Trans/acting: Latin American and Latino performing arts 9780838757260

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Trans/Acting

The Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory Series Editor: Anibal Gonzalez, Yale University Dealing with far-reaching questions of history and modernity, language and selfhood, and power and ethics, Latin American literature sheds light on the many-

faceted nature of Latin American life, as well as on the human condition as a whole. This series of books provides a forum for some of the best criticism on Latin American literature in a wide range of critical approaches, with an emphasis on works that productively combine scholarship with theory. Acknowledging the historical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian literatures, the series welcomes consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and topics, while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romance studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and literary theory. Titles in Series

Sergio Waisman, Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery Stuart Day, Staging Politics in Mexico: The Road to Neoliberalism Amy Nauss Millay, Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in TwentiethCentury Spanish American Narrative J. Andrew Brown, Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in Argentine Narrative Juan Carlos Ubilluz, Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel Mark A. Hernandez, Figural Conquistadors: Rewriting the New World’s Discovery and Conquest in Mexican and River Plate Novels of the 1980s and 1990s Gabriel Riera, Littoral of the Letter: Saer’s Art of Narration Dianne Marie Zandstra, Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque Amanda Holmes, City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space Gail Bulman, Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater Anne Lambright, Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminist in the Narrative of José Maria Arguedas Dara E. Goldman, Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South Sharon Magnarelli, Home Is Where the (He)art Is: The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater Raul Marrero-Fente, Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia Jacqueline Bixler and Laurietz Seda, eds., Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts http.//www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ press

Trans/Acting Latin American and Latino Performing Arts

Edited by

Jacqueline Bixler and Laurietz Seda

SS Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

© 2009 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp.

All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-0-8387-5726-0/09 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.]

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trans/acting : Latin American and Latino performing arts / edited by Jacqueline Bixler and Laurietz Seda

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8387-5726-0 (alk. paper) 2. Theater—Latin America—History—20th century. 2. Hispanic American theater—History— 20th century. 3. Latin American drama—20th century—History and criticism. 4. American drama—20th century—History and criticism. 5. American drama—Hispanic American authors—History and

criticism. I. Bixler, Jacqueline Eyring. II. Seda, Laurietz. III. Title: Transacting.

PN2309.T65 2009

792.098'0904—dc22 2008029670

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

As you read this text, you are crossing a border yourself. —Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, The Multicultural Paradigm Theatre is like a wild weed, its seeds are blown everywhere and despite the conditions, always bloom. —Teatro Malayerba, Ecuador Borders are everywhere. They surround us. They divide us and allow us to come together. They mark our territories, our bodies, and our speech. They are real and imagined, porous and hard, visible and invisible, dominant and subtle, but above all politi-

cal. Just as they hinder and impede our expansion and our growth, so they also shape our identities and senses of self. They become socially and culturally meaningful by the way in which they signal an end to possibility, but they also encode the very possibility of that which they deny: the performative and necessary act of being crossed. Virtually, physically, legally or illegally, as long as borders exist, so will border crossers. —Ulla Berg and Roberto Varea, Borders: Hybrid Imaginaries/Fractured Geographies

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Contents

Acknowledgments 9 Trans/Acting: The Art of Living “In-Between”’ 13 LAURIETZ SEDA

Latin American Theater 24 Transformation and Transculturation in Twentieth-Century GEORGE WOODYARD

Patricia Suarez 37

Transitional Stages: Space and Illusion in Las polacas by SHARON MAGNARELLI

Transgressing Spaces: Within, Without, and Beyond the

Stage and Uruguay in Gabriel Peveroni’s Theater 55

Berman 72 SARAH M. MISEMER

The Politics of Tradaptation in the Theater of Sabina JACQUELINE BIXLER

Estorino’s Parece blanca 9] Theater Transformations: Reading Race in Abelardo CAMILLA STEVENS

the Press 109 Transposing Professions: Vicente Lefiero and the Politics of STUART A. DAY

and Freud 125

Transference and Negotiation: Sabina Berman Plots Dora AMALIA GLADHART

7

8 CONTENTS Transferring Terms, Translating Sin: The Search for

Meaning in Rafael Spregelburd’s La estupidez 143 GAIL A. BULMAN

Paquita la del Barrio and Translocal Theatricality:

Performing Counter(post)modernity 160 GASTON ALZATE

Standing in Cultural Representation: Latino Stand-Up and

The Original Latin Kings of Comedy 179 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY

Performing Gender in ... Y a otra cosa mariposa 196 BECKY BOLING

Dragging the Borders: Transnational Queer Identities and

Citizenship in Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas 211 WILLIAM GARCiA

Trans/Acting Bodies: Guillermo Gomez-Pefia’s Search for a

Singular Plural Community 227 LAURIETZ SEDA

Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator

GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA 238

Index 264

Contributors 260

Acknowledgments ‘Tus Book OF ESSAYS WAS BOTH INSPIRED AND INFORMED BY THE

presentations and discussions that took place in April 2005 at the

University of Connecticut during the VI Conference on Latin American Theatre Today. Of the many administrative units at the University of Connecticut that made possible the conference/festival as well as this book, we gratefully acknowledge the generous support from the following: the Department of Modern & Classical Languages; the Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences; the Office of the Dean of Fine Arts; the Office of the Vice Provost for Multicultural & International Affairs; and the Office of

the Vice Provost for Research & Graduate Education. Special thanks go to Peter Nichols, Provost and Executive President for Academic Affairs, for his exceptional generosity. We extend our gratitude to the contributors of this book for their

patience and for their belief in this project, and to Guillermo Gomez-Pefia for permission to include his performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator. We are also grateful to Mary Smith for her continuous willingness to work with the unexpected and to Brian D. Patrick for his superb work as a research assistant. In addition to the invaluable assistance that he provided during the conference in 2005, Brian has proven to be an expert reader, translator, and editor in the final revisions of the present book. Finally, we express our most profound gratitude to George Woodyard, our dearest friend and mentor, for his guidance, his support, his friend-

ship, and all he has done to promote the study and well-being of

Latin American theater.

9

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Trans/Acting

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Trans/Acting: The Art of Living “In-Between” Laurietz Seda All Americans (from the vast continent America) were, are, or will be border-crossers. —Guilermo Gomez-Pefia, The Multicultural Paradigm

SINCE THE 1950s, THEATER HAS EMERGED AS ONE OF THE FASTEST

erowing and most innovative artistic and literary fields in Latin America.’ During this time, critical interest in theater and performance has been on the rise in Latin America as well as in the United States. The last twenty years of the twentieth century saw a boom in the publication and availability of works written for the theater accompanied by a proliferation of book-length studies, specialized journals, Internet sites, blogs, conferences, festivals, and competitive awards that support creative work for and critical research on the theater.’ The renewal and strengthening of the theater scene in the years leading up to and immediately following the new millennium move

in time with political, economic, cultural, and social changes brought on by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the signing of free trade agreements between several Latin American countries and the United States,’ the transition to democracy in countries such as Chile, Peru, and Argentina, and new advances in technology and communications.* These regional and global developments mark the beginning of a movement toward the elimination of physical and symbolic boundaries by creating the feeling that national borders “can no longer be considered to be the ideological gatekeepers which they were meant to be in the eyes of 19th and

20th-century nationalist politicians.”> In the same vein, Néstor Garcia Canclini observes that “in a short period of time the econo-

mies of large, medium and small countries came to depend on a transnational system in which cultural and ideological borders disappear.’’° Nonetheless, as I explain below, even today one cannot 13

14 LAURIETZ SEDA speak of the total extinction of borders since the systems of production and exchange remain under the control of social actors. Commercial and political blocks of power still exist, along with colonial and neocolonial ideologies, while communication technologies are neither free to use nor always multidirectional.’ Thus, it 1s necessary to (re)think, (re)create, and (re)articulate the interstitial spaces

that permit an interrogation of limits and absolute, reductionist

definitions. It is virtually impossible to approach current thinking on borders without mentioning the processes of globalization.® The term glob-

alization has been in frequent use since around 1990. Despite the publication of hundreds of books that analyze and debate questions surrounding these processes, there is little consensus among economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and humanists, among others, as to the definition and meaning of globalization and whether its impact on countries and individuals is positive or negative. While it is not the objective of this book to resolve this dilemma, I would

like to suggest that the debates and the numerous publications evince a “consciousness of globalization” and that in today’s world

one cannot reflect on the society, culture, literature, politics, and economy of any country without referring to these processes.’ Through a gradual accumulation of multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings, the term globalization has come to refer to a world in which a country’s social, economic, political, and cultural systems are interconnected with other countries. The term helps to frame and explain the transformations brought about by the new global economy. According to Daniel Mato, the most appropriate way of representing ““globalization’ is as a historical trend, resulting from various social processes and projecting its effects over the

entire planet, toward interconnection among the peoples of the world and their institutions, so that the planet’s inhabitants as a whole tend to share a unified space, more continuous than discrete, by virtue of multiple and complex interrelations; all this not only from an economic point of view, but also a social, political and cultural one.” !° The word globalization has also responded to the complex development of international and transnational relations and to the intensification of cultural exchanges made possible by advances in technology and communications. These new transnational interrelations create the illusion that borders have disappeared.'' The key word here is i//usion because borders have not disappeared entirely. Although physical borders seem

to have been eliminated, as in the case of the European Union, where citizens can travel from one country to another with relative

TRANS/ACTING: THE ART OF LIVING “IN-BETWEEN” 15

ease, symbolic borders (ethnic, social, and economic borders, among others) and fundamentalisms take on new life. For example, the eventual disappearance of the US-Mexico border 1s further from

coming true today than ever before. Ironically, the signing of NAFTA between Mexico, Canada, and the United States in 1994 coincided with the adoption of resolutions such as Operation Gatekeeper, which was aimed at closing the most accessible routes between Mexico and the United States to prevent the entry of illegal immigrants. Guillermo GoOmez-Pefia has noted in this regard that

“it is not a coincidence that along with the implementation of

NAFTA we witnessed the construction of a sinister metallic border

wall that eerily resembles the old Berlin Wall... . The new wall contradicted the borderless rhetoric of the free traders, revealing their true intentions.” !? Worse still, following the terrorist attacks on New York City of September 11, 2001, the US-Mexico border has been militarized and patrolled by vigilante groups.'* More recently, in May 2005, George W. Bush signed into law a bill that makes it harder for illegal immigrants to obtain a driver’s license. Furthermore, a year after signing that bill, he announced in his State of the Union address a plan to send thousands of National Guard troops to protect the nation’s southern border against illegal immigrants. And as this book goes to press the president is proposing “legislation that would introduce a guest-worker program, allowing some immigrants into the country temporarily. And it would provide the 12 million illegal immigrants a chance to earn legal status if they have jobs, pass a criminal background check and pay a fine, and eventually gain even permanent residency if they pay a steeper penalty, learn English and return home first.” '* The growing problematization of territorial and symbolic borders has had an impact on the daily lives of individuals (whether they be migrants or not) and on events taking place at the local, national, and global levels. Processes of globalization have transformed the planet into a transnational world in which traditional ways of thinking about family, marriage, sexuality, identity, race, borders, and the nation have undergone a metamorphosis through the questioning of restrictive, categorical definitions.'> While national borders “are political constructs, imagined projections of territorial power,” symbolic borders are social constructs intended to preserve power, be it political, social or cultural. !© Thus, recent trends in socioeconomic development and changes in our ways of understanding borders, even when they tend to be contradictory, “alter the form of the scenarios that once gave meaning to goods and messages.’’'’ Furthermore, they contribute to the desire to articulate subjectivit-

16 LAURIETZ SEDA ies that transcend the limits preestablished by politics, society, and culture.

This book grew out of a desire to stimulate dialogue and new interpretations and to bring to the fore the state of Latin American and US Latino performance and performance arts.'® The present essays propose new paths of inquiry into the symbolic, sociohistorical meanings and discursive formations in the field of Latin American and US Latino performance. More specifically, they offer new perspectives on questions of genre, gender, race, identity, history, and

politics. We are interested in the shifting paradigms of an era in which citizens face the challenge of rethinking themselves in light of new perspectives opened up by communication technologies and the diverse patterns of consumption taking root in contemporary society. Thus, we asked contributors to consider the various meanings of the prefix trans (e.g., “across,” “on the other side,” “through,” “beyond”’) as a way of understanding not only performance practices but also contemporary society and the human condition in this age of globalization and shifting borders. The authors were given absolute freedom in all other regards (region, country, genre, author). The result was that we received essays on the performing arts and dramaturgy of Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, and the US Latino community, all taking as their point of departure the varied and complex dynamic of transborder enunciations. In other words, the studies assembled in this collection include topics ranging from transculturation and transnationalism to transgender, transgenre, and translocation. These keywords are used throughout the book to challenge the meanings of genre, gender, race, identity, history, and politics in the context of a new century. We expect that such explorations will bring to the fore the struggles and contradictions of a convulsive era. The search for an apt title for a book, not to mention the selection of a representative corpus of texts, can be an agonizing process. While this book might be criticized for including more than one essay on a given country or author, or for failing to represent all

Latin American countries or all Hispanic groups residing in the United States, we wish to make clear that it is not our intention to present a comprehensive study of Latin American and US Latino performance, as such would be an encyclopedic undertaking. The absence from these pages of a given author, playwright, scholar, or performer does not imply a denial of their work’s value or importance. This being said, we want to stress that we have collected a body of essays that explores interstitial spaces and strengthens our understanding of Latin American and US Latino performance and

TRANS/ACTING: THE ART OF LIVING “IN-BETWEEN” 17

performing arts as a diverse range of discursive and cultural practices.

