biblical exodus, and the many Chileans forcibly
resettled from bulldozed shantytown homes. Besides the notable increase
in the number of characters from Radrigán’s typically small casts, Pueblo
marks a more significant shift, from an exploration of the character-as-witness and a confrontation of the spectator-as-witness to a consideration of the
role of the author-as-witness. Pueblo’s central character is an author-figure,
a kind of poet/historian, the first and only chronicler of a lost people. As the
author dwells among the memories of his dead and tries to commit their tragedy to writing, his struggle with the construction of narrative raises several
issues about truth and time in testimonial theater. In order to grapple with
these issues, Radrigán crafts a complicated blend of allegory and testimonio,
similar in some ways to Varela’s Crónica and Gambaro’s Atando cabos, that
might be best described as a meta-testimonio, for how it consistently calls
attention to itself as a testimonio under construction. The drama then is as
much about the difficulty of preserving meaningful, truthful memory in the
face of the passage of time as it is about the event, or rather type of event, to
which it testifies.
Pueblo’s protagonist, Vicente, is the only survivor of a massacre. As in
Rulfo’s town of Comala in Pedro Páramo, the characters other than the
protagonist are dead, yet embody memory. They both tell their stories and at
times perform them as if they were taking place in the present.25 All seventeen
characters, we learn, were forcibly evicted and relocated by the authorities,
transported by bus to a remote area far from the impoverished shantytown
that had been the only community they knew. As they survey the barren
land, they immediately realize that they cannot possibly survive there, and
begin to wander from place to place in search of a town that will take them
in. But no matter where they go, they are turned away by others who settled
there before them. One of their leaders, a young firebrand with the biblical
name David, wants to invade another community and illegally enter empty
homes. But an older and more patient leader, the also symbolically named
Moisés, instead negotiates with the authorities and suggests using the time of
homelessness as a phase of contemplation that could lead the community to
self-knowledge. After years of fruitlessly following Moisés, the dispossessed
finally lose patience, kill their leader, and follow David, attempting to forcibly
225
insert themselves into an unwilling community. The authorities respond by
massacring all the would-be new settlers except Vicente, the author, who
manages to escape and fulfill Moisés’s commandment to chronicle the fate
of his people.
Pueblo was staged with solid fi nancial backing from the Catholic University in Santiago, which showcased it as the fi rst production of its 1986–
1987 season. The director, Raúl Osorio, and the design team aimed at
what Osorio described as a “realism in a dream” staging that emphasized
the details of every day life yet also arranged ordinary objects so as to transcend realism (personal interview). For example, the most striking element
in the scenic design was an enormous fragment of an actual crumbling
stone wall found by the sculptor Mario Irarrázabal in the ruins of an abandoned shantytown. The wall functioned as a Wailing Wall for prayer, as a
symbol for the site of executions, and as the incongruous indoor boundary
of a room, with furniture placed in front of it at odd angles. “Since the
text seemed closer to an abstract painting than to narrative realism, I tried
to create a sense of musical composition in my direction, in which images
would synchronize, contradict, surge, fade, and so forth,” Osorio recalled
(personal interview).
Sound designer Patricio Solovera said he created “broken sounds that
would echo the broken nation” (personal interview). To create the round
tones of a gong marking time, for instance, Solovera opened a piano, tied
some of the strings together, and struck them with an iron bar. The amplified sound of his fi ngers running through rice—a harsh, nervous rattle—
accompanied the characters’ search for new land. And an Andean flute
fashioned from a bird’s leg produced a very high-pitched, thin sound that
represented pain.
Lighting designer Ramón C. López exaggerated the contrasts between
light and dark in order to heighten the sense of the characters’ vulnerability, using light to expose and attack them (López 37). 26
The actors, Osorio said, purchased much of their clothing—dark, somber suits and skirts typical of dress in southern Chile—and stage properties
from actual shantytown dwellers, not out of fi nancial necessity, but because
they felt that their performances would be somehow more authentic if they
worked with “real” objects rather than with specially designed costumes
and stage properties from a warehouse. Finally, the sense of being watched
by Pinochet’s government was also real, since the dictatorship, though on
the wane, was not to end for another four years. Osorio recalled that the
rector of the university would regularly telephone him to ask: “‘Is it really
necessary to have actors who are known communists in the cast?’ I just told
him that those were the best actors for the roles” (personal interview).
Pueblo may also have made the rector uneasy because of its obvious
protest of the Pinochet effort to cleanse the capital of shantytowns, an
effort that involved bulldozing fl imsy structures that housed thousands of
poor people and relocating their inhabitants far from the Santiago center.
226
Though forced evictions of the urban poor to the outskirts of the capital
had been practiced in Chile since at least the 1950s, between 1979 and
1985 the Pinochet government stepped up efforts to push the poor out of
valuable land with high potential for real estate development. Some 30,000
residents were relocated to small new houses that may have provided better shelter than their ramshackle shantytown dwellings but were located in
areas that lacked basic services such as drinking water, schools, health services, and job opportunities (Rubilar Donoso 12). People fortunate enough
to have jobs in the city were forced to spend many hours on buses to commute to work. In the 1980s some shantytowns became centers of opposition to the dictatorship, with residents building barricades in the streets
and throwing stones at army tanks. The military responded with reprisals:
arrests, beatings, and killings (Schneider 1–16).
Protests to the abuses of the dictatorship, not just to eradications but
to the entire range of repression, from censorship to disappearance, were
uncoordinated. 27 The internal divisions within the Left that had helped lead
to Allende’s downfall were only exacerbated after his death. In Pueblo, the
characters of David and Moisés personify the primary division, between
those who would resort to armed struggle and those who would attempt
reform through nonviolent political participation. David’s language echoes
the rhetoric of guerrilla groups such as the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda
Revolucionario) [Movement of the Revolutionary Left] that argued that
only violent opposition stood any chance of bringing down the dictatorship: “¡Ya está bueno de arrastrarse, ya está bueno de rogar! Si seguimos
así van a pasar mil años y nunca vamos a tener dónde echar los huesos: esto tiene que terminar” (334). [Enough dragging ourselves around,
enough begging! If we go on like this a thousand years will go by and still
we won’t have a place to rest our bones: this has to end.] David’s rhetoric
recalls, for instance, that of a young shantytown and university activist,
Carlos, interviewed by journalist Patricia Politzer, who describes in detail
how satisfying it was to fight back against the police with stones and clubs
(Fear in Chile 60–63). Carlos’s account betrays how such a tactic often
comes at the cost of human life, since one of his schoolmates, a diabetic
whom police tortured and denied insulin, did not survive the reprisals (65).
Yet his friend’s assassination only strengthens Carlos’s resolve: “We can’t
wait for them to kill us the way they killed Patricio Manzano” (63). In
Pueblo, David’s path of violent, open rebellion is depicted as swift and certain suicide: All the characters are executed by the authorities. On the other
hand, the Moisés path of attempted negotiation only leads to a slow death,
as the characters begin dying off one by one: Ana dies in childbirth for lack
of medical attention; Javier dies of a beating incurred for stealing fruit;
Alberto commits suicide. Ironically, by the time Moisés fi nds the strength
to eloquently express his opposition to violence, his former followers have
decided to assassinate him. Like Salvador Allende, Moisés gives his most
227
moving speech immediately before his death. Both violence and nonviolence, then, lead to the same bleak defeat.
As Vicente, an old man with a failing memory, attempts to extrude
some truth from the disaster, he struggles with many of the same challenges faced by all writers of testimonio: not only what are the facts, but
more importantly, how to assign causality and responsibility? Testimonio, as Kimberly A. Nance notes in Can Literature Promote Justice?, can
accuse or defend, praise or blame, persuade or dissuade. And Radrigán’s
earlier testimonios do exactly that, implicitly accusing the spectators of
indifference or complicity and challenging them to respond. Isabel’s fi nal
demand—“Talk to me!”—and Marta’s last words—“How did we let this
happen?—are directed to us. Pueblo, by contrast, focuses its ire on the
character of the author. Respecting the fourth wall, the other characters
nudge, hector, command, challenge, and confront Vicente. “Tu cuaderno,
Vicente; mira tu cuaderno” (300) [Your notebook, Vicente; look at your
notebook], Ana urges at the beginning of the play, when he cannot recall
who he is or where he is. Though writing is supposedly an aid to memory,
Vicente’s notes explain little. Meanwhile, the characters quibble about the
factual details, such as whether Moisés came from the north or not (307).
But more importantly, they also disagree about matters of judgment: Was
he a good man or a cruel tyrant (307–308)?
The community wants to know who to blame and looks to Vicente to
provide a kind of truth rooted in the assignment of responsibility. Vicente’s
inability to provide that judgment frustrates them:
LUISA. ¿Que escribiste? ¿Hay un culpable?
VICENTE. No lo sé.
LUISA. ¿Como que no sabes? Tú escribes todo lo que pasa. ¿Qué
pusiste?
VICENTE. Nada. (327)
[LUISA. What did you write? Is there a guilty one?
VICENTE. I don’t know.
LUISA. What do you mean you don’t know? You write down everything that happens. What did you say?
VICENTE. Nothing.]
Arturo mocks him before the others: ¡Miren, y era él el que iba a escribir
la verdad! (309). [Look, and he was the one who was going to write the
truth!] With a gentler demeanor, Moisés also accuses him of not writing
the truth and urges and him to do so (328). But when Vicente responds by
telling Moisés a difficult truth, that the people have lost faith in him, the
leader refuses to believe it (328). Their exchange of words exemplifies a
Cassandra-like quandary: If the would-be testimonial author keeps quiet,
disaster will befall; but when he speaks the truth, no one believes him.
228
In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur offers several insights about the relationships among our conceptions of time and the construction of historical
and fictional narrative that shed light on testimonio in general and Pueblo
in particular. Ricoeur describes the relationship between historical and fictional narrative as an “interweaving,” in which historiography reconfigures
and emplots like fiction, whereas fictional narrative “is quasi-historical to
the extent that the unreal events that it relates are past facts for the narrative voice that addresses itself to the reader” (3:190). Fictional testimonios,
I would add, combine both types of narrative in a single genre, using a
fictional event to allude to a real event, or type of event, in order to protest a specific injustice. For instance, while the particular forced eviction
depicted in Pueblo never took place, and the community called Otoñal is
Radrigán’s invention, forced evictions in Chile under dictatorship are a
historical fact. As Radrigán told one journalist at the time about the play’s
setting: “Sucede en las afueras de Santiago, en una imaginaria Población
“Otoño,” [sic] pero podría transcurrir en cualquier lugar donde exista
gente sin hogar” (“Juan Radrigán”). [It takes place on the outskirts of Santiago, in an imaginary shantytown called “Autumn,” but it could happen
anywhere where there are people without homes.]
One difficult choice for the testimonial author, Radrigán suggests in
Pueblo, is how to balance the proportions of historical and fictional narrative. How faithful to journalistic fact should one remain and how much
may one invent and stray into the realm of poetry? Does the supplement
of memory with imagination enhance witnessing (as Gambaro suggests in
Atando cabos) or does it simply substitute fiction for truth? For instance,
unlike the characters in Radrigán’s earlier testimonios, Pueblo’s characters
do not speak in slang; they speak in a diction that ranges from standard to
elevated speech, a stylistic decision that the characters themselves disparage. When Luis tells Vicente that as a poet he has “una especie de oscura
intuición” [a kind of dark intuition], Vicente repeats the phrase in awe,
“¿Una especie de oscura intuición? ¡Tú eres Luis, no puedes hablar así:
apenas sabías leer!” (304). [A kind of dark intuition? You are Luis, you
can’t talk like that: you barely knew how to read!] As he listens to his own
character, the author doubts the veracity of the entity he has created. Radrigán’s meta-testimonio anticipates through concrete example a theoretical
question that later came to preoccupy literary critics: If part of testimonio’s
contestatory power comes from its ability to challenge literature, once it
becomes literature, does it lose that power (Beverley, “Margin” 38–39)?
If Luis, the “subaltern,” begins to speak in the language of the educated
elite, Radrigán goes further than those who would ask if Luis remains subaltern and asks: Is Luis still Luis? The character of David plainly dismisses
Vicente’s narrative as a distortion:
DAVID. . . . Reconstruye lo que sucedió, eres nuestro único testigo.”
VICENTE. ¡Lo hice, lo escribí todo!
229
DAVID. No, Vicente, no lo hiciste. No éramos palabras bonitas, no
éramos poemas: éramos gente que buscaba un lugar donde vivir y
no se lo permitieron. (330)
[DAVID. Reconstruct what happened, you are our only witness.
VICENTE. I did, I wrote everything!
DAVID. No, Vicente, no you didn’t. We were not pretty words, we
were not poems: we were people who were looking for a place to
live and were not allowed to.]
Radrigán speaks to himself through his characters, doubting whether his
increased use of poetic language has dulled the political import of his theater. By leveling the criticism himself and inserting it in the play, he alerts the
spectators or readers to the discrepancy between fact and fiction, turning
their attention to the artifice of fiction and asking them not to lose sight of
the underlying, unpoetic reality.
Ricoeur argues that historical narrative mediates between mythic time
and lived time as it employs calendar time to identify founding events and
units of measurement that allow us to measure the distance from foundational events, such as the birth of Christ, to subsequent or prior events (Time
and Narrative 3:105–109). The use of days, months, years, and so forth to
describe events, according to Ricoeur, “cosmologizes lived time and humanizes cosmic time” (109). In testimonio, events related in calendar time perform a similar function, connecting cosmic injustice to individual human
suffering. In the case of allegorical testimonio, a reference to time—a date,
an individual’s age, a time of year—can serve as a kind of glue that helps
bond the fictional to the non-fictional. As we saw with Gambaro’s Atando
cabos, the story of one teenage girl’s assassination connected mythic time
and biblical injustice, a hecatomb, to the quotidian suffering of a mother who
has lost her daughter. A single measure of calendar time, the fifteen-year life
span of the girl, cements her allegorical function as a figure for actual teenagers killed by the Argentine military and to whom the play was dedicated.
In Pueblo, Radrigán brilliantly uses the conspicuous absence of calendar
time to heighten the work’s allegorical resonance. The play never specifies
when the community was evicted; David says that it was “years” before they
decide to rebel against Moisés, but he never says how many years (354).
And we don’t know how many years it has been before the characters-asmemories come back to haunt Vicente with their demands that he testify to
their existence and extermination. The absence of dates and other measures
of time leaves the spectator’s imagination free to hit upon the date that is
never mentioned but that I would contend is what Ricoeur would call the
“axial moment,” the zero point (Time and Narrative 106), around which all
other events revolve: September 11, 1973. The date of the coup, it seems to
me, is the date of the disaster, the moment that the play links allegorically
to the biblical exodus from Egypt. The destruction of Otoñal becomes an
allegory for the destruction of shantytowns in general, but more importantly,
230
the expulsion of the townspeople and their subsequent massacre become an
allegory for the destruction the coup wrought upon the nation. Like the wandering shantytown dwellers who have no idea when, or if, they might find a
resting place, Chileans in 1986 had no idea when, or if, democracy might be
restored. The death of the shantytown represents the metaphorical, and literal, death of Chileans in the post-coup era, Chileans who killed their leader
(Moisés/Allende) and with him killed the utopian dream of a socialist nation.