The title of the book, Trans/Acting: Latin American and Latino Performing Arts, calls attention to the transgressive and performative nature of territorial and symbolic border crossings. To trans/act is to go beyond binary oppositions, beyond acting and performing identity, ethnicity, gender, and nation. It also connotes negotiation and/or exchange while in the act of performing. To trans/act is to open up possibilities and to be open to possibilities of mediation, transformation, or transgression within, across, and beyond the absolutist limits and definitions that attempt to control subjectivities. To trans/act is consciously to opt for a ceaseless process of reinventing and redefining the art of living “in-between,” to avoid succumbing to commodification or to the very paradigms and binaries that this process places in question. These words give agency to the strategies of negotiation used by subjects who inhabit the borderlands of different nations, societies, cultures, sexualities, and ethnicities to create hybrid identities and fluid systems. By using this word, we strive to vindicate the political status of those who live, perform, and trans/act in-between, in the territorial, psychological, or symbolic borderlands. We ourselves partake in the process of trans/acting by including Guillermo Gomez-Pefia’s performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator. GOmez-Pefia is indeed the epitome of the trans/actor. He is not only a performancero but also a cultural critic, a writer, and an interdisciplinary intellectual. He consciously and constantly eradicates essentialisms by incarnating multiple personas in his art and daily life in a continuous journey across borders both geographic and artistic. As I explain in my essay “Trans/acting Bodies: Guillermo GoOmez-Pefia’s Search for a Singular Plural Community,” this performance script serves as an example par excellence of the art of trans/acting. As previously mentioned, the underlying purpose of this collection is to foreground, question, and dismantle contradictory notions of border. While on the one hand laws are passed to close territorial borders to immigrants, on the other hand we can no longer speak of these boundaries as absolute and self-contained entities but rather as part of a fluid and dynamic set of relations within which subjects are constantly reinventing and trans/acting their identities. Given our world of ever-changing signs and meanings, this is a trend that will continue to prevail as borders continue to shift, zigzag, overlap, and at times disappear. The essays presented in this book refer to a

wide range of interdisciplinary theories and approaches such as

18 LAURIETZ SEDA Stuart Hall’s ideas on “negotiated consumption,” Judith Butler’s ideas on gender and performativity, Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern

take on adaptation, Peter Brook’s well-known theory of empty space, and Marvin Carlson’s most recent theory of memory theater and the phenomenon known as “haunting.” George Woodyard’s essay, “Transformation and Transculturation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Theater,” is key to understanding the phenomena that shaped the theater of the twentieth

century and helped to formulate that of the new millennium. Woodyard describes the artistic movements, theatrical groups, directors, dramatists, and the transcultural and transnational events that, based on his broad vision and long experience in the study of this genre, transformed twentieth-century Latin American theater into a global phenomenon. The analysis of space is the main focus of the essays by Sharon Magnarelli and Sarah Misemer. In “Transitional Stages: Space and Illusion in Las polacas by Patricia Suarez,” Magnarelli examines the transitional spaces of the play’s fictional world and studies in detail the use of imagined as well as concrete space to show how the production process translates the complex spatiality of Suarez’s trilogy from text to stage. For Magnarelli, these transitional spaces are places that erase the line separating reality from illusion and where meanings are in a constant state of construction, destruction, and rearticulation. Space and borders are also the focus of “Transgressing Spaces: Within, Without and Beyond the Stage and Uruguay in Gabriel Peveroni’s Theater.””» Misemer shows how Peveroni

uses the terms hueco and esquina, both related to the idea of marginality, to problematize notions of identity in a postdictatorial society such as that of Uruguay. Misemer carries out a detailed study of these concepts in two works: Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El

puente) and El hueco (una tribu urbana). She maintains that through his emphasis of these spaces Peveroni reveals Uruguay’s unsteady position in the twenty-first century as it faces the challenges of globalized world markets and third-world limitations. Jacqueline Bixler, in “The Politics of Tradaptation in the Theater of Sabina Berman,” observes that in recent years Mexico’s theater scene has witnessed a proliferation of translations and adaptations of European plays. She argues that this phenomenon should not be interpreted simply as a preference for the foreign. Taking into consideration Linda Hutcheon’s recent theory on adaptation, as well as more specific theories on tradaptation, Bixler explains that a tradaptation—a text that is translated and adapted for a new cultural context—becomes a completely autonomous work that can be just as

TRANS/ACTING: THE ART OF LIVING “IN-BETWEEN” 19

political as the original text. In support of her argument she analyzes Berman’s eXtras, showing how the author tradapts an Irish work that, upon translocation to the stage and context of contemporary Mexico, presents a strong critique of globalization’s negative impact on that country. Camilla Stevens also reflects on the concept of adaptation, but from the perspective of a culture that finds itself divided between two shores. In “Theater Transformations: Reading Race in Abelardo Estorino’s Parece blanca,” Stevens studies how a foundational Cuban text is adapted for contemporary society, that of the island as well as that of the Cuban diaspora. Stevens proposes that the theme of race has been and continues to be an important factor in imagining Cuban national reconciliation. She also observes that Estorino’s decision to rewrite the great nineteenth-century myth of the mulata Cecilia Valdés, transforming it into a postmodern play, may serve as a warning that the Cuban nation is gradually returning to a nostalgic narrative of racial and social oppression. In “Transposing Professions: Vicente Lefiero and the Politics of the Press,” Stuart A. Day uses the musical term transpose, which means “to write or perform in a key other than the original,” to show how Lefiero in his double role as playwright and journalist

uses each of his two professions to supplement his work in the other. Day demonstrates this notion of supplementarity through his careful analysis of the drama Nadie sabe nada and the journalistic text Manual de periodismo. Reading each text in terms of the other reveals the full depth of Lefiero’s reflection on contemporary Mexican politics. In “Transference and Negotiation: Sabina Berman Plots Dora and Freud,” Amalia Gladhart offers a thorough analysis of Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud to show how history, memory, identities, and our perceptions of them are transferred, negotiated, and reinvented in an imperfect and contradictory way not only by the play’s characters but also by the playwright, readers, and spectators. Conse-

quently, the audience is faced with multiple and sometimes contradictory versions of the historical past, in this case the events surrounding the clinical case of Dora as interpreted by Sigmund Freud. Gladhart concludes that although Berman seems to review and recreate these events “to clarify what really happened, either between characters or in the historical record . . . that really may be unknowable, unattainable.”’ In “Transferring Terms, Translating Sin: The Search for Meaning in Rafael Spregelburd’s La estupidez,” Gail Bulman explains how Argentine playwright Rafael Spregelburd takes the Hieronymus

20 LAURIETZ SEDA Bosch painting The Seven Deadly Sins as his point of departure in creating a series of seven plays entitled Heptalogia de Hieronymus Bosch. This essay analyzes the fourth piece, La estupidez, which 1s

considered to be the most complex and transgressive to date. Through a detailed discussion of the play, Bulman argues that the

playwright transforms and translates the medieval painting’s themes and esthetic function to foreground the stupidity of a globalized, capitalist world governed by corruption, crisis, and greed. In his essay, “Paquita la del Barrio and Translocal Theatricality: Performing Counter(post)modernity,” Gaston Alzate analyzes the lyrics and stage presence of popular singer Paquita la del Barrio to show how she subverts the patriarchal premises of Mexican culture. He proposes that the singer’s lyrics and her simple, sober manner implicitly propose a symbolic rearticulation of new subject identi-

ties in Mexico. While Alzate notes that Paquita la del Barrio dismantles and directly confronts Mexico’s culture of masculinity, Guillermo Irizarry, in his essay “Standing in Cultural Representation: Latino Stand-Up and The Original Latin Kings of Comedy, studies the dynamics of production and consumption of Latino ethnic humor as evidenced in stand-up comedy. The mass-produced

TV show The Original Latin Kings of Comedy serves as a prime example of the ambiguous ideological value that some massified cultural products hold. The essay discusses in particular what Stuart Hall calls the “negotiated consumption” of culture. Irizarry reflects on the transgressive value of self-deprecating humor, ethnological information, family stories, and quaint representations of latinidad. He proposes that, while this type of ethnic humor appears to com-

modify stereotypical notions of latinidad and to reproduce hegemonic values, there is enormous disruptive potential implied in the same cultural commodity.

Becky Boling grounds her study of Susana Torres Molina’s ... Y a otra cosa mariposa in Phillip Zarrilli’s theory on the actor’s body in performance and Marjorie Garber’s seminal study on crossdressing. Boling examines the interplay between the actress’s body

in its performance of masculinity and how gender is represented and scripted by both the process of cross-dressing and the narrativization of gender. This essay argues that the play’s gender ambiguities destabilize the characters’ identities, leading us to question the binary opposition between male and female and the cultural scripts that inform the characters’ behavior. Boling concludes that Torres Molina presents “a reversed stereotype in that while her characters are continually reconstructing femininity according to their machis-

TRANS/ACTING: THE ART OF LIVING “IN-BETWEEN” 21

ta fears and desires, the play also posits the nightmare version of machismo as experienced by women.”

In “Dragging the Borders: Transnational Queer Identities and Citizenship in Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas,” William Garcia adopts José Esteban Mufioz’s coinage disidentification in order to conceptualize the transvestite as a means of criticizing and subverting binary categories. Like GOmez-Pefia, Reyes breaks with

normative views on gender through parody and drag. However, Reyes assigns different levels of metaphorical meaning to the concepts of dragging or queering the border to problematize the border as a fluid space where utopian agendas of normalcy and exclusion are contested. In this way, the playwright shows that the process of negotiation (or trans/acting) creates hybrid identities that enable marginalized subjects to cross and transgress all types of boundaries.