Unlike in Atando cabos, where the structure is cyclical and the protagonist
ends with her vow to return in an endless future, in Pueblo there is almost
no sense of a future. The ending, Vicente’s poem, which he reads from his
notebook, reads as an epitaph for the nation that concludes with a past-tense
description of Chile: “Vivían en un país duro de norte y verde de sur; un país
con lagos, lluvias, y volcanes . . . Un país que tenía un corazón grande, loco
y triste” (357). [They lived in a country hard in the north and green in the
south; a country with lakes, rains, and volcanoes . . . A country that had a
heart that was big, crazy, and sad.]
The pessimism of Radrigán’s allegorical meta-testimonio complicates
Ricoeur’s optimistic model of reading and writing as a hermeneutic circle.
According to Ricoeur, the interweave of historical and fictional narrative does
not resolve the mystery of temporality but instead meditates on it productively: Our lack of complete understanding of time serves as imaginative fuel
to create works that reconfigure it, which in turn changes our understanding
of the world and leads to new creative works: “The mystery of time is not
equivalent to a prohibition directed against language. Rather it gives rise to
the exigence to think more and to speak differently” (Time and Narrative
3:274). Unlike Ricoeur, Radrigán is profoundly agnostic about the question
of whether writing has meaning. Pueblo leads one to wonder: Could the hermeneutic circle be no more productive than a dog chasing its tail? As a meditation on the mystery of temporality, the play suggests that writing leads only to
a greater plumbing of an infinite well of injustice and futility. The writer can
at best imperfectly record the holocaust; memory does not preclude repetition
of the horror.
Pueblo’s position comes perilously close to that of one of the characters,
Pedro, who laments:
Por nosotros nunca nadie sabrá la verdad, de toda historia hay tantas
versiones como personas intervienen en ella; pero si se juntan todas esas
versiones se obtiene solo una colosal mentira. (305)
[As for us, no one will ever know the truth, there are as many versions of
every story as there are people in it; but if you put together all those versions all you get is one colossal lie.]
Vicente nevertheless takes up his pen again at the end of the play; his actions
speak louder than Pedro’s words. But what will Vicente write about the moral
responsibility of the Left’s divided leaders and the moral responsibility of the
231
author himself, whose obligation to testify impedes full participation in the
life of his community and triggers what has come to be known as “survivor
guilt”? And what difference, if any, will it make? While the act of shaping a
testimonio, Radrigán suggests, gives meaning to the lives of both the subjects
and the crafter of the narrative, at the same time, it demands a sacrifice in
the present for the sake of a possibly fruitless attempt to preserve the past
truthfully for an unknowable future.
By way of a conclusion that comes full circle, it seems fitting to briefly
compare Radrigán and Varela’s invocations of memory. While both playwrights attempt to stir memory, there are significant differences between
their perspectives and their strategies, besides the emphasis on allegory in
Varela’s works and testimony in Radrigán’s. First, their class status significantly shapes their respective approaches. Since he is a member of the middle
class, Varela parodies and appeals to that social sector from the position of
an insider. The working class, when it appears in his plays, is viewed from the
perspective of the middle class, whether as a threat (Cuentos) or as a possible
savior (Alfonso and Clotilde). By contrast, Radrigán’s works, and Radrigán’s
characters, maintain the position of outsiders to the middle and upper classes.
From the perspective of the working class, encounters between classes are
often fraught with a consciousness of exploitation: Isabel cleans all day only
to discover that the boss wants to “pay” her with cheap wine. When the
cross-class encounters turn comic—Pedro imagines that a lifetime of street
fights has prepared him for professional boxing—they nevertheless continue
to illuminate class exploitation.
Because even Allende’s supporters had to admit that his rule was brief and
chaotic, unlike the Uruguayan middle class, Radrigán had little or no culture
of nostalgia to combat. Particularly for the poor, no Chilean era compares to
the Uruguayan glory days of generous social welfare. The underclass had little
lost privilege to feel nostalgic about. Radrigán’s lament is thus more for what
might have been than for what was. Arguably, his work indulges in a kind
of nostalgia for the more just society that never materialized, for the utopian
promise that was never fulfilled. His characters often bemoan their fate with
the desperation of those whose last hope has been crushed. What Radrigán’s
characters miss, then, is not a time when they actually lived well but a time
when they dared to hope that they might one day live decently. In this context, nostalgia is often tinged with bitterness at the discrepancy between how
the future was imagined and how it turned out. For instance, El invitado’s
Sara comments with irony, “hace años que lloro y lamento el tiempo en que
era pobre, no porque ahora me vaya bien, sino porque me he convertío en
miserable” (257) [for years I’ve been crying and missing the time when I was
poor, not cuz I’m doing so good now, but cuz now I’m flat-out broke]. Varela
appeals to his primarily middle-class spectators to rid themselves of the illusion that they lost something they never really had; Radrigán asks his working-class, and dissident middle-class, spectators to acknowledge the loss of
what they could have had.
Epilogue
Can these plays have a life today? And if so, how will they be staged by
directors and received by spectators, in times and places distant from South
America under dictatorship? Evidence gathered from a few recent productions indicates that while at least some of the works are indeed stageworthy
and speak to contemporary audiences, what they say now must necessarily
be quite different from what they whispered subversively in their earlier
incarnations. In these contemporary productions, love stories often tend to
overshadow political themes. The subject of dictatorship recedes, in some
cases degenerating into a general idea of apocalypse detached from any
specific event. In other cases, dictatorship, allegorized in the text to protect
against repression, is re-allegorized in postdictatorship productions as a
figure for one or more of today’s political crises.
When Thomas Otto Zinzi began to explore the possibility of staging
Varela’s Alfonso y Clotilde with the Rimini-based Teatro della Centena in
1998, the Uruguayan ambassador to Italy, concerned that Italians might
confuse Uruguay’s relatively small holocaust with neighboring Argentina’s
more severe repression, tried to convince him to stage a “happier” drama
(Zinzi personal interview). Yet Zinzi stuck with the play; the company
toured it sporadically for sixteen months, opening in the small town of
Montefiori Conca on June 18, 1998, and performing in ten other villages
in central and northern Italy as well as the major cities of Bologna, Torino,
and Rome. In Rome, the highlight of the tour, the company performed in
the Teatro dell’Orologio from March 9 to 14, 1999.
Zinzi’s production created an air of romanticism that highlighted the
underlying pathos of the relationship between the squabbling husband and
wife. Played by two actors far younger than the middle-aged Uruguayans
who premiered the roles, thirty-two-year-old Gianvito Banzi (Alfonso) and
the long-haired beauty Damiana Bertozzi (Clotilde), at age twenty-five,
depicted not an exhausted marriage but what Zinzi called “a love story
between Alfonso and Clotilde that cuts through and somehow exists upon
the tragedy” (personal interview).1 As the cast rehearsed on a beach in
Rimini, one of the most emblematic images of the production evolved, a
spoon-like position in which Banzi embraced Bertozzi from behind as the
Epilogue 233
couple lay on their side in the scene that Zinzi described as one in which
they “make love.” At the end of the play, the couple lay down again in the
spoon pose as the lights turned blue to indicate their impending death. The
tenderness of the moment contrasts with the textual stage direction, which
calls for a more farcical miming of sexual intercourse:
CLOTILDE. Vení acá. (Grita.) Vení. (Alfonso obedece como un
autómata. Se coloca detrás de ella, con las manos en el piso y
juntos inician los movimientos rituales del acto sexual.) (159)
[CLOTILDE: Come here. (Yells.) Come. Alfonso obeys like a robot.
He positions himself behind her with his hands on the ground
and together they begin the ritual movements of the sexual act.]
In Zinzi’s staging, the tragedy of Alfonso and Clotilde’s loss of memory
becomes just as much or more of a personal disaster than an allegory for
collective amnesia.
While Teatro della Centena’s production was not apolitical, it transformed the Uruguayan disappeared into a symbol for generic atrocity. The
set design, by Zinzi and Gladis Grossi, used mountains of sand to create a
world suggestive of buried bodies and to literalize the metaphor of people
who bury their heads in the sand (Zinzi personal interview). At the moment
when Paco (Maurizio Argán) dies, as the lights dimmed, the other two
actors would lift a sand-colored piece of cloth to reveal about ten terracotta
heads (sculpted by Ulricho Schettini), complete with human facial features,
emerging from the ground and staring at the audience. The moment lasted
only about five seconds before the set went dark and the heads were covered
again by the cloth. “I did not want to pay a service to Uruguay alone, by
staging an Uruguayan playwright not very well known in Italy. I wanted
to pay a service to the audience overall, punch them inside and ask them to
reflect on how bad human beings can be,” Zinzi said. He found that spectators most often associated the play with the Holocaust. According to Banzi,
however, spectators associated the play with a far wider variety of atrocities: “I believe that the audience often connected the play with the desaparecidos in Argentina, the tortures in Kosovo, the regimes of Pinochet and
Franco. Basically with every ghost of humanity that represents a moment of
horror in history.” Bertozzi summed up the lack of a specific location: “The
space was far away and very familiar at once; both geographically and culturally it could have been anywhere. The big themes are universal.”
Such an aura of universality, or what I consider a condemnation of evil
so vague as to lose its potency, oddly enough, may be acquired through the
passage of time, even when a play is restaged in its country of origin. One
would have thought that Gambaro’s La malasangre, restaged in Buenos
Aires in 2005, twenty-three years after its 1982 debut, would still constitute a powerful cry against a national disaster whose aftershocks are far
from over. The production team included Laura Yusem, who had directed
the earlier staging, and the designer Graciela Galán, who had created the
original set. Galán kept most of the original design elements, except for
the addition of a chessboard floor pattern that created the sensation of the
characters-as-pawns. Young actors well known for their work in television,
Carolina Fal and Joaquín Furriel played the romantic leads Dolores and
Rafael. Catalina Speroni played the docile mother and Lorenzo Quinteros
played the abusive father.
On the eve of the restaging, in an elegant proscenium stage theater that
seats several hundred spectators, the Teatro Regina, located among the
boutiques and cafes of the fashionable Avenida Santa Fe, Argentine newspapers were publishing almost daily updates on the search in neighboring
Uruguay for the body of María Claudia García, the daughter-in-law of
Argentine poet Juan Gelman, who was kidnapped by the Uruguayan military in 1976. Yet even in an uncensored press under a democratic government, no reviewers of Malasangre drew any connection to contemporary
events. While some reviewers mentioned that in 1982 the work had served
as an allegory for dictatorship, they apparently discerned no relationship
to still ongoing efforts to recover remains of bodies and prosecute human
rights offenders. On the contrary, as in the case of the Italian production
of Alfonso and Clotilde, words like “universal” and “global” dominated
reviewers’ descriptions, as if the atrocities alluded to in Malasangre had
taken place on some distant continent. Writing for La Prensa, Juan Carlos
Fontana euphemistically drew the connection to 1980s dictatorship as “la
politica de aquellos años de dolor y terror” [the policies of those years of
pain and terror] yet concluded that the 2005 production acquired “matices
más universales, globalizadores” [more universal, global tones] yet was also
“algo de anacronico” [somewhat anachronistic]. The headline on Ernesto
Schoo’s review for La Nacion put it more derogatorily: “La malasangre”
no es lo que era antes [“La malasangre” is not what it once was]. Both Fontana and Schoo noted that the acting relied too heavily on melodramatic
gestures that failed to convey the weight of the text.
When I saw the production on August 17, 2005, spectators appeared
largely unmoved by the performance and to my surprise actually laughed
(out of anxiety or out of contempt for the actors’ heavy-handedness?) at
some of the language that conveyed violence or tenderness, such as when the
father calls the mother “puta” [whore] or when Dolores suddenly declares
her love for Rafael. Besides acting marked by much screaming, crying, and
fl inging about of the arms, part of the reason for the audience’s unexpected
reaction may have been the music (Carmen Baliero), a set of deep, dark
chords that punctuated the end of every scene. The director, Yusem, angrily
denounced the spectators’ reaction as evidence of intellectual superficiality:
“I was afraid of doing Malasangre again. I doubted there would be interest
and I wasn’t mistaken. The military didn’t want thirty thousand dead; they
wanted people to stop thinking and they managed it” (personal interview).
The Buenos Aires spectators who saw Malasangre in 2005, however, most
Epilogue 235
likely came from a less dissident social sector than those who viewed the
work in 1982. By now Gambaro has become a canonical figure in Argentine theater and it is no longer considered potentially dangerous to attend
theatrical performances of her work. Younger theater practitioners, such
as Teatro por la Identidad, formed in 2000 by the sons and daughters of
the disappeared, are perhaps now drawing the equivalent of the politically
committed audiences that Teatro Abierto once drew.
If Malasangre in Buenos Aires in 2005 retained only a tenuous link
to specifically Argentine atrocity, Malasangre in New York City in 2002,
as directed by Repertorio Español’s Alejandra Orozco, severed the link
entirely. Orozco’s production, which opened on February 5, 2002, received
little or no English-language press attention. 2 In an interview with Greyza
Baptista in the Spanish-language Periodico Hoy, however, Orozco said
that while the production remained faithful to letter of Gambaro’s text, it
was necessary to eliminate all references to Argentina in order to “update”
the work:
Sin embargo, para actualizarla tuvimos que quitar el tiempo y el espacio. Por eso en la pieza no hay un tiempo ni un lugar defi nido, lo cual
la hace muy interesante porque lo que resalta fi nalmente es la relacion
victima-victimario dentro de una familia. Además es una situation que
continúa desafortunadamente en el mundo.
[However, in order to update it, we had to take away the time and
space. That’s why in the work there is neither a defi nite time nor place,
which makes it very interesting because what comes to the fore in the
end is the victim–victimizer relationship within a family. And also it is
a situation that unfortunately continues in the world.]
Indeed, in the promotional photos distributed by Repertorio Español the
couple playing Rafael and Dolores wear costumes that recall modern dancers’ garb in their lack of temporal specificity and show off the actors’ sexualized bodies. In one photo, Dolores’s (Anilú Pardo) head is covered by
an orange bonnet fastened under the chin like a futuristic bathing cap.