This volume includes no conclusion or closing remarks, for we feel that to do so would be to succumb to the same concepts that this project seeks to problematize. Instead, we present this collection as an open, borderless work. As Juan Duchesne Winter explains, literature (and, we would add, performance) functions as a limitless meeting place, a space for encounters between an incalculable multitude of virtual readers and listeners who become interlocutors and join in the act of enunciation.!? Thus, our hope is that this book will function as a meeting place that will foster further dialogue and debate. But more than anything else, we invite all of our readers to become trans/actors. Although, come to think of it (and to paraphrase GOmez-Pefia): As you read this book, you are a trans/actor yourself. NOTES

1. I thank my research assistant, Brian D. Patrick, for translating this essay. 2. In October 2004, Theatre Journal published a special issue on Latin American theater. Of particular note is the section “A Forum on the State of Latin Ameri-

can Theatre and Performance Studies in the United States Today,” ed. Jean Graham-Jones, special issue, Theatre Journal 56 (October 2004): 445-77. One of the most useful and well-designed Internet sites is that of Argentina’s Latin American Center for Theatre Creation and Research (CELCIT). The site provides access to over two hundred works by playwrights from Spain and Latin America, critical texts dealing with all aspects of the theater world, and the Revista Teatro/Celcit, which includes essays of interest for critics, scholars, directors, and actors. All of these materials are available for free download at www.celcit.org.ar. Among the most distinguished and longest-running festivals are the international theater festivals of Bogota (Colombia), Cadiz (Spain), Buenos Aires (Argen-

22 LAURIETZ SEDA tina), Avignon (France), and Havana (Cuba), and the International Hispanic Theatre Festival (Miami). In addition, the International Latin American Theatre Conference in Puebla (Mexico), the International Congress on Ibero-American and Argentine Theatre (Buenos Aires), and the Latin American Theatre Today Conference/Festival (five stagings at the University of Kansas since 1982; the University of Connecticut, 2005; and Virginia Tech, 2008) have promoted continued interest in Latin American and US Latino theater and performance arts.

3. Some of these free trade agreements include: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed on January 1, 1994; the Chile Free Trade Agreement (Chile FTA), signed on June 6, 2003; the Uruguay Bilateral Investment Treaty (Uruguay BIT), signed on October 25, 2004; the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), signed on August 2, 2005; the Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (PTPA), signed on April 12, 2006; and the Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (CTPA), signed on November 22, 2006. 4. Inthe 1960s and 1970s, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay, among others, were ruled by dictatorial governments that hoped to resolve the economic problems that had long afflicted these countries. However, once installed in power, the military governments were unable to improve the economic situation that they were purporting to resolve. The 1980s witnessed a resurrection of democracy, and today most Latin American countries have democratic governments. However, it is important to note that new social, cultural, and political movements that challenge the principles of neoliberal globalization are appearing in countries such as Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay. 5. Michiel Baud, “State-Building and Borderlands,” in Fronteras: Towards a

Borderless Latin America, ed. Pitou van Dijck, Arij Ouweneel, and Annelies Zoomers (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 2000), 69. 6. Néstor Garcia Canclini, Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados: Mapas de la interculturalidad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2004), 16. 7. See Daniel Mato’s essay “Procesos culturales y transformaciones sociopoliticas en América Latina en tiempos de globalizacion,” in América Latina en tiempos de globalizacién: Procesos culturales y transformaciones sociopoliticas, ed. Daniel Mato, Maritza Romero, and Emanuele Amadio (Caracas: ALAS-Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1996), 14. 8. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of books have been published in the US on the issue of border studies. The bibliography is now immense. Here

are a few suggested titles: Gloria Anzaldta, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Héctor Calder6n and José David Saldivar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Alfred Arteaga, Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); José David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Wilson Neate, Tolerating Ambiguity: Ethnicity and Community in Chicano/a Writing (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Emma Perez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 9. Mato, “Procesos culturales,” 11. 10. Ibid., 12.

TRANS/ACTING: THE ART OF LIVING “IN-BETWEEN” 23 11. The word transnationalism, like the term globalization, 1s charged with con-

tradictions and ambiguities. According to Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith, “transnationalism is a multifaceted, mutli-local process” (6). They also write that “while transnational practices extend beyond two or more national territories, they are built within the confines of specific social, economic and political relations which are bound together by perceived shared interests and meanings” (13). Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith, “The Locations of Transnationalism,” in 7ransnationalism from Below, ed. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004). On the other hand, Steven Vertovec notes that transnationalism “refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states,” in “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (1999): 1. 12. Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11. 13. Zoe Hammer-Tomizuka and Jennifer Allen, Hate or Heroism: Vigilantes on the Arizona-Mexico Border (Tuscon: Border Action, 2002), http://www.borderact 10n.org/PDFs/vigilante_report.pdf. 14. Peter Baker, “Bush Chides GOP Critics of Immigration Plan,” Washington

Post, May 30, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2007/05/29/AR2007052901067.html?hpid = moreheadlines.

15. To understand the different ways in which Latin American playwrights problematize the processes of globalization, see my essays and presented papers: “Etnia y clase social en el contexto de los procesos de la globalizacion en La Malinche de Victor Hugo Rascén Banda,” in Voces en el umbral: El teatro de Victor Hugo Rascon Banda, ed. Jacqueline Bixler and Stuart Day (Mexico City: Escenologia, 2005), 91-102; “El teatro latinoamericano ante un mundo globalizado: AIgunos ejemplos concretos,” in Versus Aristoteles: Ensayos sobre dramaturgia contempordnea, ed. Luis Mario Moncada (México City: Anodnimo Drama Ediciones, 2004), 71-83; “Crisis y globalizacion en el teatro latinoamericano” (presented at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru, April 12, 2006); “Crisis y globalizacion en la escena latinoamericana: Dos ejemplos concretos” (presented at the Universidad Dominicana O&M, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, November 18, 2005); “Globalizacion, neoliberalismo y crisis” (presented at the Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American & Caribbean Studies Symposium, Latin American Inequalities: Politics and Culture, Stony BrookManhattan, NY, December 9, 2005). 16. Baud, “State-Building and Borderlands,” 42. 17. Garcia Canclini, Diferentes, 17. 18. The present articles, except those by Bixler, Garcia, and Seda, were presented in shorter preliminary versions at the Sixth Latin American Theatre Today Conference/Festival: Translation, Transgender and Transnationalism, held at the University of Connecticut, April 6—9, 2005. 19. Juan Duchesne Winter, Fugas incomunistas: Ensayos (San Juan: Vértigo, 2005), 54.

Transformation and Transculturation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Theater George Woodyard ‘THE THEATER, AS ARGENTINE CRITIC AND HISTORIAN OSVALDO

Pellettier1 has often said, is a process of change and continuity.! Styles, techniques, themes, and patterns emerge and capture the attention of theater people (playwrights, directors, critics, and others) as well as the general public, often for years at a time. Just as certain, however, are the processes of change, the disruptions, the new directions, whether from within or without, that move the theater into new channels of exploration and experimentation. Change is neither instantaneous nor pervasive; a new impetus seldom has an immediate impact and it never achieves a total transformation of the landscape because older styles and forms will continue to exist well into a new period. Nevertheless, over time, it is clear that such moments happen and that the theater changes. The change may result from the impact of a single person (an author or director, for example), who may be either a resident or a foreigner. Likewise, it may result from a theatrical phenomenon in itself, or a political or social event of great magnitude. In this essay I propose to identify several major events, people, or phenomena from the twentieth century that

produced change at critical junctures in the theater of Latin America.’ In discussing the movements, directors, authors, or phenomena

that charted these new directions, the emphasis will fall on the transcultural and transnational values that became the building blocks of new theater. Many times these new directions are marked

by new currents, trends, or directions from Europe, the United States, or even from Asia through individuals such as Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Constantin Stanislavsky, Antonin Artaud, and

Arthur Miller. It is gratifying to note that at times the impetus comes not from foreign cultures but from homegrown figures, or, more broadly, from inter—Latin American events, when the theater,

in an effort to find its identity or a new language for the stage, 24

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCULTURATION 25

draws from its own inner strength. In the final analysis, it is clear that transcultural and transnational influences have transformed the Latin American theater, no longer limited to national borders, into a global phenomenon. Rather than follow a strictly chronological order, it is tempting to

begin in medias res with the year 1968, when global disruptions that coincide with protests over the Vietnam War also coincide with sweeping changes in the theater. Traditional icons fall, and the em-

phasis on questioning authority translates into unconventional styles and techniques. The Festival Internacional de Teatro that took place that fall in Manizales, Colombia, became the model, the gold Standard in a sense, for the international theater festivals that came afterwards. Until the 1950s and even into the ’60s, Latin American theater was basically European in its themes and techniques. The festivals reflected, and perhaps even triggered, a revision in the way theater people and groups in Latin America thought about them-

selves in relation to their neighbors, a need to consider what it means to be Latin American, and a search for inspiration in their local cultural roots and histories. The spirit of camaraderie, or animosity in some cases, was heightened by postperformance forums, wherein the participants talked, often in animated fashion, about conceptions and contexts, dreams and aspirations, objectives and accomplishments. The accumulation of talent at that Manizales festival in 1968 was astonishing; among the dignitaries were no less than Miguel Angel Asturias and Pablo Neruda.’ The festival operated as a competition, with a distinguished panel of judges to evaluate the performances: Pablo Neruda (Chile), Atahualpa del Cioppo

(Uruguay), Jack Lang (France), Carlos Miguel Suarez Radillo (Spain), and Santiago Garcia (Colombia). The winner was the TEC

from Colombia with a play, ironically by an American, Megan Terry, titled Gudrdese bien cerrado en un lugar seco y fresco (Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place). Theater festivals had already been held regularly in Venezuela,

Mexico, and many other countries. The distinction of Manizales was that it was transnational, involving groups not only from Colombia but also from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. In retrospect, it looms large on the horizon of 1mportant events because of the inspiration it provided—in terms of invitations, performances, discussions, and interactions—for the important festivals that came afterwards. Subsequently, the ManiZales festival fell on some hard political times (it was suspended for ten years), but it continues to survive after twenty-six seasons, albeit now diminished in scope. Regrettably, the closing of the Teatro

26 GEORGE WOODYARD Fundadores has limited the festival’s capacity to stage big spectacles. Major festivals came soon to Caracas, Bogota, Bolivia, Central America, and, since 1986, to Cadiz, Spain. As a result of these events, a concept of Latin American theater as a phenomenon with an identity of its own became well established in transnational circles.

A previous major upheaval, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, helped to set the stage for these changes through its antiestablishment approach to politics, government, and lifestyles. Its impact on the theater, not just in Cuba but in all of Latin America, was enormous. When the government recognized the potential of using theater as a vehicle for its state-sponsored ideology, theater budgets in Cuba soared to levels previously unimaginable. The theater journal Conjunto was established in 1964 and circulated freely, and the Casa de las Américas competitions brought the literati and intelligentsia from all over Latin America to participate in the contests. Even though the utopian bubble burst fairly early on within Cuba, the level of admiration and the feelings of solidarity toward Cuba inspired theater workers throughout the Americas. The politics and the ideology, in part a reaction against the imperialist American approach to the revolution, had an impact on the leftist theater movement throughout Latin America at a time when many countries were suffering brutal right-wing dictatorships. The enthusiasm for social change that could be found in Cuba in the early years was palpable, and when a writer such as José Triana, who had fled Cuba to escape the tyranny of the Batista regime, returned from Madrid to put his talents to work for his island nation, he quickly achieved international success, as 1s seen in the case of La noche de los asesinos (Night of the Assassins). Just as quickly, the government sus-

pected subversive intentions and shut him down, as well as his contemporaries Anton Arrufat and Heberto Padilla. It was clear that government policy would sacrifice talent in order to gain compli-

ance with its objective of promoting the revolution. Even so, throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s, Cuba continued to exercise considerable influence throughout Latin America by publishing new texts, by sponsoring talent contests for new materials in different genres, and through the high quality of the performers sent on the road, whether in music, dance, or theater. Cuba was able to export its revolutionary ideology, in spite of adverse conditions at home, and the nation served as an inspiration for the leftist, politicized theater of the period. Cuban theater was, of course, not the only source of leftist inspiration. In the 1970s, performances of plays by Bertolt Brecht were common throughout the Americas. It

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCULTURATION 27

is not surprising that Brazilians and Spanish Americans learned to adapt the epic theater concepts of Brecht to their own unique circumstances. In retrospect, the quality of new plays from that period now seems limited because of their excessively political orientation, although the effort to share, even as the hierarchy of theater design was changing, was a laudable goal. While these two phenomena left an indelible stamp on the directions of Latin American theater in the second half of the century, earlier individuals and events contributed, each in a unique way, to the transformations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, another revolution, so to speak, was taking place in Argentina because

of a fellow who was, curiously, not even Argentine. What Uruguayan-born Florencio Sanchez accomplished in that first decade of the century had a major impact on the later direction and development of River Plate theater as well as notable international ramifications. Sanchez was a master at capturing the essence of conflict, and through his use of a realistic language and a kind of facile psychology, he inspired a new sense of the theater through M’hijo el dotor (My Son the Lawyer) and La gringa (The Foreign Girl). Now,

one hundred years after the production of his masterpiece, Barranca abajo (Down the Gully), in 1905, in which the old Zoilo faced his painful choices, it is difficult to imagine the reality that he was describing.* Faced with the challenge of interpreting an Argentine society that was involved in massive social, demographic, and

political change, Sanchez wrote plays that abjured the traditions that had brought success to the Podesta theater that staged them. Although Sanchez’s star shot across the Buenos Aires sky in less than ten years, his legacy was enduring. By putting on stage the issues and concerns of a society in a state of massive transformation, Sanchez paved the way for Argentina, and specifically Buenos Aires, to become a model of urban theater on a spectacular scale.