Her athletic body conveys erotic strength through a long red, gauzy cloth
draped over bare legs and a tight white sleeveless leotard revealing welltoned arm muscles. She leans back seductively against an adoring Rafael
(Gonzalo Villanueva), whose black suspenders stretch over big shoulders in
a red shirt as he leans forward to clutch her hand and bring his face close
to her head. Like Zinzi in his approach to Varela’s work, Orozco blunts
Gambaro’s political edge, as the love story once again takes priority over
some now vague, unspecified evil wrenched from historical context. Orozco’s explanation of her decision to emphasize the domestic over the public
and detach Malasangre entirely from Argentina assumes that a play fi rmly
set in an earlier time and place cannot engage with contemporary passions,
236
whether personal or political. In my view, numerous successful allegorical
productions have repeatedly proved this assumption wrong.
A couple of recent productions of Radrigán plays in the United States,
either in spite of or because of the fact that they were produced under
conditions of low budgets, limited runs, small audiences, and lack of press
coverage, have somehow managed to retain something of a dissident posture. These restagings demonstrate that political theater transplanted from
its original culture can in fact remain oppositional—if no longer in dialogue with the original political injustice the play sought to address, then
in relationship with the continuing legacy of those events. Or, a production
can sometimes imaginatively allegorize an allegory: The original injustice
allegorized by the theatrical event in the source country comes to symbolize
a different wrong when the play is staged in a new country.
The bilingual production of Hechos consumados, directed by Martín
Balmaceda for LaMicro Theater in November 2004 at New York City’s
Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, tried to create what Balmaceda called “the
memory of the play.” Balmaceda, a Chilean who grew up under Pinochet’s
rule before emigrating to the United States, described that memory as the
play’s potential to testify to the realities of life for many people under Chilean dictatorship and the potential for the production to make witnesses of
United States spectators, even spectators who had little previous knowledge
of Chilean politics.
In a room that seats about fi fty people, with a playing area separated
from the performers only by tape on the floor, actors performed just six
times before audiences that combined some local spectators from Spanish
Harlem with college students from around the city who came to attend
the Mi Mundo/My World Festival that hosted the production. 3 LaMicro
experimented with video as both an informational frame and an element
integrated into the production itself. Before the play began, two-and-ahalf minutes of black-and-white footage culled from several documentaries
visually told the story of Salvador Allende’s rise and fall in record time, and
culminated in images of soldiers rounding up men while a woman’s voiceover listed family names, each name followed by the word “desaparecido.”
As the word is repeated it develops an ominous power, and its meaning,
“disappeared,” becomes obvious. The video was projected onto the white
wall upstage, behind a makeshift clothesline on which Marta’s clothes
are drying, the physical juxtaposition of the big picture to the individual
belongings suggesting a connection between the coup and the troubles of
the characters. Further video during the production, created by Jill Wissmiller, interspersed far more abstract color images throughout the play:
A handheld camera pans across a muddy grassy area and lingers on an
abandoned work boot, a dress shoe, the rubber sole of an overturned shoe;
a hand fi ngers a rootless tooth, as if examining human remains; happy psychedelic colors flash by as Marta (Eva C. Vásquez) waxes nostalgic about
the gardening work she used to do with the long-gone Mario. While the
Epilogue 237
images remain legible, they also feel chaotic, like a jumble of memories.
The music underscores the theme of loss: a haunting contemporary baroque
oratorio, Lost Objects, by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolf,
which laments a long list of losses, from socks to people to resistance.
The characters representing the disappeared, described in the stage
directions as off-stage presences visible only to the spectators, were
embodied in the LaMicro production by a single silent actor, I-Cheng
Chen. Clad in loose-fitting gray pants and a shirt, her face painted in a
white death mask, Chen dance-walks slowly toward the characters in the
world of the living. Taking short backward steps, she beckons Marta (Eva
C. Vásquez) and Emilio (Pietro González) into her world. Chen’s presence
invoked a mystical world of spirits, depicting the disappeared as ghosts
that summon the living. While a more realistic portrayal of the disappeared—ordinary people who have obviously been tortured—might have
made the situation more intelligible to a spectator completely ignorant
of Chilean history, Balmaceda’s staging highlighted the text’s sense of
mystery and awe about the disappeared as a ghostly presence that invades
daily life without being an ordinary part of it.
Finally, the production experimented with the use of Spanish language
to help remind spectators that the play was originally set in another time
and place. About 10 percent of the dialogue was spoken in Spanish, some
of it in conjunction with visual cues that made the meaning obvious; other
lines were spoken without any non-verbal hints, leaving spectators without Spanish to enjoy the language purely for its formal texture. Besides
rooting the play in South America, the use of Spanish language was also
intended to dislodge English from its position as dominant language,
so that those who comprehend only English would at least temporarily
experience the sense of disorientation and powerlessness that subordinates, in terms of linguistic and often related economic disadvantage, live
with every day. In this respect, the production asked spectators to witness
both the trauma of dictatorship and its aftermath for some, the trauma
of exile.
In 2006, a Spanish-language Isabel desterrada en Isabel was directed
by Carlos Vargas-Salgado as part of the Political Theater Festival at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. Nelly Pilares Manrique played Isabel as a
homeless woman in a production intended to both address the problems
of women in Latin America, the theme of the festival, and also confront
Minneapolis spectators, primarily non-Spanish speakers, with homelessness in their own community.4 Isabel’s subtle allusions to political repression—the birds that no longer sing, the boyfriend jailed for a suspiciously
long time—were connected exclusively to questions of isolation and loneliness stemming from poverty. The issue of dictatorship, which is only
addressed obliquely in Radrigán’s text, fell by the wayside. Yet another,
perhaps even more central, interrelated issue, poverty and exploitation of
the poor, was explored in a transnational context.
238
Vargas-Salgado and Pilares wanted to forestall spectators who might
be tempted to consider poverty an exclusively Latin American problem.
Vargas-Salgado explains:
I think people can best understand a Latin American problem through
an analogous problem in its U.S. context, something that hurts them
here. They might understand with their brain but they are not going to
have lived the experience of the pain of others. I wanted to avoid the
risk of being viewed like a National Geographic documentary. (e-mail
to the author)
To that end, Vargas-Salgado and Pilares created a costume for the character of Isabel that approximated the dress of homeless people on the streets
of Minneapolis during winter: layers of shirts over shirts, including a bright
blue man’s flannel pajama top that clashed with the beige skirt worn over
black-and-blue checkered leggings. Her footwear, rubber fl ip-flops, added
an incongruous touch.
In a black-box theater that seats about one hundred people, during just
five performances, Pilares moved on an almost bare stage with Englishlanguage subtitles projected on a screen behind her. The garbage can she
addressed was placed under light in the fi rst few rows of the seating area,
amid the audience, so that most of her monologue challenged the spectators to acknowledge her. Pilares spoke a more standard Spanish than the
Chilean dialect of the text, yet adopted a Chilean accent, thus retaining
something of the Chilean specificity of the language. Her physical movements were something between dance and naturalistic acting, underscoring
Isabel’s psychological distress. Pilares moved at fi rst under a small spotlight, whirling round-and-round to the accompaniment taped drumming
that beat harder and faster until she fi nally fell to the ground and began to
speak of repairing her shoe. Later she moved within a wider circle of light,
her physical gestures “complementing rather than representing the text,”
Pilares recalls (personal interview). “I didn’t prepare in a Stanislavskian
way, but I remember that images flowed through my mind. When I spoke
of the girl digging through the garbage for food, I became that girl and
thought of dogs fighting over food.”
During post-show discussions with the actor and director, many spectators brought up the subject of local poverty. Yet for one reviewer, the
Spanish language of the production and nationality of the production team
apparently overshadowed any connections to Minneapolis. (Vargas-Salgado and Pilares are Peruvians, members of Peru’s Teatro Aviñón.) Writing
for The Liberator Magazine, David Grant praises the performance as “a
one-woman tour de force” but fi rmly situates the action in South America:
“Performed in Spanish with projected subtitles, it offers a searing look at
the world of a woman living on the streets of Anytown, South America, as
a beggar . . . The play offers an uncompromising look at grinding poverty
Epilogue 239
and a clarion call to work for its elimination by whatever means necessary.” Though Grant correctly identified the play’s protest of indifference
to poverty, he perhaps failed to perceive the production’s connections to
poverty in Anytown, USA.
These recent productions all offer lessons about how these plays might
be staged as more than redundancies (evil is bad) or tales of love gone
wrong. Directors, dramaturges, and other production team members can
navigate between the dangers of folkloric productions that summon stereotypes in the service of cultural celebration and dehistoricized productions
that ignore the political in the personal. An array of imaginative directorial
tactics might be deployed to challenge spectators far from Latin America to
nevertheless think politically about Latin American theater.
Notes
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. This defi nition is indebted to Taylor’s “Theatre of Operations” chapter in
Disappearing Acts.
2. To list just one key text about each of the countries I write about here: for
Uruguay, see Sosnowski and Popkin; for Brazil, see Dassin; for Argentina,
see Feitlowitz; and for Chile, see Politzer.
3. For more on my translations and LaMicro’s productions, see my introduction to Radrigán, Finished from the Start and Other Plays.
4. One notable exception to this isolation was the wide dissemination of Augusto
Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, fi rst published in Argentina in 1973, which
inspired some experiments in other countries. For instance, under dictatorship in Chile, Juan Radrigán and his friends would do their own version of
“invisible theater,” performing predevised arguments on street corners about
the pros and cons of the dictatorship in an attempt to get ordinary Chileans
to participate in more open debate. Following Boal’s instructions in Theatre,
they would also order a meal in a restaurant, then claim they did not have
enough money to pay for it, using the occasion to attempt to incite discussion about the increasing gap between rich and poor (personal interviews
Radrigán and Solovera).
5. Although this concept was revelatory to me when I encountered Taylor’s and
Roach’s work in graduate school and helped me to begin to make sense of
many things I had witnessed as a journalist, the idea of performance outside
of theaters can of course be traced back much farther, most notably to the
work of Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, and Irving Goffman. It bears
clarifying here that this study does not employ the term performance in the
broad sense of presentation of self. Nor does it engage with Judith Butler’s
concept of “performativity.”
6. I use the phrase “political evil” to describe organized campaigns on the part
of the nation-state that violate certain values, which if they are not universal
or absolute, in my view, ought to be. One such value, the one that most concerns me here, is respect for human life. The dictatorships’ statements and
actions betrayed the conviction that some lives are disposable lives, namely,
the lives of communists, or of suspected communists, or of anyone who
might possibly be construed as furthering the communist cause—in other
words, anyone at all. The bureaucracies of torture and assassination that
they instituted clearly demonstrated blatant, systematic disregard for human
life, a disregard that exhibited both the incomprehensible quality of evil of
that Hannah Arendt emphasizes in The Origins of Totalitarianism and the
242 Notes
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
more mundane characteristics that she famously describes in A Report on
the Banality of Evil.
Another part of the essay is often cited out of context as, “After Auschwitz
you could no longer write poems.” The complete thought suggests a much
broader accusation of guilt against anyone, artist or nonartist, who survives
the disaster: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less
cultured question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially
whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been
killed, may go on living” (362–363).
Some subsequent readers of Adorno have focused only on one or the other
leg of his paradox. For instance, in Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor suggests a binary opposition between the supposed followers and opponents
of Adorno, between “Those who, in the tradition of Adorno, insist that the
atrocities committed defy language and representation and those who insist
that only through denunciation, which necessarily involves representation,
can crimes be brought to light and similar ones be avoided in the future”
(139). In fact, Adorno encompasses both views: He insists that atrocities
defy representation and insists on denunciation. The struggle is not between
Adorno and others; it is within Adorno, within the artist, and within the
critic.
Although later Jameson works, such as for example Brecht and Method,
stress possibilities for social change, Postmodernism remains one of his most
well-known and influential works.
Lyotard has already been widely criticized for how his announcement of the
end of grand narratives itself takes a narrative form (for instance, see Jameson’s forward to Lyotard, xi). I would simply add that the antihero of his
antinarrative narrative seems to be the sinister, all-encompassing “system.”
For a discussion of the political context of Spider Woman, see Levine, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman, 253–272.
See “Human Rights Watch” and “Brazil—Amnesty International” reports.
Direito à memoria e à verdade [The Right to Memory and Truth] details 357
cases of disappearance, a substantial increase over the government’s previous
count of 125 political assassinations during dictatorship.
For examples of articles that exaggerate the supposed anticapitalism of Latin
America’s new left, see Padgett and Forero.
See Dion for a summary review of several recent studies that come to similar
conclusions on the absence of a correlation between economic growth and
reduced poverty. Dion cites a 2005 World Bank report that demonstrates
extremely limited progress in alleviating extreme poverty throughout the
region: In 1981, 9.7 percent of Latin Americans lived on less than a dollar
per day and 26.9 percent lived on less than two dollars per day; in 2005, 9.5
percent lived on less than a dollar per day and 24.5 percent lived on less than
two dollars per day. See also Tokman and O’Donnell for a bleak analysis of
how poverty and inequality have persisted, and even deepened, under new
democratic governments.
Among the most prominent post-Marxist theorists are Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe
argue that traditional hegemony theory must be revised to take into account
the inability of invalid categories such as class and society to account for
what they view as myriad differences in subject positions and an infi nity
of possible play among them. Over the years Laclau and Slajov Žižek have
engaged in increasingly heated debate about class, since as Žižek summed up
Notes
243
his view in a recent article, “Against the Populist Temptation,” “the ‘class
struggle’ far from being ‘obsolete,’ goes on” (552). For Laclau’s response, see
“Why Constructing a People is the Main Task of Radical Politics.”
For other important attempts to wrestle with postmodernism from a
variety of leftist perspectives, see boundary 2 (1993), The Postmodernism
Debate in Latin America, edited by Beverley. Subaltern studies has also
provided some theoretical ammunition to scholars of Latin America. See,
for example, Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern
Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History.” And for a response to
Mallon, see Beverely’s introduction to and fi rst chapter of Subalternity and
Representation (1–40).
17. In Ideology: an Introduction, Terry Eagleton pokes fun at how postmodern theory posits a postideological world by noting the discrepancy between
theory and political reality in Eastern Europe in 1990: “No doubt President
Ceausescu spent his last moments on earth reminding his executioners that
revolution was an outmoded concept, that there were only ever micro-strategies and local deconstructions, and that the idea of a ‘collective revolutionary subject’ was hopelessly passe” (xiii).
18. My analysis builds on Scott’s contention that external conformity, or the
appearance of compliance with dominant ideologies, what he calls “hegemonic appearances,” does not necessarily indicate internal belief in those
ideologies (85–107).
19. Adorno further distinguishes between works that at least attempt commitment and works that complacently accept the status quo. He dismisses the
latter works as “content to be a fetish, an idle pastime for those who would
like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them, in an apoliticism that is
in fact deeply political” (“Commitment” 177).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
1. For Ricoeur’s idea of the “duty to remember” in a nutshell, see “Memory
and Forgetting”; For the more complex version of his thoughts on obligated
memory, see Memory, History, Forgetting, 86–92.