Sanchez’s influence was enormous, as Pellettieri points out, not only in Argentina and Uruguay, but as far away as Brazil, Cuba, and even Mexico.°

Buenos Aires is also the site of the Teatro del Pueblo. While Mexico, Chile, and the Caribbean islands had their vanguard movements, Buenos Aires was special because of the work of the Teatro del Pueblo, a little underground theater on the Diagonal Norte not far from Corrientes. Leonidas Barletta’s first theater, actually a for-

mer milk store, was located at Corrientes 465, at that time still a very undistinguished site. Barletta (1902—75) was a man of many talents: writer, editor, boxer, dockworker, journalist and, of course,

theater director. He has been described as a leftist romantic militant

28 GEORGE WOODYARD whose support for a theater of protest naturally aligned him with the Boedo literary group (e.g., Alvaro Yunque and Roberto Arlt), in contrast with those of the Florida group (e.g., Oliverio Girondo and Jorge Luis Borges). Friend and patron of the underprivileged, he opened his theater on November 30, 1930, only days after the military coup against Hipolito Yrigoyen, as a vehicle for supporting social protest and change. Before its restoration in 2000 by the Fundacion Somi, this theater space existed for a time as the Teatro de la Campana, so named for Barletta’s habit of announcing show time by ringing a bell on the street. He charged little or nothing so that his productions would be accessible to a broad public. Barletta was intent on offering an artistic alternative to the commercial theater of the time. He promoted national authors (Ezequiel Martinez Estrada and Eduardo Gonzalez Lanuza, among others), but he also staged Shakespeare, Gogol, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Moliére. Barletta not only managed to launch Roberto Arlt’s career with a feisty run of excellent plays such as Saverio el cruel (Saverio the cruel), Trescientos millones (300 million), and La isla desierta (The desert island), but in the process he laid the groundwork for a new concept of vanguard theater that would be picked up by other groups such as Juan B. Justo y La Mascara. The independent theater movement in Argentina, well documented by David William Foster,

owes its impetus to Barletta, who through his active campaigns against poverty and injustice provided the essence of the struggle.°® Among his many accomplishments, Barletta published nearly forty books and started his own publishing house. In a 1967 essay, Barletta argued that the Boedo group, with authors from the working class sympathetic to the Russian Revolution and influenced by the Russian novelists, struggled for “el arte para la revolucion” (art for revolution) while their upper-class opponents, the Florida group, advocated a “revolucion del arte” (a revolution in art). Barletta’s work clearly transcended the limits of his native Buenos Aires to have a major impact on theater, not only during his lifetime, but in the years since. An interesting tribute to the life and work of this passionate leader is the play El cerco de Leningrado (The Siege of Leningrad, 1994), written by the popular contemporary Spanish playwright José Sanchis Sinisterra. The concept of a “revolucion del arte” leads to consideration of the Mexican corollary with its experimental theater movement. In fact, the creation of the Teatro Ulises by Xavier Villaurrutia and Salvador Novo, under the patronage of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, anticipates by two years (1928) the independent theater movement in Buenos Aires. Mexico did not have a Florencio Sanchez to open

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCULTURATION 29

the door to the twentieth century, but the Mexican Revolution provided more than enough drama in those early years of the century.

The Teatro Ulises, for example, is an interesting phenomenon. While it produced not a single Mexican play during its single season, the Teatro Ulises is universally credited with launching a theat-

rical revolution that led to improved staging techniques, a new conception of the role of the director, and eventually to the production of Mexican plays written by Mexicans. While Marcelino Da-

valos may be under new scrutiny as a prerevolutionary Mexican writer, his theater did not inspire a revolution. It was, rather, Ulises and its followers that began the transformation of the Mexican theater into the full-blown movement that emerged in the 1950s. This new direction began to take shape through the work of Ro-

dolfo Usigl, who was himself a vanguard writer, although not in the style of Villaurrutia, Novo, or Celestino Gorostiza. His interpretations of history and social values transmitted a notion of Mexican

identity, in much the same way that Florencio Sanchez had done for Argentina some thirty years earlier. His career as a playwright lasted over thirty years, a long time compared to Sanchez’s brief career, although it has now been long eclipsed by the nearly sixty years that Emilio Carballido has occupied center stage in Mexico. Still, Usigh, for all his faults and limitations, provided a considerable impetus to the development of the theater, not only through his plays but also through his critical writings and his teachings. Born

a century ago, in 1905, Usigli has been dubbed, justifiably, the father (or perhaps now the grandfather) of the contemporary Mex1can theater because he understood two concepts extremely well. He

understood Mexican culture and the Mexican psyche at the same time that he understood the principles of dramatic construction. An avid fan of George Bernard Shaw, he maintained a lively correspondence with the major literary figures of his day. Professor, poet, essayist, critic, and diplomat, Usigli was a giant of his generation, and his influence was felt well beyond his native Mexico.’ Seki Sano was also born the same year, in 1905, in far-off Japan. Seki Sano is no doubt the most improbable figure in this compendium. Born to wealth and privilege, he made a sharp left turn after the devastating Tokyo earthquake of 1923 exposed him to the corruption endemic in Japanese society. His criticism of the rising national imperialism finally led to his expulsion from Japan in 1931.

He traveled across the United States to Europe, through Berlin, where he met Brecht and Piscator, and eventually settled in for a five-year stay in Moscow, where he immersed himself in the techniques of Stanislavski, Meyerhold, and Vajtangov. After a brief so-

30 GEORGE WOODYARD journ in Europe (Berlin, Paris, and Prague), he returned briefly to the United States as a political refugee. His efforts to get funding from Celestino Gorostiza, then the director of Bellas Artes, via his friend, the artist Rufino Tamayo, were not successful, but he sailed for Mexico in the spring of 1939 anyway. He quickly added Spanish to his arsenal of languages (Japanese, Russian, German, French, English, and even Latin). In the 1940s and ’50s he became a major figure on the Mexican stage. He worked to make the Russian styles of acting, directing, and staging, at that time arguably the most advanced in the world, an essential part of the Mexican repertoire. He was instrumental in fostering the qualities that were assimilated by Mexican theater directors such as Ignacio Retes and others. In the early 1940s, his Teatro de las Artes staged a play by Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty) and another, Rebelidn de los colgados (The Rebellion of the Hanged), based on a novel by B. Traven, both with obvious sociopolitical implications. His collaboration with Waldeen (neé Falkenstein), an American ballerina in Mexico, was a joint creation that marked the beginning of Mexican modern dance. Seki Sano fell from favor during the war years, perhaps because of FBI investigations into his political alliances, although he was clearly antifascist, antimilitary, and opposed to Japanese imperialism. In later years his school was not part of the Mexican theatrical mainstream, but it did have a major influence on some actors, among them that “Latin from Manhattan,” Ricardo Montalban. Dagoberto Guillaumin, the distinguished director of many of Carballido’s early plays, considers that “his influence was decisive in my profession and in my life.”*® Rafael Solana admired and carefully documented his activities while Seki Sano was staging extraordinary productions of Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Arthur Miller (The Crucible, All My Sons, View from the Bridge), as well as Mexican writers Usigli (Corona de sombra [Crown of Shadows]|) and Luisa Josefina Hernandez (Los frutos caidos [The fallen fruit]). Meanwhile, in Bogota in 1956, during the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, television was being introduced as the new medium. The regime recognized the need for new actors and ordered a search to bring “the best Spanish-speaking theater director in the world.” Seki Sano was identified as the principal candidate, brought in at a good salary, housed in a suite at the Hotel Tequendama, and set to work. But, as Santiago Garcia tells us, “he did not respond to the

buffoonery that Rojas Pinilla wanted to stage.”® He instead launched into the training of theater actors, not “actors for television and radio.”’!° Although the right-wing Colombian government

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCULTURATION 31

expelled him from the country within just a few months because of his suspected communist ties, Seki Sano had a profound influence on the development of later Colombian theater. Enrique Buenaventura had already established his Teatro Experimental de Cali (the TEC), but he recognized the potential for incorporating Seki Sano’s and Stanislavski’s techniques. Another first-generation Seki Sano student was Santiago Garcia, who would become a playwright, director, and founder of the Teatro La Candelaria in Bogota’s eponymous district. He alleges that, in a very real sense, the history of recent Colombian theater is a product of the influence of Seki Sano. Michiko Tanaka, a Mexican research scholar who has dedicated years to documenting his life and works, stresses that Seki Sano “was convinced that the artist cannot be indifferent toward society and the age in which he/she lives” and traces the extent of his influence in the following countries: Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Spain, and even Hispanic communities in the United States and Canada."! It would be tempting to grant major consideration to such authors as Jorge Diaz and Eduardo Pavlovsky, whose experiments with an invigorated use of language and a new conception of stage reality were noteworthy in Chile and Argentina, respectively, in the early 1960s. It is difficult, however, to sustain an argument that the tenets of the absurd were far-reaching, or that they provoked a major revolution in their day. A much stronger argument can be made for the creacion colectiva (collective creation) movement that swept across most of Latin America beginning in the late 1960s and that has continued to the present, although its impact diminished greatly by the mid-1980s. The movement was particularly strong in Colombia, where the previously mentioned Enrique Buenaventura and Santiago Garcia developed its principles to a high level, but its attraction was so pervasive that every country in the Americas shared in this new approach. The creacion colectiva upset the traditional hierarchy of author to producer to director to actor, and instead implemented a system in which the conventional roles were all, so to speak, on the table. Actors often switched roles, and the importance

of the role of director, which had only come into its own in the 1920s, was suddenly minimized, with all the actors to some extent participating in the process. The most fundamental difference, however, no doubt related to the process of constructing the performance through the collaborative work of the group itself. Instead of

basing their performance on a written text, the actors often spent inordinate amounts of time creating, improvising, sketching, and

32 GEORGE WOODYARD revising, ad infinitum, a spectacle that could take weeks, months, or perhaps a year to develop. Virtually all of this theater subscribed to a leftist ideology, critical of sociopolitical and economic positions of governments and societies. Much of it was ephemeral, performed briefly, and is now lost. In other cases, however, performances had

long runs and have survived as important texts from the period.” During the 1970s and early 1980s, it would be fair to consider that creacion colectiva was a major art form throughout the Americas, and that its impact was notable.'? Given the relative importance of the United States as one of the world’s major Spanish-speaking countries, it is natural to consider the rise of the Hispanic theater movement within the US. The actos (short plays) developed by Luis Valdés for the farmworkers in California in 1965 were, of course, not the first examples of Hispanic

theater in this country. The New Mexican pastorelas (shepherd’s plays) antedate them by several centuries, and even in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hispanic theater was common in Texas and Florida, with traveling groups often circulating widely. The coincidence of Luis Valdés’s efforts with the civil rights movement in the US, however, catapulted Chicano theater into a position of prominence and within a few years as many as one hundred theater groups were functioning widely across the country. Almost simultaneously, the expatriate Cuban community in Florida began to

dramatize its nostalgia for the homeland while dealing with questions of adapting to new linguistic and cultural conditions. The Hispanic population of New York also developed quickly, embracing not only the Nuyorican but the widely diversified Hispanic population in the greater metropolitan area. The primary characteristic of this new theater was its linguistic diversity. Sometimes written in

orthodox Spanish, sometimes in English, at times experimenting with the infinite possibilities of Spanglish, this new theater was performed monolingually or bilingually and with a great variety of ac-

cents representing the linguistic richness of the immigrant or resident population. Its one unifying characteristic was the effort to capture the essence of Hispanic culture in its many manifestations, its values, its essence—in short, its soul. This US Hispanic theater has, thanks to the good efforts of Jorge Huerta, Nicolas Kanellos, and others, become well established and well documented. !* Censorship, while not limited to a particular time or place, has had an especially pernicious effect on the theater as a phenomenon that transcends national borders as well. In the United States we

are quick to take pride in our “free” society and our freedom of expression, but these freedoms have come at a high price and are