2. I borrowed the term “dissident spectator” from Manning, who in turn
borrows it from Alan Sinfield. In the context of Uruguayan dictatorship,
dissident spectators would be those audience members who could read an
antidictatorship subtext intended by the playwright, or in some cases even
invent one that the playwright did not necessarily intend, imbuing certain
words or phrases with new meaning. Censors attended rehearsals and performances to try to put themselves in the position of such spectators and
intercept any such resistance, whether coded by the playwright or the spectator. Because certain kinds of theater were known as sites of resistance, audiences to oppositional theater tended to be rather politically homogenous. A
certain degree of what Manning calls “cross-viewing” occurred, however, as
the censors and government spies watched the dissident spectators and the
dissident spectators watched out for censors and spies, as well as watching
each other. Anecdotal evidence indicates that as the repression eased over
the years, spectators relaxed their body language, at fi rst limiting themselves
to smiles, then glances and nudges, and fi nally allowing themselves outright
applause and calling out (Mirza personal interview). For more on dissident
spectatorship and cross-viewing, see Manning (xv–xviii).
3. For a broad comparison of the military coups, economic programs, and
styles of political repression in the four Southern Cone nations, see Fagen.
244
Notes
4. The vast majority of Uruguayans who disappeared were actually detained
in Argentina. According to the “US Department of State Country Report
on Human Rights Practices,” March 4, 2002, only 30 out of 179 Uruguayans were disappeared in their home country. The rest were kidnapped
in Argentina (137), Chile (7), Paraguay (3), Bolivia (1), and Brazil (1),
January 9, 2006 (http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27922.htm).
The organization representing the family members of the Uruguayan disappeared, Madres y Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos-Desaparecidos
[Mothers and Family Members of Detained-Disappeared Uruguayans],
says that the total number of disappeared at home and abroad exceeds
200. For a full breakdown of the fi gures, see “Press Release from Mothers and Family Members of Uruguayan Detained-Disappeared, August 15,
2005,” accessed January 9, 2006 (http://www.uruguay.indymedia.org/
news).
5. During the twelve years that his cousin was imprisoned, Jorge Sedano
Arias never once went to visit him. The cousin was not completely obliterated from memory, but banished to its outer edges. Arias reconciled with
the cousin, José Felíx Nieto Gnazzo, after his release from prison in 1985,
but the reconciliation was short-lived because a couple of years later Nieto
Gnazzo died of lung cancer (Sedano Arias personal interview).
6. The “Medidas Prontas de Seguridad” [Prompt Security Measures] decreed
in 1973 allowed for detention without trial. See Kaufman, “The Role,”
29.
7. A Todos Ellos [To All of Them], the report from the Mothers and Family Members of Uruguayan Detained-Disappeared, recounts how the Uruguayan mothers of the disappeared tried unsuccessfully to imitate their
more well-known Argentine counterpart: “Nosotras, a imitación de las
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, intentamos hacer reuniones en plazas con
pañuelos blancos en la cabeza. Eramos tan pocas que inspirabamos conmiseración. En esos años, la gente que nos veia paradas en la plaza no se
explicaba por qué. No había ni idea de las desapariciones. No entendían
quiénes eramos ni qué hacíamos” (29). [We, in imitation of the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo, tried to hold meetings in plazas wearing white scarves
on our heads. We were so few that we inspired pity. In those years, people
would see us standing in the squares and couldn’t fi gure out why were
there. There was no thought to disappearances. They didn’t understand
who we were or what we were doing.]
8. See Halbwachs, Nora, Ricoeur.
9. Though she cites neither Halbwachs nor Ricoeur, Perelli straddles their
positions in an important essay on Uruguayan memory, “Power of Memory
and Memory of Power.” Drawing on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis,
Perelli divides memory into the “real,” corresponding to “lived experience”; the “imaginary,” or the echoes of those experiences—distortions,
emotional shadings, ghosts, guilt feelings, projections, displacements;
and “the symbolic,” or the realm of language which gives meaning to
experience and imagination. In Perelli’s view, both the imaginary and the
symbolic are more closely linked to collective than to individual memory,
situating her closer to Halbwachs than Ricoeur: “The individual personal
memory of each subject, and the memory of that microcosm which is constituted by small groups, fi nd a frame of reference and a voice in collective
memory. No personal biography is conceivable without a minimum of referents from collective memory, which in that case act as signifi cative landmarks” (148). Perelli’s succinct analysis of the manipulation of collective
memory during and after Uruguayan dictatorship identifies five processes:
Notes
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
245
“resignifi cation, emphasis, displacement, projection, and silencing” that
various political agents—from the Tupamaro playwright Mauricio Rosencof to conservative leaders—have used to try to shape collective perception
of the past (147–159).
For more on transculturation see Ortiz, 129–135.
The Tupamaros, formally known as the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional [Movement for National Liberation], were founded by Raúl Sendic, a
law student who was moved by the plight of Uruguay’s sugarcane harvesters. Inspired by the success of Fidel Castro and Che Guevarra, he helped
organize an alliance between agricultural workers and urban unions
that believed in the possibility of radical social change. As the movement
became increasingly violent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including
the murder of the American AID offi cial Daniel Mitrione, it lost some of
its original supporters and incurred massive state repression. For more on
the Tupamaros from an insider’s perspective see Wilson. For a more critical analysis of the movement, see Lessa and Langguth.
The complete text of the Certifi cate of Democratic Faith: Juro por mi
honor mi adhesión sin condiciones ni reservas al sistema Republicano
Democrático de Gobierno que la Nación ha implantado por su voluntad
soberana y declaro no haber pertenecido ni pertenecer a las organizaciones antinacionales disueltas por el Poder Ejecutivo, así como a toda otra
que atentara contra el actual sistema de gobierno. Acepto que la falsedad
de la presente declaración implique la aplicación de los dispuestos en la
Ley 14.248 del 1 de agosto de 1974 y el art. 239 del Código Penal (Martínez 39– 40). [I swear on my honor that I adhere without conditions or
reservations to the Democratic Republic that the nation’s government has
established through its sovereign will and I state that I have not belonged
nor will belong to any of the antinational organizations dissolved by the
Executive Branch, nor to any other [organization] that undermines the
current system of government. I accept that the falsifi cation of this statement will result in the application of the provisions of Law 14.248 of
August 1, 1974 and in article 239 of the Penal Code.]
All of the biographical information about Varela not otherwise identified
comes from a series of personal interviews conducted in November 2005.
All translations from the Varela plays cited here are mine.
The actor and director Daniel Videla, for instance, recalls that just before
his production of the Uruguayan musical comedy Hacé la Calle, by Juan
Carlos Patrón, was due to open in 1977, the local police chief “recommended” that he cancel the show. Since he feared that defi ance of the
“recommendation” would result in his arrest and perhaps even his disappearance, he complied.
“Amnesty” and “amnesia” share the same Greek roots, “a,” meaning
“not” or “without” and “mnestos,” memory. The government of President Julio María Sanguinetti avoided the term “amnesty” by naming the
law that provided amnesty to military and police the “Ley de Caducidad”
[Law of Expiration], as if the law merely set a deadline of some sort for
fi ling complaints. Opponents of the law have retaliated by referring to the
law as “La Ley de la Impunidad” [The Law of Impunity.] Rather than
seek to overturn the law, the current left-wing government of President
Tabaré Vázquez is also perpetuating the illusion that radical change is not
really change by attempting to legally “reinterpret” the law so as to allow
for more prosecutions of human rights violations.
In 1950, Uruguay won the world championship in soccer, a feat that it has
not been able to repeat since. Juan Rial describes that 1950 victory as fuel
246 Notes
18.
19
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28
29
for the myth of the “happy Uruguay” in which everyone was well cared for
by the welfare state. For more on the role of political myth in Uruguay, see
Rial.
For a detailed analysis of the decline of Uruguay’s democracy in relationship to its decline in economic potency, one which attributes the economic
country’s decline to the exhaustion of the import-substitution model, see
Weinstein. For a more general theory of the rise of Latin American authoritarianism in relationship to the eventual failure of the import-substitution
strategy, see O’Donnell.
Since Palabras has not been published, this summary and the quotations
that follow are from an unpublished manuscript provided by Varela.
See Weschler for more on the Uruguayan military government’s economic
policies, 147–149.
The U.S. government backed military rule in Uruguay, yet was far less
active in promoting the coup there than in Chile, where a socialist had
actually been elected to offi ce (Kaufman, “The Role” 20). Nevertheless,
the Tupamaro guerrillas succeeded in convincing many Uruguayans that
the U.S. government had sent a police trainer from Washington, DC, to
Montevideo to instruct Uruguayan police in methods of torture. Though
the U.S. government maintained that Daniel Mitrione was simply in Montevideo to help “professionalize” the police force, in 1970 the Tupamaros
kidnapped and assassinated him (Weschler 105–107). After Jimmy Carter
took offi ce, in 1977, a new emphasis on human rights in U.S. foreign policy
helped push the Uruguayan junta toward the 1980 plebiscite that led to the
restoration of civilian rule. See Martínez, 89–166; Weschler 257–258.
While Roach’s concept of performance as “surrogation” is similar to Connerton’s “bodily practices,” Roach’s crucial insight is that performance
involves substitution of one behavior for another, a substitution that can
never be an exact replica. See Cities 2–7, 26–27.
My analysis here is based on the version of Interrogatorio that was published in 1991 and fi nally staged in Montevideo in August 2005 at Teatro
El Galpón. It was directed by Leonel Dárdano and performed by members
of Teatro Eslabón, a small company based in the interior city of Canelones, Uruguay.
This account of how Elsinore was developed was pieced together from
interviews with Duffau, Jones, and Varela.
Interrogatorio was also reviewed by Faturoso, Freire, Magdalena Gerona,
El Día, September 13, 1983; Alvaro Gustavo Loureiro, Ultimas Noticias,
September 14, 1983; and Roger Mirza.
One prominent example of the torturer who repents at the last moment is
the character of the “Capitán” in Mario Benedetti’s play, Pedro y el Capitán, México: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1979.
In translating the title “Crónica de la Espera” I decided to capitalize the
“The” in “The Wait,” in order to signal that the play is about a very
specifi c wait, the wait of the friends and relatives of the disappeared to
discover the fate of their loved ones.
All citations are from an unpublished manuscript provided by the playwright.
Castillo called Crónica “an intelligent and generous effort to stage a subject
that touches us deeply and still hurts.” Novoa praised its restrained tone
and lauded it as “one of the most important Uruguayan works of all time.”
Mirza, while complaining that the textual fragmentation sometimes made
the narratives diffi cult to follow, praised the playwright for handling such
an emotional subject with elegance and restraint.
Notes
247
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
1. Theatrical resistance included the work of at least two other companies,
Teatro Oficina and Grupo Opinião, as well as individual efforts such as Chico
Buarque’s Roda Viva. And one must keep in mind that music and fi lm also
played a significant role in resistance to dictatorship. For a general history of
oppositional movements in all three media see Ridenti. For an excellent survey of leftist theater and music in the years preceding 1964, see Garcia. For
a landmark history of Grupo Opinião, see Damasceno. For a lively account
of Oficina, see George. For more on Tropicalia and other opposition in the
world of music, see Dunn and Veloso. For an in-depth study of allegory in
some key dictatorship-era fi lms, see Xavier.
2. Boal simplifies Brecht’s stance on heroism at the end of Theatre of the
Oppressed, when he concludes: “Brecht sang: ‘Happy is the people who needs
no heroes.’ I agree. But we are not a happy people: for this reason we need
heroes. We need Tiradentes” (190). Brecht did not actually explicitly express
his own views on heroism, but instead wrote the following exchange between
two characters in Scene 14 of Life of Galileo, in which Galileo’s protégé,
Andrea, voices his disappointment with Galileo for recanting: “Unhappy the
land that has no heroes!” A few lines later, Galileo replies, “No, unhappy
the land where heroes are needed.” Brecht’s play remains nuanced, and even
confl icted, about the need for hero-martyrs.
3. See Heinz and Frühling for a breakdown of disappearances by year and
political affi liation. See Brasil: Nunca Mais (translated as Torture in Brazil,
ed. Dassin) for a list of 125 names of disappeared people and for many individual accounts of torture and disappearance. During the last two decades,
police executions of criminal suspects and prisoners have resulted in far more
deaths per year than political executions under the entire 1964–85 dictatorship. The 2004 Human Rights Watch report estimates about 3,000 police
killings per year (Essential Background: Overview of Human Rights Issues
in Brazil).
4. For a detailed description of the text and staging of O Rei da Vela [The
Candle King], see George, 74–107.
5. See Woodyard for an analysis of the Inquisition as a metaphor for contemporary repression in Dias’s O santo inquérito.
6. See Albuquerque for an analysis of Buarque and Guerra’s Calabar in comparison to versions by Geir Campos and Ledo Ivo.
7. I am indebted to Ridenti for the general observation that Che Guevara serves
as a model for the protagonist of many novels, fi lms, and plays, including
Zumbi, during the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil.
8. For a critique of the coringa system, see George, 51–55.
9. For more complete histories of Teatro Arena, see Almada, Damasceno,
George, or Magaldi. The CD ROM Arena Conta Arena: 50 Anos is an
invaluable source of testimonies by many of the company’s performers, as
well as the artistic directors, Renato and Boal.
10. Migliaccio revealed his lack of involvement in party politics in the CD ROM
Arena Conta Arena: 50 anos. Medalha confessed her aversion to party politics in a personal interview. And Boal writes in Hamlet and the Baker’s Son:
“The mere idea of joining a party gave me a cramp” (175).
11. For a detailed account of the entire Opinião show, see Damasceno, 123 –
142.
12. Another precursor to Arena’s Tiradentes is the play by the same title written
by Viriato Correia that opened in Rio’s Municipal Theater on November 16,
1939.
248
Notes
13. See Sales for a fascinating account of Ação Libertadora Nacional and its
leader Carlos Marighella, who spent five months in Cuba training as a guerrilla fighter and established Cuban-style camps in the Brazilian northeast
before he was assassinated in 1969.
14. See Freire, Almada, and Ponce for richly detailed testimonial accounts of life
inside the prison named after Tiradentes. The book also includes a wealth
of illustrations, photographs, and reproductions of visual art, some of which
was produced by prisoners.
15. While Boal was imprisoned, his company traveled to the international theater festival in Nancy, France, the same venue where the antidictatorship
plays of Radrigán and Gambaro were given an international stage. By coincidence, in 1969, both Gambaro’s El campo and Arena’s Zumbi were staged
there. Radrigán’s works were not staged at Nancy until the 1980s.
16. By happy coincidence, a letter to the editor of The New York Times protesting Boal’s imprisonment, signed by Miller and fifteen other prominent
figures as diverse as Harold Prince and Richard Schechner, was published
April 24, 1971, just a few days before Boal came before the judge who was
to determine whether or not to release him. Boal’s hand-scrawled notes from
prison to Theatre of Latin America (TOLA) founder and director Joanne
Pottlitzer asking for help betrayed a combination of desperation, imperiousness, and indomitable optimism. One note, dated March 10, 1971, begins:
It’s me again. Just to make sure you got the letter, one copy or another. Still
in jail. Tell Schechner (TDR), ITI, O’Neill Found., Playwright’s Guild, E.
Stewart, and I don’t know who else can be. [sic] Send formal invitation for
me to direct the Fair [the São Paulo Fair of Opinion], and explain with details
what the fair is, for they apprehended [sic] a tape with L.A. music on the
ground [sic] that it is subversive. Explain it is to be done in New York! Other
Fair material (plays) also apprehended.
After rattling off several more directives, Boal closes with a bit of dark
humor: “Love to you. Hope to hear from you soon (AND SEE YOU TOO!!!)
Boal.”
17. For more details on the Guarnieri plays not analyzed in detail here, see Fonseca-Downey, Anderson, “Gianfrancesco Guarnieri,” and French. Upon his
death in 2006, a slew of obituaries in the Brazilian popular press recapped
his life.
18. Gender issues were similarly slighted: though three out of eight of the original cast members were women, all but one of the half-dozen main characters
in the play is male. Gender, however, unlike race, is not used as a metaphor
for class.
19. Arena’s Zumbi draws heavily on the novel by João Felicio dos Santos, Ganga
Zumba (1962), and follows in the footsteps of studies by leftist scholars
such as anthropologist Edison Carneiro, O Quilombo dos Palmares [The
Quilombo of Palmares] (1947), and sociologist Clovis Moura, Rebeliões
da senzala—quilombos, insurreições, guerrilhas [Rebellions of senzala—
quilombos, insurrections, guerrillas] (1959), who recast Palmares as a haven
from class exploitation (Funari and Vieira de Carvalho 43). Though Pedro
Paulo Funari and Aline Viera de Carvalho provide a very useful outline of
the social science research on Palmares, they unfortunately ignore representations of Palmares in theater, fi lm, and literature, and neglect to discuss
how artistic representations intersect with the sociological materials. Two
important fi lms that fictionalized Palmares are Carlos Diegues’s Ganga
Zumba (1963) and Quilombo (1984).
20. Brazilian government statistics show that twice as many people of color compared to whites in Brazil live in poverty (Telles, “Incorporating Race” 3).
Notes
249
21. See Gubar, 134–168, and Manning, 10–29.
22. Choreographic notations are from the version of Arena conta Zumbi published in Revista de Teatro 378 (1970): 31–59. I am grateful to Joanne Pottlitzer, the former founder and director of Theatre of Latin America (TOLA),
for allowing me to view her copy of amateur video of Zumbi fi lmed by a
spectator during one of Arena’s August 1969 performances in New York
City.
23. See Skidmore, Black into White, for an explication of nineteenth-century
theories of whitening in Brazil. See Freyre for the evolution of “whitening”
into the twentieth-century conception of Brazil as a “racial democracy.” And
see Fernandes for the denunciation of that supposed racial democracy as a
myth.
24. Bandeirantes were backlands explorers who often kidnapped Indians and
pressed them into slave service in mercenary armies and gold-hunting expeditions.
25. For more biographical information about the original Zumbi cast, see
Almada, Sanches, and Arena conta Arena: 50 anos.
26. Joel Zito Araújo demonstrates in his masterful study of television actors, A
Negacão do Brasil: O Negro na Telenovela Brasileira [The Denial of Brazil:
The Black in the Brazilian Soap Opera], that black actors were consistently
excluded from leading roles and relegated to the stereotypical roles of slaves
and servants. As late as 1968, a white actor in blackface, Sérgio Cardoso,
played the role of Uncle Tom in a serialized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
televised by Rede Globo, the country’s largest television network.
27. When Arena brought the play to New York City in 1969 and 1970, under
the auspices of Theatre of Latin America (TOLA), almost all of the original
cast, except Lima Duarte, had been replaced. The new cast included only
one light-skinned Afro-Brazilian actor, Germano Batista. The other actors
were Renato Consorte, Antonio Pedro, Rodrigo Santiago, Cecilia Thumin,
Zezinha Duboc, and Vera Regina.
28. Costa uses a similar argument when she analyzes how Zumbi compresses
almost a century of successful battles against European aggressors in order to
focus on Palmares’s fi nal defeat, a narrative strategy that she argues reduces
the complex military strategies of Palmares’s leaders to “angelicais votos de
boas intenções” [angelic vows of good intentions] and also slights the battles
won by the Left in the years preceding the 1964 coup (127).
29. One particularly graphic expression of this derogatory term was Plínio Marcos’s short play for the Feira Paulista de Opinião [Sao Paulo Fair of Opinion]
in 1968, in which an army officer wearing a gorilla suit and a military helmet
wipes his backside with pages from one of Marcos’s works (Boal, Hamlet
279; George 52–53).
30. One of Arena’s early members, Gonçalves performed in the Arena adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men (1956) and in Guarnieri’s
Eles não usam black-tie (1958). In the 1950s, Gonçalves recounts, black
actors were so rare that one director tried, without much success, to use
heavy makeup to “whiten” him so that he would be acceptable in the role of
a king with a blonde, blue-eyed princess of a daughter in a staged adaptation
of a fairy tale (personal interview). He performed in the Rio production of
Zumbi, directed by Paulo José, which opened October 8, 1965. Two years
later, as one of the founders of Grupo de Ação [Action Group] in Rio de
Janeiro, a company dedicated to improving opportunities for Afro-Brazilian
theater practitioners, Gonçalves directed an all-black version of the play in
São Paulo (Fernández 16). At least one prominent reviewer compared the
Action Group staging unfavorably with the original (Yan Michalski Jornal
250
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
Notes
do Brasil, March 8, 1967 p. 2, sec. B) . Gonçalves maintains that Brazilian
audiences were not ready, and are still not ready, for all-black theater (personal interview).
The only major female character in the play, Zumbi’s mother Gongoba,
similarly displays nobility, tempered with humility and self-abnegation.
When her evil mistress Clotilde sentences her to whipping from dusk until
dawn, she responds with a mild oath: “Peste de Marafa. Mata eu que
missão minha já cumpli” (44) [Plague of Marafa. Kill me, I’ve already
fulfi lled my mission]. Underlying her placid renunciation of mortality is of
course the misogynistic supposition that her primary value is as the vessel
that gave birth to the male leader.
The literature debunking the myth of racial democracy is extensive. Building on Fernandes and Nascimento, its more prominent contemporary critics include Hanchard, Telles, Twine, and Skidmore (Black Into White).
The economist, playwright, activist, and senator who founded The Negro
Experimental Theatre in 1944, Abdias do Nascimento, had made the
same point two decades earlier. In a 1968 essay published in the left-wing
journal Cadernos Brasileiros, on the eightieth anniversary of abolition,
he wrote: “Abolition was a façade: juridical, theoretical, abstract. The
ex-slaves were driven to the brink of starvation; they found only disease,
unemployment, complete misery. Not only the elites, but all of Brazilian
society closed the avenues through which blacks might have survived; they
shut off the possibility of a decent, dignifi ed life for the ex-slaves” (cited in
The Brazil Reader 380).
See Aline Fonseca Carvalho for a detailed study of the military’s representation of Tiradentes.
The statue of Dom Pedro I atop his horse, waving a copy of the constitution, sits in the center of what was once called Constitution Plaza but is
known today as Tiradentes’ Plaza, adding insult to injury, since the square
includes no monument to the would-be independence leader. Underscoring its confl ictive history, by night the area is now frequented by homeless
people, transvestite prostitutes and their clients.
General Ernesto Geisel revoked the decree in 1976 as part of the process
of political abertura [opening] he led.
The original cast of Arena conta Tiradentes: Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, Renato Consorte, David José, Dina Sfat, Jairo Arco e Flexa, Vânya
Sant’Anna, Silvio Zilber, and Cláudio Pucci.
Other critics have expressed impatience both with the play’s didacticism
and with the hero’s lack of guile. The one-to-one correspondences of the
historical allegory led to some eye-rolling reviews. Sábato Magaldi, one
of Brazil’s most respected critics, pointed out (without using the word
“dictatorship”) that Portugal, the economic colonizer in Tiradentes’ time,
served as as a metaphor for the United States as the economic colonizer in
cahoots with Castelo Branco’s military government. “Entendase Estados
Unidos, em lugar de Portugal, e se terá a imagen exata do que se pretenderam os autores” [Think of the United States, in the place of Portugal,
and you will get the idea of exactly what the authors intend], he wrote for
the influential newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, in a review that was
nevertheless generally positive. A few months later, writing for the same
paper’s literary supplement, his colleague María Sylvia Franco Moreira
was less charitable. “A mensagem que os autores procuram transmitir não
ultrapassa muito o nível do ensinamento escolar” [The message that the
authors are trying to transmit does not reach much above what is taught
in school], she complained.
Notes
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
251
The construction of the character of Tiradentes struck several critics as inadequate to the heroic task he faces. Rosenfeld suggested that Tiradentes was
too foolish to be considered a proper hero (27). Writing after the dictatorship,
Milleret agreed and argued that his foolishness interferes with his ability to
win audience empathy. The chameleon-like coringa, she maintains, would be
more likely to attract audience empathy than Tiradentes (Teatro 162).
The six parties: Partido Comunista [Communist Party], Partido Comunista
Brasileiro [Brazilian Communist Party], Partido Comunista do Brasil [Communist Party of Brazil], Partido Comunista Revolucionário [Revolutionary
Communist Party], Partido Comunista da União Soviética [Communist
Party of the Soviet Union]. The Maoist-inspired Partido Comunista do Brasil contained two dissident factions: the Partido Comunista Revolucionário
and the Ala Vermelha [Red Wing]. Meanwhile, the Moscow-line Partido
Comunista Brasileiro brought forth the Dissidencia da Guanabara, which in
turn evolved into Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (Ridenti 382).
Other groups included Trotskyists and radical Catholics (Skidmore, Politics
85).
Lua was Boal’s own contribution to a presentation of short works he organized in June 1968, the Primeira Feira de Opinião Paulista [First São Paulo
Fair of Opinions]. The fair, which included theater, fiction, music, and visual
art, defied government censors who would have cut the collected texts from
80 to 15 pages. After an initial show of force, the authorities backed off and
tolerated the fair until the December 1968 coup-within-a-coup. For more
details, see Boal, Baker’s Son, 264–265.
While McMahon maintains that the text itself is allegorical, I would argue
that she makes a more persuasive case that the restaging of the play in Cape
Verde is an allegorical production.
A fourth Arena production, Arena canta Bahia, which opened 26 September 1965, is not included in this study because as the “canta” from the title
implies, it was purely a musical variety show, with music composed by two
young singers who later went on to international fame: Caetano Veloso and
Gilberto Gil. Other performers included Tom Zé, Torquato Neto, Gal Costa,
and Maria Bethânia, Caetano’s sister.
The same is true of Boal’s depiction of Che in Lua: The images in the photos
taken shortly before Che’s execution, images that showed him with his long
hair matted, his body debilitated by asthma, exhaustion, undernourishment,
and gunshot wounds, never make it into the play. The Che constructed by
Boal walks to the spot where he is shot to death.
Conway’s description of how the Liberator’s image was deployed by conservatives in Venezuela recalls the conservative deployment of Tiradentes’s
image in Brazil. See Conway, 18–45.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. Human rights organizations speak of “hundreds” of assassinations in Brazil,
not thousands. See “Essential Background: Overview of human rights issues
in Argentina.” Heinz and Früling conclude that in Brazil, “an understanding
seems to have existed that fighting the terrorists could and should lead to
some deaths, even when the capture of terrorist suspects was possible. However, there was no nationwide policy to exterminate guerrilleros or guerrilla suspects systematically, as was the case in Argentina” (80). Sadly, the
postdictatorship era has brought little or no improvement in Brazil’s human
rights record, as police have tried to control common crime by executing
252
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Notes
suspects. In 2004 and 2005 Amnesty International reported some two thousand police killings per year, many of which “took place in situations that
pointed to excessive force or extrajudicial detention” (Brazil).
For extensive comparison of Southern Cone military regimes, see Stepan.
For comparison of Brazilian and Argentine economic progress under dictatorship see Heinz and Früling, 50–58, 728–729.
Translation mine.
For a detailed taxonomy of this shift in character type in Gambaro’s work,
from passive victim to active resistor, see Taylor, “Afterword.”
All translations of Antigona are from Feitlowitz.
One important antidictatorship Gambaro play that I am not going to discuss in detail is worth briefly mentioning here: Información para extranjeros [Information for Foreigners] (1972). While not strictly realistic, this
is one of the few Gambaro plays that cannot be called allegorical. Its lack
of metaphoric disguise, in fact, doomed it to obscurity for many years.
Subtitled “A Chronicle in Twenty Scenes,” the drama constitutes a documentary pastiche of contemporary Argentine horrors, including scenes of
torture and kidnapping taken from real-life accounts, interspersed with
scenes that depict the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority, and
metatheatrical rehearsals of scenes from Shakespeare. Within the episodic
structure, an exaggeratedly grotesque tone, as well as the use of poems,
song, and dance all serve to “alienate” the spectators, who are expected to
view the work while moving from room to room in a space such as house
instead of a traditional theater. The audience is led by a sinister guide
who announces: “The play speaks to our way of life: Argentine, Western,
and Christian. We are in 1971.” Gambaro feared publishing or producing
the work, even outside of Argentina, until well after the dictatorship had
ended. It was not published in Argentina until 1987 and was not published
in English until 1992.
See Graham-Jones for a discussion of the role of allegory in Argentine
theater and for many analyses of plays that coded reality in metaphor.
I fi nd Graham-Jones’s use of the term “metaphorize” to be interchangeable with “allegorize.” While a metaphor may be defi ned as a similarity
between two superfi cially unlike things, allegory usually refers to a sustained chain of metaphors. What Graham-Jones describes as “metaphorizing reality” involves creating systems of related, extended metaphors (for
instance, plays that involve a house, the family living within the house,
the violent struggles of the family members, etc. as coded representations
of the nation) rather than just the isolated use of independent metaphors.
For a defi nition of metaphor see Davidson. For the distinction between
metaphor and allegory see Brogan (184).
See Benjamin’s famous defense of allegory over symbol in “Allegory and
Trauerspiel.”
W. B. Worthen makes a similar argument about the aesthetics of Chicana/o theater in the United States: “The thematics of Chicana/o history
plays are inseparable from their rhetoric, typically from the use of discontinuity and fragmentation, appropriation and hybridity, heteroglossia
and pastiche. This formal complexity might appear to verge on the blank
aesthetics of the ‘postmodern.’ Yet both literary work and the critical discussion surrounding it tend to distinguish the oppositional, destabilizing
use of such techniques in Chicana/o aesthetics from an inert and inertializing ‘pomo’ aestheticism” (103).