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCULTURATION 33

probably as highly threatened today as at any point in our recent history. Arthur Miller struggled with censorship during the worst years of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.'° The examples in Latin America are legion, such as the Teatro Abierto’s challenge to the state apparatus during the final years of the Proceso in Argen-

tina. When the Teatro Picadero in 1981 served as the venue for

twenty-one highly charged plays, 1t was rewarded by arson for its efforts. In Chile, following the Pinochet coup of 1973, many theater artists preferred to leave the country, although some valiant ones remained to fight from within. In 1978 Marco Antonio de la Parra managed to take on the atrocities of the Pinochet regime with his play Lo crudo, lo cocido y lo podrido (The raw, the cooked and the rotten), which was banned one day before its premiere. In Brazil the newspapers printed recipes and passages from Cam6es’s epic As

Lusiadas (The Lusiads) in the blank columns that the censors bleeped out, and a play like Roberto Athayde’s Apareceu a Margarida (Miss Margarida’s Way) could appear only because it was too subtle for the censors. Dagoberto Guillaumin, cited earlier, staged

Emilio Carballido’s plays in the early 1950s, skirting his way around some dangerous censorship issues, but in the 1970s, in a radically different environment, José Agustin fell victim to the wrath of the censors while staging Circulo vicioso (Vicious circle).

The theatrical legacy of Tlatelolco, a “non-event” according to Mexican government sources, was years in the making, but is now finally well documented in the anthology prepared by Felipe Galvan.'© Curiously, the extreme censorship that characterized Cuban theater in the late 1960s now seems to have evolved into an atmosphere where virtually all is permitted. All of the writers, directors,

theater groups, and actors who challenged the systems that repressed their freedom of expression deserve recognition for their struggle to lift high the virtues of a free marketplace of ideas on the national and international stage. It is clear that they transcended borders and cultures, personal dangers, and insular pettiness. To conclude, we return to the original conception of the theater as a transnational, transcultural experience. By means of a few examples, we have seen how twentieth-century Latin American theater has shared in the international theater experience. The best of

this theater can hold its own against other national theaters. That the general American theater public, who recognizes the work of Samuel Beckett or Wole Soyinka, fails to recognize the plays of Sabina Berman or José Triana is not a statement about their quality but rather an all-too-typical response to Hispanic culture within the United States. At the same time, it 1s gratifying to see the success

34 GEORGE WOODYARD that Emilio Carballido has had in France, or Roberto Ramos-Perea in Tokyo, or Eduardo Rovner in the Czech Republic. There is a nice paradox to be found in the strength that the theater acquires locally through its transnational assimilations. All of those individuals not previously named, the thousands of authors, directors, actors, stage

hands, aficionados, known and unknown, famous or infamous, young or old, rich or poor, who have struggled valiantly, many times with little or no recognition or success, often against overwhelming odds, to create theater in Latin America, deserve enormous credit for their work. Space limitations have precluded

consideration of multiple transnational and transcultural influences on this rich assortment of theater. Luigi Pirandello’s visits to Argentina in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, had a major impact on the theater, and knowledge of his techniques spread widely in subsequent years throughout the Americas. Antonin Artaud, on the other hand, visited Mexico and the Tarahumara Indians in the 1930s with no immediate visible influence, although his techniques became broadly known, respected, and implemented after the publication of his seminal book, The Theatre and Its Double. The influence that Margarita Xirgu and her theater company, fleeing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, had on the Chilean theater in the 1930s was a major stepping stone in the creation of the theater schools at both the University of Chile (in 1941) and the Catholic University (in 1943). Polish Zbigniew Ziembinski, also a war refugee, found in Nelson Rodrigues’s Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress) the right material to launch a new expressionist conception onto the Brazilian stage in 1943. Arthur Miller’s visit to Buenos Aires in the 1960s spawned an immediate response in terms of a new realist theater. When Grotowski traveled to Latin America in the 1970s and referred to his “poor theater,” he had little conception of how the term would be interpreted. More recently, the Italian-born Eugenio Barba, operating from his Odin Teatret in Hostelbro, Denmark, has influenced and inspired theater directors and actors in Peru, Cuba, and other key sites. These famous European and American authors and directors of the twentieth century are only a part

of the rich legacy of individuals whose interaction with Latin Americans, at key moments in their history, helped to infuse the theater with new vitality. Ironically, these contacts led to the development of a Latin American theater that has acquired its own identity. Just as the American theater, for example, has always been enriched by European transculturation, there is no reason to under-

estimate the quality of Latin American theater in light of these contacts. From the beginning of the Conquest, the indigenous

TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSCULTURATION 35

populations were subjected to a process of transculturation and eventual transnationalization. In contemporary times, theater must and does transcend national borders in order to establish its own system of values as an interpreter of the human condition. NOTES

1. Osvaldo Pellettieri1, Una historia interrumpida: Teatro argentino moderno (1947-1976) (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1997), 13ff. Another pertinent book by Pellettier1 1s La historia del teatro argentino en Buenos Aires, vol. 2, La emancipacidn cultural (1884-1930) (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2002). 2. While these “moments” are the result of a process of personal observation and selection, it is fair to assume some common ground for these judgments, al-

though it is equally certain that another individual approaching the same task would find other high points that characterize theater development and history in Latin America during the same period. 3. Neruda, as it turned out, was the focus of a major event. He was scheduled to give a poetry reading at eleven o’clock one morning in the Teatro Fundadores. When the eager public discovered that the doors were locked because the theater was already full of schoolchildren, the crowd turned ugly and smashed through the glass doors on the front of the theater. Neruda, completely unruffled, of course gave a brilliant performance. 4. Likewise, it is difficult to believe that in the United States one hundred years ago, only 8 percent of homes had a telephone, or that there were only eight thousand cars in the entire country, with only 144 miles of paved roads, or that pneumonia and influenza were the leading causes of death. 5. Pellettieri, La historia, 379. Sanchez’s influence can be seen, for example, in Ernesto Herrera, E/ le6n ciego (Uruguay, 1911), José A. Ramos, Tembladera (Cuba, 1917), Arturo Azevedo, El ordculo (Brazil, 1908), Marcelo Salinas, Alma guajira (Cuba, 1928), Federico Gamboa, La venganza de la gleba (Mexico, 1905), and Carlos Gorostiza, El puente (Argentina, 1949). 6. David William Foster, Argentine Teatro Independiente, 1930-1955 (York, SC: Spanish Literature Publishing Company, 1986). 7. In the centennial year of Usighi’s birth (1905), special events were held, including publications, symposia, and performances, at both Miami University of Ohio and the CITRU (Centro de Investigaci6n, Documentacion e Informacion Teatral Rodolfo Usigli) in Mexico City. 8. Dagoberto Guillaumin, “Algunas impresiones sobre Seki Sano,” Tramoya 50 (1997): 154. 9. Santiago Garcia, “Seki Sano en Colombia,” Tramoya 15 (1979): 5. 10. Ibid. 11. Michiko Tanaka, Seki Sano, 1905-1966 (Mexico City: CONACULTA, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1996), 5. 12. For example, Colombia’s Teatro La Candelaria has three volumes of plays, most of which are collective creations. 5 obras: creacién colectiva (Bogota: Editorial Colombia Nueva, 1986), Los diez dias que estremecieron al mundo (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1978) and Guadalupe ajios sin cuenta: creacion colectiva del Grupo “La Candelaria” (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1976). In Argentina, Cordoba’s Libre Teatro Libre’s well-known collective creation, El asesinato de X

36 GEORGE WOODYARD (The assassination of X) was published by Casa de las Américas in Cuba. Teatro latinoamericano de agitaci6n (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1972). The Peruvian Grupo Yuyachkani has also produced several texts that are collective creations,

such as Los musicos ambulantes (The traveling musicians), Contraelviento (Againstthewind), No me toquen ese vals (Don’t play that waltz for me), and Retorno (Return), all of which have been published in Allpa Rayku: una experiencia de teatro popular (Lima: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, 1983). I am indebted to the manuscript evaluator for helping to clarify this point. 13. Beatriz Rizk has documented the principles and effectiveness of creative

creations in her book El nuevo teatro latinoamericano: Una lectura historica

(Minneapolis: I&L, Prisma Institute, 1987). 14. See, for example, Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000) as well as two books edited by Nicolas Kanellos: A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) and Hispanic Theatre in the United States (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1984). 15. One of my first personal contacts with censorship in the US took place during the Vietnam War period, when a theater group from Kansas, under the direction of Professor Fredric Litto, the colleague with whom I founded the Latin American Theatre Review, saw its projected tour of Europe cancelled because the collage they proposed to take on tour, titled Kaleidoscope of the American Dream, was considered inflammatory and “un-American.” 16. Felipe Galvan, ed., Antologia Teatro del 68 (Puebla: Tablado Iberoamericano, 1999).

Transitional Stages: Space and Illusion in Las polacas by Patricia Suarez Sharon Magnarelli ARGENTINE PATRICIA SUAREZ’S FIRST DRAMATIC WORK, LAS POLACAS

(The Polish Women, 2002), is a trilogy of one-act plays that depict various moments or transitions that characterized the business of the Zwi Migdal, an organization that operated during the first three decades of the twentieth century, luring adolescent Jewish girls (among others) from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe to Argentina, by promising them marriage when they arrived in their new country and by paying sizeable “dowries”’ to their desperately poor parents in Eastern Europe.' In the following pages I will examine the transitional spaces of the fictional world of Las polacas and how those spaces were translated from the page to the stage in the process of production. At the same time, I will build on the insights of Mauricio Kartun, who, in the prologue to the published edition of the trilogy, discusses the function of space in theater. As he notes, “The space upon which good plays are really sculpted 1s nothing more and nothing less than the mind of the spectator.”* He goes on to quote Peter Brook: “In the theater, the imagination fills the space. .. . Emptiness in the theater allows the imagination to fill the gaps.”? My focus, thus, will be the utilization of space in the three plays, both the imaginary spaces within the fiction and the concrete spaces of the theater building. It will become clear in this respect that the manipulations of space, both real and imaginary, are fundamental to spectator reception and the construction(s) of meaning(s). Nonetheless, since stage directions are minimal in the published text, the spaces being discussed here are either those evoked by the words of the characters or those depicted in the scenic space of the Patio de Actores theater in which the plays were staged, with the latter, one presumes, to a large degree the brain children of the trilogy’s directors.* 37