One of the few references to El campo’s allegorical function can be found
in Jean Franco’s “Self-destructing Heroines,” in which she says that El
Notes
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
253
campo may be taken either “as an allegory of ‘man’s eternal inhumanity to
man’ or as an allegory of the subjection of the individual to the totalitarian
state” (108–109). Yet there is a false dichotomy in reading El campo either
as a national allegory, in which the camp represents the Argentine state, or
as an allegory in which the camp represents evil in a more global sense.
Gambaro recalls that when Onganía seized power she felt “outraged” by
the military coup (personal interview). However, the director of the 1967
production, Augusto Fernandes, recalled that rather than comment on
contemporary politics, he tried to create “a Kafkaesque world that was
Argentina, but not a concrete Argentina.” The set, designed by Leal Rey,
was intended to represent “a dirty, smelly government offi ce,” (personal
interview).
Unless otherwise noted, all English-language quotations are taken from
Oliver’s translation.
Translation mine. Oliver’s translation is more literal: “the cream and
flower of our society”] (77).
Translation mine. Oliver’s translation softens Martín’s response: “a bloody
awful history” (58).
The physical comedy in Gambaro’s theater, often accompanied by a dark
sense of humor, can be traced to the subgenre of grotesco criollo, which
deeply informs much of her work. While visible in El campo, the influence of this Argentine theatrical tradition is far more evident in El despojamiento, in which awkward, bumbling body movements fi gure more
prominently. The protagonist of El despojamiento exhibits the disjuncture
between outer social mask and interior, inner self that typifi es the grotesque. Martín, by contrast, has no discernible interior self and thus seems
oddly hollow, all mask, almost like the character of Creon in Gambaro’s
Antígona Furiosa, who is literally played by an actor holding a shell of
Creon’s helmet, torso, and arms.
For a detailed history of this period see David Rock’s Authoritarian
Argentina.
For Peronist fascim as myth, see Newton; for the opposing view that Perón
had fascist tendencies and favored fascists, see Goñi.
See Gladhart (177–183).
The title “El despojamiento” has been translated as “The Dispossession”
by Sharon Magnarelli and as “The Striptease” by Becky Boling. However,
I use the English title I gave the play in my translation and refer to that
version in all English-language citations.
For a discussion of El despojamiento as a feminist play see Magnarelli
“Acting/Seeing Woman” and Boling, “From Pin-Ups to Striptease in Gambaro’s El despojamiento.”
See Taylor, Disappearing Acts, for an exhaustive analysis of Argentine
military discourse and its representation of the citizenry as a wayward
woman in need of correction.
For a detailed discussion of the grotesque in Argentine theater, see Pérez
(19–66).
For an extended analysis of this dynamic see Taylor, Disappearing Acts
(44–58).
The history of Isabelita’s short presidency is recounted in Rock (Argentina, 369–374) and Crassweller (369–374).
Because Teatro Abierto has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, I
do not dwell on it here. See Giella, Graham-Jones, Taylor, and Trastoy.
Teatro Abierto spawned a handful of spin-offs in other arts—Danza Abierta [Open Dance], Música Siempre [Music Forever], Poesía Abierta [Open
254
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
Notes
Poetry], Cine Abierto [Open Film]—that must have helped build antidictatorship momentum (107).
For an insightful analysis of the play as a critique of patriarchy, see Magnarelli (“Authoring the Scene” 5–27).
The 1985 fi lm “La Historia Ofi cial,” directed by Luis Puenzo, screenplay
by playwright Aida Bortnik, chronicles one military wife’s awakening to
her husband’s secret work in torture and baby-theft. The movie won the
1986 Academy Award for best foreign fi lm.
While Jews constitute less than 1 percent of the Argentine population,
they comprised 10 percent of the disappeared during the 1976–1983 dictatorship. See Heinz and Frühling for a discussion of the possible reasons for
that discrepancy (650–651). See Kaufman, “Jewish Victims,” for accounts
of anti-Semitic mistreatment of prisoners during the dictatorship. And see
Feitlowitz for more accounts of mistreatment of Jewish prisoners and an
indictment of Jewish community leaders’ pusillanimous response to the
abuse (89–109). However, like Kaufman, Feitlowitz concludes that the evidence does not “point to an out-and-out Jew hunt” (106).
See Dinges for an account of how South American military governments
collaborated on a plan to hunt down and assassinate prominent dissidents
living in exile in Europe and the United States.
This history was reconstructed from personal interviews with Gambaro,
Muraña, and Yusem in August 2005. Yusem has staged the original productions of seven Gambaro plays: La malasangre (1981), Del sol naciente
(1984), Antígona furiosa (1986), Penas sin importancia (1990), Es necesario entender un poco (1995), De profesión maternal (1999), and Lo que va
dictando el sueño (2002).
For a history of the Mothers, see Bonafi ni and Fisher.
Argentina’s current president, Néstor Kirchner, elected in 2003, supported
annulment of the “Punto Final” [Full Stop] and “Obediencia Debida”
[Due Obedience] laws granting military and police offi cers amnesty for
human rights abuses committed under dictatorship. According to Human
Rights Watch, since the Argentine congress annulled the laws in August
2003, about 100 former military and police offi cers have been detained,
including ex-junta leader Gen. Jorge Videla (Argentina).
For a moving, and beautifully written account of women suffering such
atrocities, see Partnoy’s testimonial.
See Fisher for details of repression against the Mothers themselves (60–
70).
For a discussion of the political, legal, and moral issues involved in the
Due Obedience Law, see Nino.
Atando cabos was staged in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, with
Dinah Stabb as Elisa and Colin McCormack as Martín. Reviewers paid
scant attention to the play, focusing instead on the full-length work, Death
and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman, for which it served as a curtain-raiser.
See Armistead and Paul Taylor.
For a complete account of the events of the Night of the Pencils and its
aftermath, see Seoane and Ruiz Núñez.
All translations of quotations from Atando cabos are my own.
For a brilliant study of lamentation in Ancient Greece, see Loraux.
Atando cabos has had very limited productions in Argentina. To my
knowledge, it has not been produced in Buenos Aires, yet has had at least
two productions by small companies in the interior: in Mar del Plata in
1998, and in Quilmes in 2002.
Notes
255
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. Though different kinds of testimonial narratives can be found all over the
world, perhaps the most obvious example of the genre from outside of Latin
America is the huge body of fi rst-person accounts of the Holocaust. An earlier, widely disseminated form of testimonial is the nineteenth-century slave
narrative.
2. Because the Real was linked to attempts at revolutionary social change,
attempts that have since collapsed, Beverley contends that testimonio’s
moment “has undoubtedly passed” (281). The recent publication of three
separate studies of Latin American testimonial literature, however, suggests
that Beverley’s epitaph was premature. See Bartow, Nance, and Maier and
Dulfano. Nance takes Beverley and other critics who question the current
viability of testimonio to task for “offering the reader new means to resist
action” (152). See Nance 152–156.
3. Scott gives an apropos example of this phenomenon from Chilean political
life. In June 1988, Ricardo Lagos broke the cautious silence among would-be
political opponents of Pinochet to condemn the general for seeking another
eight-year term of office. During a television report, Lagos rebuffed interviewers who tried to shush him with, “I speak for fi fteen years of silence.”
He pointed a fi nger at the camera and addressed Pinochet directly: “You
promise the country eight more years with torture assassination, and the
violation of human rights. To me, it seems inadmissable that a Chilean is so
ambitious for power as to pretend to hold it for 25 years” (quoted in Scott
207). The excitement of the event was created by several factors: the personal
risk Lagos took, his defiance of power, and the fact that he had spoken what
thousands of people had long been thinking or saying among themselves
under less risky circumstances. In 2000, Lagos was elected president.
4. I take exception to Boyle, in her otherwise perceptive study of Radrigán’s
plays, when she concludes that “life is absurd” in his plays and that his characters are “outcasts and losers” (145).
Outcasts, yes. And losers, perhaps materially, but never in an existential
sense. If life were entirely absurd then the battle would be already lost and
there would be no point in struggling as much as they do to maintain their
dignity as human beings. Radrigán imbues that struggle with enormous significance.
5. See Stern, Battling, 29–32, for an analysis of what he calls the myth of Chilean exceptionalism.
6. See Politzer for an anthology of interviews that makes the terror palpable.
See Verdugo for a complete account of “The Caravan of Death.”
7. The woman washed up on the shore was Marta Ugarte, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party until the coup. An official account
of her disappearance and the discovery of her body is available in the 11 February 1977 report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of
the Organization of American States. The assassination of Allende’s foreign
minister is richly detailed in Kornbluh (341–346). The murder of the three
communists, Santiago Nattino, Manuel Guerrero, and José Manuel Parada,
was known as “el caso de los degollados,” because their throats were slit.
In March 2006, when President Bachelet addressed mourners at a ceremony
commemorating their deaths, newspaper accounts stressed that the president
shed tears as she recalled the men, who had been close personal friends. See
Marina and Cádiz. For a full account of their murder, see Rettig (659–679).
For more on the photographer Rodrigo Rojas and his friend Carmen Gloria
256
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
Notes
Quintana, see the 16 September 1988 report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.
The complete Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and
Reconciliation, also known as the Rettig report, after Raúl Rettig, the former Radical Party senator who chaired the commission, is available online
at http://www.usip.org/library/truth.html.
For details on the aftermath of the coup, see Loveman 261–307.
See Dorfman, Lepeley (“Avatares”), and Rojo, for accounts of plays performed in concentration camps.
See Lepeley, “The Cueca,” for an analysis of Tres Marías as theater of resistance. See Agosín for a study of the arpilleras that includes testimonios and
color photographs of their work. See Stern, Battling, for an account of how
an art gallery that sold arpillera tapestries was fi rebombed in 1977 and its
owner forced into exile (81–89).
See Winn for several important studies of how the textile industry workers
have fared badly under neoliberal economic policies of both Pinochet and the
democratic governments that succeeded him.
For more on Radrigán’s biography, see the introduction to my translation of
Radrigán works, Finished from the Start and Other Plays. Also see Albornoz Farías’s introduction to Radrigán’s second anthology of plays, Juan Radrigán: Cronicas del Amor Furioso.
Though these were Radrigán’s fi rst plays, they were not his fi rst published
works. Earlier writings included an anthology of short stories (1962), a novel
(1968), and an anthology of poems (1975), none of which gained much critical or popular success.
See “El teatro debe hacer meditar para que la gente salga alterada por dentro.” And see “Juan Radrigán: El Dramaturgo del Año.”
The 1980 constitution that Pinochet pushed through stipulated that his term
as army commander-in-chief would not expire until 1998. Under the terms
of that constitution, he was sworn in as “senator for life,” which he claimed
guaranteed him immunity for prosecution. On July 5, 2002, however, he
resigned the latter title, claiming that failing mental health precluded his continued service in the senate and rendered him unfit to stand trial for human
rights crimes http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/chile.
The fi rst edition of Teatro de Juan Radrigán: 11 obras contains La felicidad
de los García. A second, 1993, edition, retitled Hechos consumados: Teatro
11 obras, contains all of the same plays with one exception: Islas de porfi ado
amor is substituted for La Felicidad de los García.
For an even-handed overview of the Pinochet government’s attempts to assist
the poor, as well as its repression of the underclass, see Constable and Valenzuela, 222–246. For a study of the contrast between the memories that rich
and poor hold of Pinochet’s Chile, see Stern, Remembering, 7–67.
La Felicidad de los García was made into a video by the theater group
ICTUS under the title El 18 de los García [The 18th of the Garcías]. During
the 1984–1986 season it was one of the group’s most popular videos, second
only to Andrés de la Victoria, a documentary about the killing of a priest
during antidictatorship protests. Los García was screened 289 times in Santiago and was sent out to twenty different institutions in the provinces (Stern
331–332). I am grateful to Steve J. Stern for calling this to my attention. For
more on alternative media under dictatorship, see Stern (297–335).
For a survey of the role of protest music and song in Latin America during
the 1970s and 1980s, see Matta, 447–460. In Chile, the most prominent
protest singers were Víctor Jara, who was assassinated shortly after coup,
Angel and Isabel Parra, Rolando Alarcón, and Patricio Manns (451). The
Notes
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
257
banned folk group Inti-Illimani toured the world, taking advantage of exile
to spread its antidictatorship message. Meanwhile, the peña, a kind of alternative coffeehouse dedicated to live performance of the music known as
Nueva Canción, had started in 1965 when Angel and Isabel opened La Peña
de los Parra in downtown Santiago. The Parra venue closed down after the
coup, but subsequently other underground peñas began to operate as spaces
dedicated to the performance of protest music (Fairley 109–112).
While Festival de la Una went off the air in 1987, a similar television show,
Sabados Gigantes, which started in Chile in 1962, is still going strong,
making it the longest running television show in the world (Guinness 352).
In 1986, a U.S. version began to run on the Miami-based Spanish-language
network Univision, under the slightly different title of Sabado Gigante. Its
light comic fare and product sponsorship during the course of the program
led one business reporter to tout it as “an advertiser’s dream.” See Mehta.
The January 4, 1978, plebiscite featured a ballot with a Chilean flag for
“yes” and a black box for “no.” The text read: “Faced with international
aggression launched against our fatherland, I support President Pinochet
in his defense of the dignity of Chile and reaffi rm the legitimacy of the
government” (quoted in Constable and Valenzuela 68). Pinochet declared
that more than 75 percent of the voters had supported his rule. In a 1980
plebiscite, boycotted by leftists and centrists, on his “Liberty Constitution,”
which would keep him in office until 1989, Pinochet claimed he received 67
percent of the vote (Stern 173).
23
Translation by George D. Schade.
24
The description of the 1999 production of Hechos consumados is reconstructed from newspaper accounts and from a videocassette recording of
a performance provided by the Chilean National Theater. I am grateful to
Joseph Appelt for helping me interpret the design elements from the evidence provided by the video.
Several reviewers complained that because the characters often narrated
their experiences in the past tense the play felt static. In general, reviews
were negative, complaining that the play was monotonously sad and that
its two-hour length made the production tedious. See Letelier, Montecinos,
Uliborri, and Vargas. Even one generally positive review, by Hans Ehrmann
writing for the magazine Ercilla, begins “Lo mas cómodo seria descartar
Pueblo del mal amor, considerándola una obra pesada, confusa y aburrida.”
[It would be easiest to dismiss Pueblo del mal amor as heavy, confusing and
boring work.] Yet Ehrmann goes on to praise Radrigán for challenging the
spectators instead of simply entertaining them (38).
López published his thoughts on his design in the spring 1987 issue of
Revista Apuntes de Teatro, published by the Universidad Católica, which
includes extensive description and analysis of every element of the production. I am grateful to María de la Luz Hurtado for bringing the issue to my
attention.
Schneider’s study shows that the most well-organized resistance took place
in shantytowns with deep Communist roots in the community.
NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE
1. I am grateful to Raffaele Furno for conducting interviews with Zinzi and the
cast on my behalf in Rome and translating them from Italian into English.
2. The only English-language periodical coverage of the production that I was
able to fi nd was a Theater Journal review. See Glushakoff.
258
Notes
3. I served as translator and dramaturge for Balmaceda and LaMicro Theater
on the Hechos production in New York City, which followed a workshop
production that I produced at Northwestern University’s Struble Theater in
April of 2004.
4. According to Radrigán’s text, Isabel is not homeless. She states that she does
have a place to live (232). But her economic situation is obviously precarious
and invites “translation” into homelessness for U.S. spectators. For more on
the character of Isabel reinterpreted as a homeless woman in U.S. productions, see my translator’s note to Finished.
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INTERVIEWS
Chapter 1
Aguilera, Carlos. 17 Nov. 2005.
Alonso, Gustavo. 2 Dec. 2005.
Amoretti, Julia. 2 Dec. 2005.
Dárdano, Leonel. 15 Nov. 2005.
Duffau, Marcelino. 22 Nov. 2005.
Jones, Roberto. 22 Nov. 2005.
Marchese, Marcelo. 16 Nov. 2005.
Mirza, Roger. 15 Nov. 2005.
Sedano Arias, Jorge. 20 Nov. 2005.
Pinto, Miguel. 19 Nov. 2005.
Pirelli, Carlos. 23 Nov. 2005.
Prieto, Tito. 22 Nov. 2005.
Sawer, Isabel. 20 Nov. 2005.
Varela, Carlos Manuel. 15 Nov., 24 Nov., 2 Dec. 2005.
Videla, Daniel. 14 Nov. 2005.
Chapter 2
Almada. Izaías. 3 Sep. 2006.
Boal, Augusto. E-mail to the author. 13 April 2004.
———. E-mail to the author. 10 March 2007.
Duarte, Lima. 26 Jun. 2007
276 References
Gertel, Vera. 22 Jun. 2007.
Gonçalves, Milton. 22 June 2007.
José, David/Lessa Mattos E-mail to the author. 4 March 2007.
Medalha, Marília. 3 Sep. 2006.
Pottlitzer, Joanne. 16 Dec. 2006.
Chapter 3
Fernandes, Augusto. Personal interview. 13 Aug. 2005.
Galán, Graciela. Personal interview. 13 Aug. 2005.
Gambaro, Griselda. Personal Interview. 19 Aug. 2005.
Geirola, Gustavo. Email to the author. 6 May 2004.
Muraña, Bettina. Personal Interview. 22 Aug. 2005.
Rey, Leal. Personal Interview. 13 Aug. 2005.
Yusem, Laura. Personal interview. 23 Aug. 2005.
Chapter 4
Berríos, Arnaldo. 26 July 2006, Valparaiso.
Brodt, Nelson. 28 July 2006, Santiago.
Herrera, Pepe. 27 July 2006, Santiago.
Hurtado,María de la Luz. 27 July 2006, Santiago.
Marín, Silvia. 20 July 2001; 31 Aug. 2005; 28 July 2006; Santiago.
Meza, Gustavo. 28 July 2006, Santiago.
Osorio, Raúl. 24 July 2006, Santiago.
Radrigán, Juan. 20 July 2001; 31 Aug. 2005; 28 July 2006; Santiago.
Solovera, Patricio. 24 July 2006, Santiago.
Epilogue Interviews
Banzi, Gianvito. E-mail to the author. 16 Oct. 2007.
Bertozzi, Damiana. E-mail to the author. 16 Oct. 2007.
Balmaceda, Martín. E-mail to the author. 29 Oct. 2007.
Pilares Manrique. Personal interview. 29 Oct. 2007.
Vargas-Salgado, Carlos. E-mail to the author. 21 Oct. 2007.
Zinzi, Thomas Otto. Personal interview. 16 Oct. 2007.
Index
A
Abbondanza, Jorge, 40, 47
Adorno, Theodor, 4, 13
aesthetics, 3, 21, 74
Aguilera, Carlos, 23, 30, 43, 47, 48,
49, 60
Aleph, theater company, 203
Alexiou, Margaret, 189
Aliança de Liberação Nacional, 80
Alfonsín, Raúl, 178, 184, 185
allegory, 17, 81, 89, 100–101, 107,
110, 141, 162, 167, 229–230,
234
abstract, 15, 138–139, 142–147,
158, 166, 169, 185–186
historical, 15, 68, 73–74, 103, 105,
108, 142, 144
national, 73, 74, 144
political, 81
and testimony, 15, 186, 192, 194,
197–199, 231
traditional, 185
Allende, Salvador, 73, 201, 202, 207,
208, 209, 216, 221, 226, 231,
236
Almada, Izaías, 80, 85
Almeida Prado, Décio de, 84, 90
Álvarez, Leonor, 30, 31, 115
amnesia, 30, 56, 67
collective, 14, 18–21, 233
the lure of, 30–31
terror and, 17
amnesty, 49
in Argentina, 9, 185, 190
in Brazil, 9
in Uruguay, 9, 29, 31, 55, 57, 67
Amoretti, Julia, 61
Amoretti, Violeta, 26, 61
Anderson, Robert N., 85–87, 89
Andrade, Francisco, 95
Andrade, Mário de, 74
Andrade, Oswald de, 73, 77
A’Ness, Francine, 25
Areco, Jorge Pacheco, 18
Argán, Mauricio, 233
Argentina:
as battered woman in El despojamiento, 158–167
as concentration camp in El campo,
146–158
coup of June 28, 1966; 147
European roots, 150, 153, 170
military’s role in national history, 138–141, 143, 146–147,
154–157
and nineteenth century, 167–176
Noche de los Bastones, 147
post-dictatorship, 8–9, 63, 184,
185–193
Process of National Reorganization,
146, 168
rule of law, 172, 184, 202
Armagno, Angel, 52, 53
Arruda Campos, Cláudia de, 84, 90, 98
Auschwitz, 4, 7, 147
Aylwin, Patricio, 207
B
Bachelard, Gaston, 26
Bachelet, Michelle, 8
Baliero, Carmen, 234
bandeirantes, 89, 91, 92, 139
Banzi, Gianvito, 137, 232, 233
Barnet, Miguel, 196
Batlle y Odóñez, José, 19
Beckett, Samuel, 4, 30, 37, 203
Bemberg, Maria-Luisa, 176
Benavente, David, 204
278
Index
Benedetti, Mario, 28
Benjamin, Walter, 107, 143, 144
Bertozzi, Damiana, 136–137, 232–233
Berríos, Arnaldo, 133, 209
Beverley, john, 195–197, 200, 228
Boal, Augusto, 2, 3, 11, 13, 15, 68–
114, 122, 125, 138, 141–142,
144, 147
A lua pequenha e a caminhada perigosa, 103
Arena conta Bolívar, 69, 74, 81,
103–114
Arena conta Tiradentes, 69, 79,
94–103, 123
Arena conta Zumbi, 69, 74, 80,
81–94, 96–98, 101, 105–106,
109, 122–123
Opinião, 79, 96
Revolução na América do Sul, 78,
79, 125
Theatre of the Oppressed, 69
Boling, Becky, 160
Bolívar, Simón, 15, 69, 76, 104–114,
139
as Christ-figure, 111–112
Bordaberry, Juan María, 18–19, 56
Boyle, Catherine, 218
Brazil:
Colonial, 89, 91, 92, 94
communism, 68, 70–73, 78, 80, 90,
94, 99, 112, 114
coup-within-a-coup of 1968; 80, 107
coup of March 31, 1964; 68, 71–72,
79, 82, 100
Doctrine of National Security, 71
economy, 72, 96, 99, 138
Independence movements, 69, 74,
76, 95, 96, 97, 100–103
Institutional Acts, 71–72
military crackdown of 1968; 3, 72
military’s role in national history, 69,
73, 138, 147
police and prison violence, 8
post-dictatorship, 8–9, 81–82, 98
povo, 83, 90, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102,
103, 104, 107, 109
presidents of, 71
race, 69, 82–86, 89–90, 92–93
revolution from the Right, 68
slavery, 76, 82–84, 86–87, 89–90,
93, 106–107, 138
socialism, 68, 73, 75, 77, 80, 82,
85–86, 87–88, 89, 93, 104, 105,
109
Brecht, Bertolt, 6, 22, 60, 69, 76, 79,
82–83, 87–89, 97–98, 105–106,
111, 148, 217
Brodt, Nelson, 134, 135, 198, 205, 213,
222
Buarque, Chico, 73, 74
Bulman, Gail A., 170
Bulnes Theater, 206
Burgos-Debray, Elizabeth, 196
Butler, Judith, 10
C
Calero, Jorge Pignataro, 46
Camargo Costa, Iná, 84, 101
Carvalho, Alina Foncesca, 95
Carvalho, José Murilo de, 95
Castelo Branco, Humberto de Alencar,
71, 90, 95
Castro, Alfredo, 222, 223
Castro, Celso, 70
Castro, Fidel, 9, 102, 105
Castro, Oscar, 204
Caxias, Duke of (Luis Alves de Lima e
Silva), 70, 81, 82, 93
Center for Theatre of the Oppressed,
81, 82
Centro Popular de Cultura, 75, 78
Chambers, Ross, 6–8
Chávez, Hugo, 9, 113, 114
Chaves Sosa, Ubagesner, 67
Chile:
Caravan of Death, 202
cultural blackout, 203
communism, 202–203, 210, 226
coup of September 11, 1973; 202
economy, 210, 213, 219
economic miracle, 18, 197, 219
elections of 1989, 1
military’s role in national history, 70,
210–204, 214
socialism, 194, 208, 210, 230
plebiscites of 1978 and 1980; 203
plebiscite of 1988; 207
the poor, 15, 194–195, 199–200, 204,
223, 231
post-dictatorship, 8, 63, 207
shantytowns, 222, 224–227, 228–230
textile industry, 204
censorship, 19, 35, 58, 64, 69–70, 72,
81, 167–198, 204, 226
Chen, I-Cheng, 237
Coedo, Alfredo, 48
Cold War, 3, 4, 105, 110, 114, 146,
153, 155
Index
279
conformity, 2, 18, 30, 33, 163, 171
Comedia Nacional, 39, 46, 47, 48, 116,
117, 118
Connerton, Paul, 20, 22, 23, 57
Consorte, Renato, 106, 123
Conteris, Hiber, 28, 29
Contreras, Sergio, 223
Conway, Christopher B., 109
coringa (joker), 69, 76–77, 97–98, 101,
106–108
cultural translation, 2, 10
culture of fear, 19, 173, 212
Fausto, Boris, 101
Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 163, 174, 191
Felman, Shoshana, 4, 211, 215.
Fernandes, Florestan, 92–93
Ferrada, Tennyson, 204
Ferreira, Wilson, 59
Festival de la Una, 217
Foucault, Michel, 4, 5, 218
Franco, Francisco, 139, 151, 154, 233
free market, 72, 195, 196, 204, 210,
211
Furriel, Joaquín, 127, 128, 234
D
G
Damasceno, Leslie, 78, 79, 96
Dárdano, Leonel, 54, 55, 119, 120
de Certeau, Michel, 5–6, 26, 30
Demassi, Gloria, 48, 118
Dessian, Chant, 85, 122
Dias Gomes, Alfredo, 73, 74
Díaz, José Pedro, 27, 28
Díaz, Pablo, 185
disappeared and disappearance:
in Argentina, 13, 18, 70, 138, 141,
163–164, 167–168, 172, 175,
180–181, 186–187, 189, 191,
235
in Brazil, 8, 70
in Chile, 70, 197, 203, 207–208,
219, 222–224, 226, 236–237
in Uruguay, 18, 21–22, 29, 34,
45–47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 60–64,
66–67, 233
Discépolo, Armando, 36, 160
dissidence, 8, 12, 45, 138, 142
Distéfano, Juan Carlos, 129, 179
Dozi, Lami, 190
Duarte, Lima, 85, 90, 91, 106, 109,
122
Duffau, Marcelino, 24, 53, 178
Dunn, Christopher, 74, 75
duty
to conceal, 14, 15, 138–193
to inspire, 14, 68–114
Galán, Graciela, 171, 179, 234
Galbiati, Delfi, 46, 48, 117, 118
Galeano, Eduardo, 17, 67
Galtieri, Leopoldo, 178
Gambaro, Griselda, 2, 3–4, 11, 13,
138–193, 228, 235
Antígona furiosa, 129–132, 141,
178–185, 186
Atando cabos, 141, 185–193, 194,
224, 228–230
El campo, 139, 140, 141, 146–158,
168, 169, 170, 177
El desatino, 139
El despojamiento, 140, 141, 143,
158–167, 168, 169, 177, 178
Ganarse la muerte, 138
La malasangre, 11, 127, 128, 137,
140, 141, 167–178, 184, 233,
234, 235
Las paredes, 139, 167
Los siameses, 139
García, María Claudia, 234
García Márquez, Gabriel, 109, 110
Geirola, Gustavo, 159
Gelman, Juan, 66, 234
Gelman, Marcelo, 66
Gelman, María Claudia, 66
Gertel, Vera, 78, 115, 122
ghosts, 47, 49, 55, 67, 237
Gonçalves, Milton, 92, 122
Gonzaga, Tomá, 97, 100–101
González, Ana, 209
González, Pietro, 237
Gordon, Avery F., 47
Goulart, João, 71, 73, 99, 101, 103
Graham-Jones, Jean, 143, 166, 173
Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 22.