38 SHARON MAGNARELLI In the process, I follow the lead of Gay McAuley, who in turn expands on the insights of Anne Ubersfeld.° The former has argued

that “the spatial organization [of the stage] always also includes more or less overt commentary on the very activity by which the ideas are being communicated.”® Thus, my focus will be double, for I will argue that the blank spaces being filled in the spectators’ minds find their referents both inside and outside the theater building. Those empty spaces allude to the illusions not only of theater itself but also to those of sociopolitical reality, illusions that in both cases are created and manipulated by the powerful who always remain just out of site and sight. In theater, as in the world that sur-

rounds it, we seldom see the power(s), the manipulation(s) of theatrical strings, the mechanics of the construction of illusion(s). All we see are the effects, the end result. The very presentation and manipulation of space in the trilogy not only allow the play to point self-reflexively to itself and comment on how theater in general creates meaning, but also allow us to glimpse, comprehend, or imagine those aspects of the sociopolitical reality outside the theater that often remain veiled, hidden in rhetoric. As we shall see, however, even that extratheatrical referent is double here, for in the theatrical translation and transitions, Suarez points not only to the creation of illusion and the accompanying theatrics that allowed the Zwi Migdal to function covertly and essentially unchecked for many years, but also to the illusions and theatrics that, in the broader sociopolitical context, have (mis)represented home and homeland as safe ha-

vens. As depicted here, home and homeland as they have been defined and internalized by most members of Western society, are illusions, creations designed to veil the roles of both in what DonZelot has labeled the management of bodies and of populations for the benefit of a few.’ According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, transitional derives from trans-, “through,” and ire, “to go.’’® If we trace the prefix back further, we find that trans- comes from the Indo-European ter-, “to go over, beyond,” from which the English word through is derived. Thus, transition 1s “a passing from one condition, form, stage, activity, place, etc. to another,” “the period of such passing,” or “a word, phrase, sentence, or group of sentences that relates a preceding topic to a succeeding one,” three definitions that describe both the theatrical spaces and the thematic focus of Suarez’s work.’ Etymologically, the adjective is closely related to (and sometimes a synonym for) transitive, “characterized by transition” or “expressing an action thought of as passing over to and having an effect on some person or thing.’ !° The latter is in many ways an apt descrip-

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 39 tion of the action of the trilogy, spotlighting, as it does, how the actions of one person or group of people impact another. As the term is used in the following pages, a transitional space is one that is subject to change and occupied temporarily—one that characters “pass through” en route to somewhere else. More importantly, the transitional spaces in these plays prove to be sites of theater and performance, spaces where boundaries between illusion and reality blur, spaces in which the plays call attention to themselves as theater and to the basic duality of any theatrical event as both reality and illusion, presence and absence. Ultimately, as we shall see, the transitional nature of the theatrical spaces underscores the notion of theater as a site where meaning is repeatedly constructed, dismantled, and generated anew on any number of levels. The plays are based on three precise moments in the Zwi Migdal’s importing of adolescent Jewish girls into Argentina and into prostitution. Set in 1913, the first play of the trilogy, Historias tartaras (Tartar stories), takes place in a third-class compartment of a train traveling across Poland. The three characters include Schlomo, the middle-aged procurer, Max, a young intellectual and/or subversive, and Vera, a young woman who abandons her children to follow Max off the train, presumably in search of love and/or financial support. One of the main objectives of the play seems to be to portray the sociopolitical conditions of oppression and poverty (perhaps the hell implied in the title)'! that predated and presumably

permitted the business in white slavery to flourish, but we also glimpse here the seeds of the disintegration of the family structure. Vera forsakes her children just as she has apparently been abandoned by their father(s). Although this aspect of Vera’s character is

not developed, given the context, it would appear that desperate poverty may have led to her prostitution, which in turn may have led to the birth of the children. Paradoxically, her potential savior, Max, the intellectual apparently involved in some plot to overthrow an oppressive government and better the lot of the poor and oppressed in Eastern Europe, seems oblivious to Vera’s plight, capable of thinking only in the abstract, not in the concrete. So much for great historical movements and all their theatrics, which benefit only a few, as Suarez seems to say. The second play, Casamentera (Matchmaker), set in 1920, dramatizes the negotiations between the procurer and the local agent, Golde, followed by the preparation of a young woman for her trip to the New World. In a less subtle manner than in the first play, here home is overtly a site of commerce and definitely not the closed, insulated nucleus impervious to external socioeconomic and socio-

AO SHARON MAGNARELLI political forces as we have been wont to believe. The third play, La Varsovia (The Warsaw woman), takes place on a ship en route to Argentina and centers on two women: the thirty-five-year-old M1enon and the younger Hanna. The latter is heading to what she believes (or pretends to believe) is marriage but is in fact prostitution. In many ways, the two women represent two moments on a timeline

or continuum, again positing that very little changes for the oppressed. Once in the position of the younger (en route to what she thought was marriage), the older woman now aids and abets the male businessman in his trade in hides or skins (a chilling metaphor for the realities of the business) and vies with the younger woman

for his attentions, as another woman had done with her years before.!? The fact that Hanna turns out to be pregnant undermines traditional images of family and home since the baby’s businessman/ procurer/pimp father will surely abandon Hanna, and the baby will be born (if indeed it is allowed to be born) not in a safe haven immune to the perils of the world, but in a brothel and will most likely be as exploited as its mother. What all three plays have in common and what can be read as an index of the work’s broader sociopolitical message is their thematic emphasis on illusion, on feigning to be other than what one is, on convincing the other character(s) that things are different from what

they are. On numerous occasions, the spectator is likely to be as duped as the characters in these plays, where acting and pretense serve as both offensive and defensive tactics, where acting is (a way of ) life. In many ways (and beyond the thematics of the historically based events of the trilogy), the accent is very much on the question of theater, both literal and figurative. Within the fiction, the spaces of each of the plays provide figurative stages for theatrical perform-

ances that are then literally reperformed for the audience in what provides a dizzying mise en abyme and posits each space as transitional (the space of a performance between the previous performance and the next). For example, in Historias tartaras Schlomo professes to be on his way to marry a certain Hanna, but his conversation and demeanor, coupled with the fact that a male character of the same name appears later in the trilogy as the procurer, suggests that he is playacting within the play, feigning to be what he is not. Thus, the play ultimately dramatizes for the theater audience what is merely his performance for the other characters, which again is a

performance between performances in terms of both time and space.'? Similarly, Vera claims to be wealthy and married to a count, but she travels in third class, leading us to conclude that her

grandeur is either a delusion or a charade performed for her on-

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 41 stage audience. Her abandonment of her children (although in this

case, male) also evokes the way in which the young girls were handed over to the Zwi Migdal’s procurers and metaphorically abandoned to their fate by their poor families, the latter perhaps deluded by the organization as to the destiny of their daughters or per-

haps deluding themselves.'* Finally, although there are various clues, proffered by Max himself, that he is part of some plot to kill the Duke of Sarajevo and/or the tsar, one might conclude that since the other characters are not as they present themselves, he may well fall into the same category, performing between performances. This predominance of theater within theater, of illusion portrayed as illusion, 1s continued in the other two plays. In Casamentera, the spectator is as duped as Schlomo, the procurer. In fact, only in the final moments of the play do we discover that everything we have observed up until this point is Golde’s staging of a complex plot of bait-and-switch in order to force Schlomo to negotiate with her and

thereby extract more money from him.'° In addition, the young woman, Edit, who was initially the prospective “bride” and who had seemed to be an idiot, is neither, but rather Golde’s daughter, Ada, and the mother of the child Golde has pretended was hers in a

gesture that reminds us that familial roles are just that, roles assigned by society, and ones with which one is expected to comply for the “better good” of that same society (if indeed not necessarily of the individual). Furthermore, and unbeknownst to Schlomo, the adolescent victim being sold to him seems to understand her plight completely.'© In the closing moments of the play, Golde and her daughter plot the next sale and the ruses they will use (more theater

within the theater). In this way, the play not only highlights the question of illusion, of convincing the other to believe one’s show, but also suggests that the divisions between victims and victimizers, those deluded and those deluding, are not as clear as it might seem. Indeed, the victims’ survival depends on their exploitation of some of the same tricks of illusion (theater) that the victimizers employ, in what lends an impressive depth and complexity to both the sociohistorical events themselves and to the plays, as it suggests that the women, while unquestionably victims here, are not all totally disempowered.!” After all, at the end of Casamentera, Schlomo is duped by Golde’s lies. Or, is this yet more illusion, delusion, wishful thinking on our part? The final play of the trilogy, La Varsovia, is similarly marked by theater within theater. First, Mignon, the elegant French chaperone who corrects Hanna’s speech and behavior and who seems to have

been assigned the task of being a role model, proves not to be

42 SHARON MAGNARELLI French but rather Polish like Hanna, not to be named Mignon but rather Ester, and finally not to be twenty-seven years old as she had declared, but thirty-five.'* She is not a glamorous chaperone but simply another prostitute who had been similarly deceived by Schlo-

mo at some earlier point in time and is perhaps now too old and wasted to successfully ply the trade. Thus, the proffered role model proves to be an assumed role, theatrical artifice. In addition, we will

learn that the young victim, en route to what she presumably believes will be marriage with Schlomo, knows exactly where she is going, knows what the other woman’s relationship to Schlomo is, and in fact, manipulates them both as she manages to usurp the power of that woman and replace her in Schlomo’s affections (temporarily at least). Or so it seems at the end of the play, but this too

may be a delusion or misinterpretation, on her part and/or on the part of the audience. To the extent that all exist in the metaphoric and literal space of theater, what is dramatized here is the magnitude and enduring nature of the business of illusion, which was, of course, the basic commodity in which the Zwi Migdal traded, the illusion of economic and moral security implicit in the promise of marriage, a new family and home(land).'” The broader question of theater within theater is directly related to the depiction and illusions of space in the work. Before focusing on the deployment of the scenic space in the stagings of the plays, we must consider the importance of the more abstract question of space within the fictional world of the plays, that is, within the char-

acters’ discourse. It should be emphasized, however, that even as one attempts to separate the two types of space (the mimetic spaces depicted on stage and the diegetic spaces, which are merely talked about), a reading of one is necessarily influenced by the other.’° It is particularly relevant that all three plays are set in spaces that mark

moments of transition for the major characters, who find themselves en route to or about to depart for other places/spaces and a potentially different life. Characters focus predominantly not on the

here and now but on other times and places, which inevitably remain in the realm of the fiction within the fiction since they are either memories of the past, what was (or might have been) but is no more, or dreams for the future, what might be. In either case, they are primarily mental creations, not unlike those spaces that Kartun talks about in the trilogy’s prologue. Characters provide the words but other characters and spectators alike must translate those

words into mental images. In this sense, the plays incorporate at least two levels of spatial imagination/translation. At the same time, space takes on a temporal dimension and vice versa—the spaces of

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 43 the past as opposed to those of the future, both of which are literally

and figuratively an absence in the present (and presence) of the play’s fiction and staging. Furthermore, the important actions do not take place on stage, before the spectators’ eyes, but only in the

words of the characters, in an imagined past or future. As is the case with Hanna in La Varsovia, the important events—her sale and subsequent impregnation—have already occurred in another place and time, and the next important event, giving birth (perhaps both to a child as well as metaphorically to a new self, a new life in Argentina) has yet to happen, again in another place and time.?! In this

respect, the space she occupies is transitional on two levels: it marks her movement through space and time, between what was and what will be, as well as her performance between performances, her pretenses in the presence of Mignon, which are based on and follow her previous training in pretense as she was prepared for

the journey and simultaneously anticipate her coming performances, designed to please her future audience, be it Schlomo or her customers.