Grossi, Gladis, 233
grotesco criollo, 36, 160
Grotowski, Jerzy, 206
E
Escalante, Laura, 26
exile, 3, 5, 25, 29, 31–32, 46, 53, 59,
69, 101, 139–140, 176–177
F
Fal, Carolina, 127, 128, 234
Falcone, María Claudia, 187
Falklands War, 178
280
Index
Guarnieri, Gianfrancesco, 2, 4, 11,
68–114, 122, 138, 141–142
Arena conta Zumbi, 69, 74, 80,
81–94, 96–98, 101, 105–106,
109, 122–123
Castro Alves pede passagem, 81
Eles não usam Black-tie, 115
Ponto de partida, 81
Teatro de Ocasião, 81
Um grito parado no ar, 81
Gubar, Susan, 83
Guera, Ruy, 73
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 3, 70, 75, 76,
82, 87, 102, 104, 113
execution of, 103,
focos, 102
Hombre Nuevo [New Man], 68, 70,
73, 75, 76, 85
as inspiration, 15, 76, 94
Gutiérrez Ruiz, Héctor, 56, 59
H
habeas corpus, 11, 59, 62, 63, 72, 172
Hamlet, 47, 52, 53, 55–56, 58
Havel, Vaclav, 7–8
Heaney, Seamus, 13
Heliodora, Bárbara, 100
Herrera, Pepe, 135, 205–207, 222
Herzog, Vladimir, 81
heroes, 3, 15, 68, 70, 73–77, 82–83,
86, 90, 102, 139, 141, 160
Hirszman, Leon, 81
history, 14, 34, 59, 60, 89, 103, 139,
186–187, 190–193
Holocaust, 151, 211, 214, 215, 233
Huidobro, Eleuterio Fernández, 24, 54
human rights, 8–9, 31, 57–58, 67, 184,
207, 234
Hunold Lara, Silvia, 95
I
ideology, 13
authoritarian, 12, 15, 33, 145
dominant, 145
as fiction, 7, 25
questioned by art, 10
Império, Flávio, 82, 97
imprisonment, 18, 27, 52, 53, 56, 94,
171, 180, 211, 213
insile, 27, 31, 32, 44, 45
Irarrázabal, Mario, 225
J
Jameson, Fredric, 4, 5, 73, 74, 142, 146
Jara, Víctor, 202
Jones, Margot (Theater-in-the-Round),
77
Jones, Roberto, 52, 53
Jorge Velho, Domingos, 84, 90–91
José, David, 85, 95, 123, 124
José, Paulo, 92, 122
Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, 236
K
Kearney, Richard, 57
Kirchner, Néstor, 8
Kissinger, Henry, 9
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 71
L
Laclau, Ernesto, 10
lament, 3, 13, 56, 181–183, 189–190,
193, 209, 212, 231
ritual, 186, 188–189
power of, 188
LaMicro Theater, 2, 236–237
Laub, Dori, 201, 211
Levi, Primo, 214
Lobo, Edu, 80, 83
Lobo, José Ricardo, 159
López, Ramón C., 225
Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 8, 9
Lynch, John, 170, 173–174, 176
Lyotard, Jean- François, 4–5
M
Magnarelli, Sharon, 162
Manning, Susan, 83
Marighella, Carlos, 99
Mármol, José, 174
Martínez Correa, José Celso, 73
Marra, Nelson, 29
Marx, Karl, 75, 87
Marxism, 4, 9, 10, 22, 154, 176, 201
Massera, Emilio, 9, 191
McCleod, Juan, 204
McDonald, James, 186
Medalha, Marília, 78, 80, 85, 122
Medina, Estela, 43, 46, 116
Mehler, Miriam, 78
Memory, 17–67
abandonment of, 42
of atrocity, 14, 29, 32, 34
in the service of blackmail, 42–43
collective, 3, 18, 19, 22, 25, 33, 40,
52, 57, 61, 63, 68, 73
ethical, 14, 25, 34, 34, 49, 61
and imitation, 42–43
Index
individual, 21–23, 25, 26, 29, 32, 63
kinetic, 23, 25
marker of identity, 21, 22, 30, 63
narrative, 46, 61,
nostalgia, 14, 25, 27, 29, 35, 41,
45–46
as resistance, 22, 26, 67
acts of transfer, 22–23
Menchú, Rigoberta, 195–197
Menem, Carlos, 185
Menéndez, Lucio, 190
Messinger Cypess, Sandra, 171
Meza, Gustavo, 204, 209
Michelini, Rafael, 67
Michelini, Zelmar, 56, 59
Migliaccio, Flávio, 78
Miller, Arthur, 81
Milleret, Margo, 78, 85, 90
Miranda, Francisco de, 108, 110
Miranda Pérez, Fernando, 67
Mirza, Roger, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 46,
47, 53, 62
Molina, Carlos Denis, 46
Montejo, Esteban, 196
Moreira Alves, Márcio, 72
Moreira Alves, Maria Helena, 71, 72
Moschner, Iván, 180
Mosquera, Tomás Cipriano de, 110
Mostaço, Edélcio, 84
mothers of the disappeared, 13, 139,
164, 178–182, 184–189
Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), 201, 226
Movimento Negro Unificado, 93
Mulvey, Laura, 160
Muraña, Bettina, 130–131, 178–180,
185
N
Nagy, Gregory, 189
Naigeboren, Elba, 159
Nance, Kimberly A., 227
narrative, 21, 22, 59, 61, 62, 64, 191,
224, 231
biographical, 110, 197
collective, 64
dramatic, 144
false, 145
fictional, 53, 86, 228, 230
historical, 229
individual, 142
official, 61
Nascimento, Abdias do, 93
neoliberalism, 10, 18, 197, 208, 219
281
Neruda, Pablo, 111, 112
Night of the Pencils (La Noche de los
lápices), 186
Nixon, Richard, 155, 201–202
Noguera, Amparo, 223
Nora, Pierre, 21, 26
nostalgia, 17, 18, 25, 27, 29, 38–39,
41–42, 231
collective, 38
Núñez, Pablo, 223
O
O’Donnell, Guillermo, 156, 173
O’Gorman, Camila, 176
Oliveira, Anthero de, 85, 122
Onetti, Juan Carlos, 28
Onganía, Juan Carlos, 140, 146, 147,
151, 153, 155, 156
Orozco, Alejandra, 137, 235
Osório, Manuel Luís, 70
Osorio, Raúl, 136, 225
Owens, Craig, 107, 110
P
Palmares, 76, 82, 83, 84–85, 86, 87,
90, 92
Pardo, Anilú, 137, 235
Partnoy, Alicia, 196
Pedro I, Dom, 95
Perelli, Carina, 19, 20, 23, 24, 27, 32,
38, 41
Pérez, Miriam, 213
performance, 22, 29, 51, 57, 189
of absence, 183
counterhegemonic, 2, 11
of dictatorship, 1–2, 72
off-stage, 1–4, 17, 74, 148, 167,
170
dissident, 1–4, 167
and intertextuality, 146
and memory, 51–52, 54, 57–58,
189, 214
oppositional, 13, 68
political, 10, 56,
as resistance, 80, 198
theatrical, 21
Perón, Eva, 165–166
Perón, Isabel (“Isabelita”), 165–166
Perón, Juan Domingo, 138, 140, 147,
151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 165,
166
Pétion, Alexandre, 106, 107
Piar, Manuel, 109
Pilares Manrique, Nelly, 237
282 Index
Pinochet, Augusto, 1, 9, 16, 202–207,
217–218, 225
Piña, Juan Andrés, 203–204
Pirandello, Luigi, 36, 49, 160
Pirelli, Carlos, 24, 30, 47, 48
Political Theater Festival at Intermedia
Arts, 237
Politzer, Patricia, 226
postmodernism, 4–9, 15, 146
Potash, Robert A., 154
Pottlitzer, Joanne, 81
Prieto, Tito, 22, 24
Puig, Manuel, 6–7
Puga Rojas, Ana María, 203
Q
Quinteros, Elena, 45–46
Quinteros, Lorenzo, 127, 234
R
Radrigán, Juan, 2, 4, 11, 13, 15, 133,
194–231, 236
Cuestión de ubicación, 204
El encuentramiento, 208
El invitado, 195, 196, 216–219, 231
El loco y la triste, 205, 210
El toro por las astas, 206, 215
Isabel desterrada en Isabel, 195, 200,
211–213, 237
Islas de porfiado amor, 207, 210
Hechos consumados, 134–135, 195,
206, 210, 211, 215, 219–224,
236
La contienda humana, 133, 207, 216
La felicidad de los García, 210
Las brutas, 133, 134, 200, 205
Pueblo del mal amor, 136, 195, 215,
224–231
Sin motivo aparente, 195, 210
Testimonio de las muertes de Sabina,
195, 204, 208–211
Regina, Elis, 69
Renato, José, 77–79
Repertorio Español, 137, 235
resistance, 3, 4–8, 10, 12–13, 16, 35, 141
artistic, 8, 10, 17
the body as a site of, 170, 175
dance and, 69
memory as a form of, 26, 34, 67
political, 189
silence, speech and, 178
theatrical, 69
revolution, 6
Cuban, 68, 73, 99
May 1968, (in French), 7
Marxist, 4, 94
socialist, 9, 68, 73, 87, 88
Reyno, Osvaldo, 39, 60
Reyno, Walter, 30
Rial, Juan, 32, 38
Ricoeur, Paul:
on admiration, 15
on allegory of temporality, 192, 230
on the construction of narrative, 21,
228, 229
on the duty to remember, 14, 17–68,
187, 188
on the duty to tell, 14, 15, 33–34,
194–231
on hermeneutic circle, 230
on memory, 21
Ridenti, Marcelo, 85, 99
Roach, Joseph, 3, 20, 34, 52, 55
Rock, David, 147, 155, 172, 191
Rodriguez Barilari, Elbio, 30
Rodrigues Sales, Jean, 99
Rodríguez, Silvio, 112
Rokem, Freddie, 76, 77
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 157, 168–176
Rosencof, Mauricio, 23, 24, 28, 29, 54,
66
Roslik, Vladimir, 59
Rossi, Claudia, 48
Royal Court Theatre, 186
Rulfo, Juan, 220–221, 224
S
Sáenz, Manuela, 110
Sales, Jean Rodrigues, 99
Sandino, Augusto César, 113
San Martín, Jose de, 109, 150
Sanguinetti, Julio María, 59, 61
Sant’Anna, Vânya, 85, 122
Santos, Thereza, 93
Santullo, Maruja, 46, 48, 117
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 153
Scarry, Elaine, 162
Scilingo, Adolfo Francisco, 163
Schettini, Ulricho, 233
Schudson, Michael, 22
Schwarz, Roberto, 84
Scott, James C., 11, 15, 26, 198
Sfat, Dina, 85, 122–123
silence, 4, 23–24, 34, 141, 166, 175,
177–178, 183, 212–213, 219
Sobrino, Juan Alberto, 30, 115
Solovera, Patricio, 208, 225
Sommer, Doris, 142, 169, 195
Index
Soza, José, 223
speech, 34, 90, 102, 104, 107, 178,
183–184, 188, 212
Speroni, Catalina, 127, 234
state terror, 3, 141, 155, 166, 168, 214
Stern, Steve J., 214
surrogation, 52, 58
T
Taller de Investigación Teatral, 204
Taylor, Diana, 3, 146, 165, 180, 181,
182
Teatro Abierto, 167, 203, 235
Teatro Aviñón, 238
Teatro de Arena, 15, 68, 76, 77–79, 78,
80, 82, 94, 96, 108, 115, 124,
126, 138, 141
company members in 1970, 106
Teatro de la Alianza Francesa, 52
Teatro de la Universidad Católica, 225,
Teatro de la Universidad de Chile, 213
Teatro della Centena, 136–137,
232–233
Teatro dell’Orologio, 232
Teatro El Galpón, 29, 54, 119, 120
Teatro Florencio Sánchez, 60
Teatro Imagen, 204
Teatro Los Comediantes, 209
Teatro Oficina, 73, 75
Teatro Nacional de Chile, 222
Teatro Notariado, 60
Teatro Popular El Telón, 205–207, 213,
216, 222
company members, 205
European tours of 1983 and 1988;
206–207
Teatro Regina, 91, 127, 128, 234
Teatro por la Identidad, 235
testimonio, 15, 194–231
meta-testimonio, 224, 228, 230
Tierney-Tello, Mary Beth, 142
Tiradentes (Joaquim José da Silva), 15,
69, 75, 76, 79, 94–103, 104–107
as Christ-figure, 94
execution of, 76, 95
Tiradentes prison, 96
Torres, Carlos, 39, 60
torture, 2, 3, 8, 9, 17, 18, 21, 27, 28, 29,
34, 45, 48, 49, 52, 53, 59, 62,
67, 70, 72, 155, 162, 164, 167,
174–175, 179, 184, 194, 196,
233
acknowledgment of, 50–51, 64–65,
164, 174, 180, 186, 187, 194
283
in Argentina, 138, 156, 159, 160,
162–164, 168, 171, 172, 173
in Brazil, 70, 72, 73, 83, 111, 138
in Chile, 194, 202–203, 208, 226
cultural memory of, 54
and doctors, 24
fear of, 22–24, 25, 28, 31, 33, 173
refusal to acknowledge, 34, 49, 174
staging of, 30–31, 51, 53, 54, 237
in Uruguay, 24, 45, 49, 53–54, 65
Totalitarianism, 19, 20, 23, 57
Tropicália, 74, 75
Tupamaro guerillas, 19, 26, 28, 29, 43
Turner, Victor, 189
U
Uruguay
classification of citizens, 27, 62
commemoration of the disappeared
(May 20), 67
coup of June 27, 1973; 18, 20, 27
Day of the Liberated (March 14–15),
59, 61, 66
economy, 18, 40
elections of November 25, 1984; 59
Golden Age, 38–40, 41, 231,
Ley de Caducidad (amnesty law), 31
Marcha, 20, 28, 29, 75
military’s role in national history,
18–20, 50, 57, 70
national anthem, 2, 23
plebiscite of 1980, 31, 58
post-dictatorship, 8, 46
rule of law, 19, 20, 44
V
Valle-Inclán, Ramón del, 36, 160
Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária, 80
Varela, Carlos Manuel, 2, 3, 11, 13, 14,
17–67, 121, 231
Alfonso y Clotilde, 29, 30, 38, 45, 51,
58, 115, 136, 137, 176, 187, 232
Crónica de la espera, 29, 58
El juego tiene nombre, 26
Happening?, 26
Interrogatorio en Elsinore, 22, 29, 51,
52, 59, 119, 120, 178
La enredadera, 26
Las gaviotas no beben petróleo, 29
Los cuentos del final, 29, 38, 47, 48,
116, 117
Palabras en la arena, 29, 46, 47, 48,
50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 118
Varela, Martín, 61
284
Index
Vargas, Getúlio, 70, 73
Vargas-Salgado, Carlos, 237–238
Vásquez, Eva C., 236–237
Vásquez, Tabaré, 8, 57
Vega, Rodrigo, 222
Vianna Filho, Oduvaldo (“Vianinha”),
78, 96, 115
Vicuña, Benjamín, 223
Videla, Daniel, 29, 31
Videla, Jorge Rafaél, 9, 169, 171–172
Vieyra, Norberto, 180
Villanueva, Gonzalo, 235
Von Hummel, Alexandra, 213
W
Wannamaker, Annette, 180, 181, 183,
185
White, Hayden, 59, 86, 192
Williams, Raymond, 10, 25
Williams, Tennessee, 40–41, 43, 44,
58, 79
Wissmiller, Jill, 236
witnessing, 34, 163, 188, 190, 198,
201, 214, 219, 222, 228
Woodall, Natalie Joy, 170
Y
Yavitz, Jaime, 46
Yusem, Laura, 127–132, 168, 178–
180, 233–234
Yuyachkani, 25
Z
Zinzi, Thomas Otto, 136–137,
232–233, 235
Žižek, Slavoj, 10
Zumbi, 15, 69, 73, 75–76, 81–94,
104–105, 107, 138–139

Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater

Transcription

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