Significantly, the trilogy begins and ends with journeys, movement through space. The first play is set in a train traveling across Poland; the last, in a ship sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. The fact that the characters are situated within vehicles moving through space produces a sense of confinement on the one hand and one of indefiniteness on the other. Paradoxically, in some sense, the spaces evoked by these two plays are both too small and too large. Characters are trapped in a confined and confining space (a train, a ship) that is neither here nor there but in the middle of somewhere, constantly moving through a space (the ocean, Europe) that is too large to grasp or embrace, much less dominate. However, and perhaps as a response to a certain sense of powerlessness produced by the vast, unseen (diegetic) space beyond the mimetic space, in each play characters clearly compete for dominance within the latter. This trope of the journey might obviously be read as a metaphor of life, which is an ongoing process, always in transition, but it also alludes to the Zwi Migdal and its wide-ranging influence in contrast to the confinement and limitations inflicted on its female victims.*? At the same time, the trope might also be linked to the unfortunate continuity of humankind’s exploitation and abuse of others as well as to all forms of prejudice, along with the implicit figurative, psychological, if not literal, physical confinements that result from that exploitation or prejudice.*? In each case the scenery may change but the abuse seems constant, as is the struggle for control within the limited and limiting spaces. Furthermore, as we shall see below,

44 SHARON MAGNARELLI these ostensibly diametrically different spaces, one finite and the other vast, ultimately serve as tropes for each other and mark their similarities in spite of their differences. At the same time, the fact that the characters are in between (in transit) sets the stage, as it were, for their conversations to center on other (imagined) spaces: the places of the past that are now only memories (those of the former home and homeland) and the places of the future that are as yet only figments of the imagination, seeded and fertilized by the words

(often lies) of others (the future home and homeland), none of which proves to be a secure space.”* Since the primary action of the play centers on the characters’ conversations—their endeavors to invent and remember (reinvent) spaces—the spectator’s imaginative work is doubled.”° Since a realistic or naturalistic setting was not part of the staging of any of the plays, the spectator had to visualize not only the setting itself (productively see the theater’s stage as a ship or a train when in fact the actors were in a nearly empty box) but also the other places the characters evoked via their words, in a gesture that leads us to wonder how many times outside of the theater we productively see what is not there. In contrast, the space of the middle play, Casamentera, appears to be a more anchored space—the family living room, setting for so many plays written and produced in the last hundred years or so. Here one finds the same sense of finiteness and enclosure that characterizes the mimetic spaces of the two plays that frame this one, but this space seems to lack the negative qualities associated with enclosure—limitation and restriction. On the contrary, there appears to be a degree of stability and security that is lacking in the other two plays. This element of security and stability (the relative comfort of the mimetic space, inside, here) is repeatedly contrasted with the invisible, diegetic space (the uncomfortable out there) by means of the characters’ references to the snow and cold outside. However, the disparity between the mimetic and the diegetic spaces proffers an ironic statement about the nature of the space of home and family insofar as the perceived safe haven of home is shown to be the gateway to those cold, outside, unknown places. It 1s within the family home (or what appears to be the same) that the exploitation begins, the negotiations are transacted, and the young woman is prepared to be handed over to the cold, calculating procurer, who will take her out into the literal and metaphoric cold.”° And, it is in another unseen home (that of the young woman being sold) where the money will be delivered to her family, that same family, which in our romanticized images should be protecting her from exactly this fate. As portrayed here, and again in a chilling commentary on

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 45 society, the home is definitely not immune to the dangers (metaphoric cold) of the outside world. One might well say the same of the two homelands, Poland and Argentina, whose government leaders (often imaged as fathers of the nation-state) allowed the organiZation to operate unchecked and failed to provide the protection and security that had been rhetorically promised to the citizenry.

At this point let us turn to the stagings of the plays to examine how the texts, the words on the page, were translated into the threedimensional space of the theater, a space that, in its own way, provided the transition between the text and the meanings constructed in the process of spectator reception. Although performed together, one after the other, each play of the trilogy had a different director and a different cast.2”7 While some of the characters, or at least their names, appear in more than one play, they were portrayed by differ-

ent actors, an aesthetic decision that on the one hand provided something of a sense of disorientation for the audience, but on the other served to highlight the ubiquitous nature of the business of the white slave trade (the actresses’ faces were different but their plights were the same) as well as the implicit illusions on which both the business and theater depend.’® In each of the three performances, props and settings were minimal. For the most part the spaces on stage were not clearly delineated (with the exception of

the division between the performance space and the spectator space), and objects were employed for their iconical or indexical functions. Thus, we return to Kartun’s and Brook’s notions of the mind of the spectator filling the blank spaces. In Historias tartaras the scenic space was loosely divided into three sections, which appeared and disappeared according to the lighting. One section to the back and side of center stage was distinguished by a vanity table at which Vera put clothes on, took them

off, applied makeup, and generally primped before a mirror in scenes that are not part of the published text but which underscored

the relationship between theater and illusion. At the same time, these scenes evoked the possibility that she was either a prostitute or an actress, literally and metaphorically capable of assuming costumes, facades, and roles as the need arose.”? Another space to the back and other side of center stage, which similarly does not figure in the published text, was characterized by a playpen where Vera gave birth and which was later occupied by dolls, presumably icons of those same children. Although their position in the margins, off center as it were, suggested that these spaces and events belonged to other places and times, they epitomized spaces marked by transition to the extent that the actress metamorphosed, before our eyes,

46 SHARON MAGNARELLI from one role to the next, be it mother in the one case or actress/ prostitute in the other. Although the main action of the play took place center stage and belonged to the fictional present, it too de-

pended on the audience’s ability (and willingness) to imagine spaces: that of the train, indexed by little more than seats facing each other, and that outside the train, unseen but evoked via sound

effects—whistles and voices in off announcing the stops, the spaces/places of Poland through which the train was passing. Thus, here as in the other two plays, spectators were literally called upon to imagine the transitional space in which the actors were pretending to be characters who were feigning to be something they were not, performing between performances, always en route to yet another performance. The setting of the middle play, Casamentera, was the most realistic, that is, readily recognizable as the sitting or living room of a family home, although it still utilized only a handful of stage props and elements of scenery—a table, a couple of chairs, a miniature tea set. As noted earlier, the fact that the home does not provide a safe haven here points to the space of the home not only as one of transition but also as one of illusion. This emphasis on the illusion was reinforced at the start of the performance of the play when, in

yet another addition to the published text, two of the characters stepped out of the fiction (if we can use this expression to refer to something that happens before the fiction actually begins) to introduce each other, specify where they were, and draw chalk lines on the stage floor, explaining that the lines indicated the limits or walls of Golde’s house. In some sense, then, the actresses called attention to the theatrical fourth wall through which we peer and which 1s as invisible as the chalk walls, depending as it does on both convention and the complicity of the spectator in the illusion. The fact that the walls, which we had to imagine, were traced on the stage itself, recognized as stage, underscored both the illusion of theater in general and the illusory nature of home, based, as the latter often is, more on wishful thinking than actual experiences. That those walls were traced specifically in chalk (infinitely erasable) further foregrounded the tenuous nature of both home and theater. The lines, illusion, can be drawn, erased, drawn again, just as meaning can be constructed, demolished, and reconstructed. Furthermore, the infinite erasability of the chalk lines pointed to the status of the home as transitory space (all rhetoric to the contrary) and trope perhaps for all those other spaces we occupy briefly in life, which feel (often erroneously) to be safe and stable, unchangeable, but which are as contingent as this chalk house. Nonetheless, because the walls were

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 47 not actually there, spectators were not only called upon to fill the blank spaces with their imaginations but also reminded that the walls themselves (in their metaphoric value as defensive, safety measures) are illusions, keeping no one safe for long. This imaginative depiction of the walls also reminded us that theater, performative behavior, is not necessarily neatly contained within the walls of the theater building, that every performance is transitional, a performance that links the previous one to the next.

While all three stagings were well-executed, the most unusual and perhaps most intriguing was the final play, La Varsovia, which eschewed all pretense of anything approaching realism or naturalism and provided a very unusual slant on the questions of theatrical space and imagination. For this production, the scenic space was

empty with the exception of dozens of metal buckets that were strewn across the floor. Thus, spectators were confronted with a metaphoric sea of silver-toned pails in which characters sometimes walked, accompanied by the grating sound they produced as the metal scraped the stage floor. In addition to serving as footwear, at times the buckets functioned as chairs, tables, playing pieces in an

imprecise game (the game of power?), containers for liquid and some grainlike substance, and so on. Again, the highly unusual con-

figuration of the scenic space underscored Kartun’s and Brook’s notion of the empty space and the spectator’s role in filling that Space insofar as it required the spectator to make meaning of the buckets, for the most part empty ones, which called attention to their emptiness when feet were inserted into them and when they were turned upside down, sat in or on, etcetera. Thus, this staging,

more than that of the other two plays, demanded that spectators become actively involved in the construction of meaning, a nonpassivity that not all spectators willingly embraced. Indeed, the audience’s first reaction was one of shock and disbelief, a reaction that was compounded as soon as one realized that the play was set on a ship in the Atlantic. This sense of disbelief is directly related

to the thematics of the trilogy insofar as it reflects (theatrically translates) the disbelief often expressed, eventually and usually ex post facto, about the atrocities perpetrated by any group, be it the Nazis in Germany, the white slavers in Argentina, the black slavers

in the Americas, or the military dictatorship of the “dirty war.” How could this have happened? Why was nothing done to stop it? How could a people be persecuted within and by a government that has implicitly promised protection as part of the nation-state pact with its people? Indeed, an implicit answer to these questions in regard to Argentine history or world history was staged precisely

48 SHARON MAGNARELLI via the pails; on occasion one of the characters stuck her head into a bucket in what provided an apt image of society’s tendency not

to see or hear (to turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to) that which is happening around us. At the same time, the fact that the buckets were infinitely movable and could be filled and emptied at will again signaled the transitional nature of the space in which meaning was repeatedly constructed, invalidated, and reconstructed. Like the stage objects of the other plays, the buckets paradox1cally produced a sense of an immense space as well as one of confinement. Visually, spectators were treated to a quantity of pails that seemed excessive for the space—hence the sense of immensity, an immensity that signaled the vast distance the young women traveled from Europe to Argentina, a distance that increased the difficulty of finding their way home or being found by their families in the New

World. But, at the same time, those buckets evoked confinement and limitation. Of a size that was relatively small in comparison to that of the scenic space (hence the large number of them), the finiteness of each individual bucket was underscored by the fact that some of them contained limited quantities of grain or liquid or even the feet of the actresses. As they walked in the buckets, the characters shuffled along like shackled slaves, for the buckets clearly hindered their freedom of movement. Although the characters could move their feet from one bucket to another, ultimately their feet were still confined to some bucket, which revealingly was identical to all others. This functioned as a comment on the historical situa-

tion depicted: the young women escaped the poverty of their homes/homelands only to find themselves in circumstances that were equally deplorable if not worse. At the same time, one might view this image in relation to a comment on the larger issue: on the restrictions and limitations society has traditionally placed on women, as well as on numerous ethnic, racial, or religious groups. Similarly, both the magnitude and the confinement evoked by the buckets signaled the ideology within which one group exploits another and recruits members of the exploited group to assist in further exploitation. In this particular case, we are talking about Jewish

women being exploited by Jewish men (an already oppressed eroup).°? But Suarez takes it one step further, for all the plays hint

at a certain complicity on the part of some members of the exploited group. It is in La Varsovia where this becomes most patent in the character of Mignon, already exploited to the maximum and about to be oppressed even further due to her advancing age. In the words of Schlomo, quoted or invented by Hanna, the older woman “ya no le sirve.... “Se esta reventando.’ .. . “Esta toda podrida por

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 49 dentro’” (is no good to him anymore... . “She’s worn out.” ... “She’s all rotten inside” ).°! Nonetheless, it 1s she who aids in the exploitation of the younger woman. In fact, if one is to judge by her words, she has totally bought into the ideology of the exploiter. As she affirms, ostensibly speaking of the animals (specifically, martas [martens], feminine) that provide the pelts or hides for the trader, “No diga pobrecitas, Hanna. Estan en el mundo para ser usadas. ,Acaso no es el hombre el rey de los animales? Si no las aprovecha

el hombre, ,quién las va a aprovechar?” (Don’t call them poor things, Hanna. They are in the world to be used. Isn’t man king of the animals? If man doesn’t take advantage of them [make use of them], who will’?)°?

One of the other notable aspects of this staging of Las polacas was that the utilization of transitional space and space as transition was not confined to the stage or the auditorium in which the plays were performed, but rather spilled over into other spaces that conventionally do not form part of the illusion. In what expanded the questions of illusion, role playing, and transition, in this staging the public spaces of the theater were incorporated into the space of the production and by inference into the business and in turn, the theatrical illusion. After each of the first two plays, there was a twentyor thirty-minute intermission while the stage was prepared for the next play. Unlike most intermissions, however, here audience members were forced to leave their seats and mingle in the lobby and the public areas, in those spaces that traditionally function as transitional spaces between the real world we leave outside the theater door and the world of illusion into which we are about to enter.* As Chaudhuri has observed, “Conventionally, this space serves to

prepare the spectators to enter the auditorium and assume their roles as ‘onlookers.’ Thus, it is a classic liminal space, marking out a spatial and temporal threshold between the outside world and the inside world of theater,” that 1s, marking the threshold between fiction and reality.**+ Here, however, the liminal nature of that space was both underscored and destabilized insofar as the actors of the previous play(s) joined us there. The role playing, the illusion, con-

tinued outside of the performance space per se. As those actors moved among us in the lobby, they remained in costume and, to some degree, in character. Thus, their very presence in and out of character functioned again to highlight the transitional nature of the space in which illusion merged with reality. As they mingled with us, they further fused illusion and reality by serving us typical Pol-

ish/Jewish food and drink and discussing the play with us (or at least with those of us who had enough presence of mind to talk to

SO SHARON MAGNARELLI them—others clearly felt uneasy about this juxtaposition of levels of illusion and the concurrent invasion of our space). In what again should be interpreted as a reference to the ubiquitous and widespread nature of the business and theatrical illusion here, neither of which respected traditional divisions of space, territory, etcetera, the dramatic work spilled over into other spaces and was not contained within the three or four walls of traditional scenic space, a factor that provoked a significantly different reception on the part of the audience.*° It was as if there were no escape from the plays, the business (as there was none for the imported women, although one imagines they soon escaped from the illusions that had been cultivated). Indeed, for many in the audience the transition back to the real world was partially thwarted as the illusion accompanied us between acts. In many ways, and as the plays so vividly dramatize, the illusion, theater, is everywhere and the boundaries between the two are repeatedly crossed. And, again, let us not forget that a major characteristic of the business of prostitution (like that of the-

ater) is precisely the production of illusion, both in the young women being imported and in the customers they will eventually Service.

As in the plays themselves, then, the clever use of the theater space in the stagings continually pointed outside the theater building and the fictional world of the play to sociopolitical realities, even as the distinctions between theater and sociopolitical reality were continually blurred, reminding us again that reality is theater, a complex web of illusions where those who wield the power always remain just out of sight, behind the scenes. But, at the same time, as I have argued, the plays and the theatrical spaces continually pointed inward to themselves, to theater per se, ever in the process of transition between the external referent and a certain internal self-consciousness of the illusion. Thus, the spaces in both the world of the fiction and its staging are shown to be transitional on any number of levels. Characters and spectators are en route to other places, other constructions of meaning, and forever in performance in these spaces that exist in the interstices between reality and illusion, performance that recognizes itself as such even as it

would paradoxically hide its nature as performance. It is in these spaces that the external sociopolitical referents meet and fuse with the thematics of theater per se and with a questioning of theater’s role in the construction of our sociopolitical realities. Ultimately, the scenic spaces of the play served to translate the invisible reality and facilitate the audience’s recognition of the same. As the plays

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 51 and their stagings so vividly demonstrated: life is theater, reality is illusion.

NOTES

1. Patricia Suarez, Las polacas (Buenos Aires: Teatro Vivo, 2002). Trilogia de las Polacas (Trilogy of the Polish women), as the stage production was titled, unlike the published edition, which is titled simply Las polacas, debuted in June 2002 at the Patio de Actores theater in Buenos Aires. I saw the trilogy at the same theater and with the same actors in August of 2003. Two plays of the trilogy have won prizes: Casamentera (Matchmaker) won the 2002 National Foundation for the Arts prize for unpublished plays, and La Varsovia (The Warsaw woman) won the 2001 National Institute of Theater prize for short plays. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that at one point the spectator needed reservations a month in advance to get into the play, it has been afforded little critical attention in Argentina. Suarez was born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1969 and has published two novels and several books of short stories. In the last couple of years, Suarez has been very prolific and has had a number of plays produced. Valhala was staged in 2004. Her 2005 productions included El suefio de Cecilia (Cecilia’s dream), Rudolf (Rudolph), El tapadito (The overcoat), Las 20 y 25 (8:25), as well as Santa Eulalia (Saint Eulalia) and La Principessa Mafalda (Princess Mafalda) (the last two written with Leonel Giacometto). In the published version of the trilogy, the three plays are titled Historias tartaras (Tartar stories), Casamentera (Matchmaker), and La Varsovia (The Warsaw woman). In the stage production the second play was renamed La sefiora Golde (Mrs. Golde), the name of the matchmaker/marriage broker. I employ the title Casamentera throughout. To confuse matters more, characters’ names are not identical in the published text and the production program. In this paper I employ the

names of the published version, but Schlomo of Historias tartaras was called Motek in the production, while Hanna of La Varsovia was named Rachela in the program.

The production program states, “Since 1906 the so-called Israeli Society of Mutual Aid ‘Warsaw,’ with legal status granted by the Buenos Aires government, was devoted to white slave trade, in other words, the ‘importation’ of European women for prostitution on Argentine soil” and adds that around three thousand women were exploited in Argentina. According to Canadian journalist Isabel Vincent, “From the end of the 1860s until the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, thousands of young, impoverished women, most of them from the hardscrabble shtetls of Eastern Europe, were literally sold into slavery by a notorious crimi-

nal gang [the Zwi Migdal, which] controlled brothels in places as diverse as Johannesburg, Bombay, and Shanghai. But the centers of their criminal activities were Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and, to some extent, New York City.” Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas (New York: William Morrow, 2005), 10-11. She also notes that “what made the Zwi Migdal so unique, and so successful, was its focus on impoverished Jewish women and girls who were easily duped into religious marriages” (11). For a literary-historical account of the Zwi Migdal and the woman who denounced it, Rachel Liberman, see Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (New York: Garland, 2000).

52 SHARON MAGNARELLI I have attempted to avoid confusion by referring to each of the one-act plays with the term play and to the collection of the three with the term trilogy.

2. Mauricio Kartun, prologue to Las polacas, by Patricia Suarez (Buenos Aires: Teatro Vivo, 2002), 3.

3. Ibid., 4. Although Kartun does not give the source of his quote, it comes from Peter Brook, The Open Door: Thoughts on Acting and Theatre (New York: Anchor, 2005), 32. 4. Historias tartaras was directed by Clara Pando, La sefiora Golde by Elvira Onetto, and La Varsovia by Laura Yusem. 5. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) and Anne Ubersfeld, Diccionario de términos claves del andlisis teatral (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2002). 6. McAuley, Space, 28. 7. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 229. 8. Webster’s New World Dictionary, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), s.v. “Transitional.” 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., s.v. “Transitive.”

11. Maria Moliner defines Tartaro (Tartar) as both “nombre dado por los griegos y romanos a la morada de los muertos” (name given by the Greeks and Romans to the abode of the dead) and “infierno” (hell). In the following entry, where tdrtaro is defined as a hard, crusty deposit, she suggests that the two may have begun as the same word. Diccionario de uso del espariol (Madrid: Gredos, 1966).

12. The procurer’s trade is referred to as pelleteria (trading in skins or hides) and he is referred to as a pelletero (one who plies that trade). 13. Furthermore, although he pretends to be rich as he continually gives the other characters money from a large wad of bills, the fact that he travels in third class belies that facade and suggests that the money may well be that of the organization. His (mis)use of it on the train embodies another level of exploitation (and implicit theater) since it will mean that even less of that money will eventually be paid as a dowry to the family of the adolescent he will buy. The play’s emphasis on his “generosity” and the way he throws money around in some sense points to the complexity of the business and the multiple levels of people who profited by it.

14. At the same time, although within the representational economy of the published text the existence of Vera’s children is never placed in doubt, the staging in many ways leaves open the possibility that they may be figments of her imagination. They are represented by dolls that are always to the back of the stage, never part of the central action, existing, as it were, only in the words or mind of Vera, in other times or places. To be sure, in the production (and in what is part of the published text) we occasionally hear the voices of the children in off. Interestingly, those voices also underscore the question of illusion and evoke the game-playing that forms part of the final play, La Varsovia. Specifically, the children are playing some sort of game dependent on watching one’s step, not stepping on a certain spot, an apt metaphor for the games all the characters seem to be playing. The children’s illusion continues as one assures the other that since he has stepped where he should not, he must die. They argue about whether the child actually did or did not touch the forbidden area, and the loser insists he does not want to play anymore, to which the winner responds, “;Primero tienes que morir! ;Te tienes que

TRANSITIONAL STAGES 53 morir!” (Suarez, Las polacas, 44) [First you have to die! You have to die!], reminding us that all the games or illusions of the trilogy are indeed matters of life and death. 15. It is relevant that the audience is as duped by her theater as is the procurer,

which is a comment not only on theater audiences but also on those citizens in both Argentina and Europe who failed to see the Zwi Migdal for what it was at the time. The motif of the sick child is a clever dramatic device by means of which Suarez is able to draw the spectator’s attention to the other deceptions that Golde employs. The sick child is mentioned in the opening dialogue of the play, and the conversations between Schlomo and Golde as well as the progress in their negotiations are

punctuated by references to the same. At the end of the play, as we are being brought out of the illusion and being led to recognize the playacting within the play, the child serves as a major point of reference.

16. Indeed, Golde and her daughter coach her on how to get help once she reaches Argentina and assure her that she will eventually be rescued, although it seems likely that this help and rescue is another sham or trick on the part of her coaches. On the other hand, Isabel Vincent has noted, “Many of the women knew what fate awaited them in America. Some would even become successful brothel owners and recruiters for the Zwi Migdal” (Bodies and Souls, 12). Interestingly, in retrospect, one realizes that there were clues to the fact that we were witnessing playacting within the play. One is probably more likely to pick up on these clues when reading the text than when watching the performance. Nonetheless, there were additional hints in the production that were not in the published text. For example, when Golde served tea to Schlomo, she used a miniature tea set that a child might use to stage a pretend tea party for her dolls. 17. See, for example, Vincent’s Bodies and Souls as well as Glickman’s The Jewish White Slave Trade.

18. In another play on the same topic, Desvan (Attic), Suarez dramatizes this custom of the prostitutes taking on French names and feigning French heritage. Apparently, clients paid more for a French woman. Patricia Suarez, “Desvdn,” CELCIT: Dramdtica Latinoamericana 152 (April 2004), http://www.celcit.org.ar/ bajar.php?hash = ZGxhKzE1IMg= =. 19. Obviously, the business of prostitution itself depends on the creation of assorted illusions to please the client. 20. I rely on Michael Issacharoff’s definitions of mimetic and diegetic space in Discourse as Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). At the same time I am reminded here of Scolnicov’s discussion of the interdependence of the theatrical space within (what we see on stage) and the space without (the off stage that we never see). Hanna Scolnicov, Woman’s Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 21. One would imagine, however, that there would be some question as to whether or not the organization would actually allow her pregnancy to come to

term, and if it did, as to whether or not she would be allowed to keep (.e., “mother” ) the child.

22. Mignon hints at that confinement. In response to Hanna’s question about whether it is ever cold in Argentina, the former responds, “A veces hace frio. Pero usted no va a estar nunca expuesta al frio, Hanna. Schlomo la va a tener siempre

en el hogar” (Suarez, Las polacas, 115-16) [Sometimes it is cold. But you are never going to be exposed to the cold, Hanna. Schlomo will always have you in the home]. She employs precisely the metaphor of the home to refer to the brothel.

54 SHARON MAGNARELLI 23. Even though they are not chained or incarcerated, marginalized groups are often not allowed to occupy the same spaces as the dominant segments of the society. One thinks, for example, of the past when many men’s clubs prohibited entry to women or when blacks were forced to use different restrooms or sit in the back of buses. 24. Although some of the characters in both plays are going back to places they have previously visited, the temporal gap would result in the places themselves being different from what they remember (which is also most likely different from what they actually were in the past). 25. In this respect, the plays highlight the inherent fictionality of space, suggesting that it is always necessarily supplemental, added before or after the fact, the invention of the perceiving, remembering, and/or foreseeing self who conceives of space predominantly in relation to him/herself, in relation to her/his ability to control and manipulate that space. 26. The continual references to the sick child discussed in note 15 also serve to identify the space as that of a family in spite of the absence of a husband or father. 27. As a result of staging the three plays together, which for this critic was essential for audience reception and the production of meaning, the production was an almost unprecedented (for Buenos Aires) three hours long. 28. Also, as noted above, in the published text some of the names are repeated. The repetition or interchangeability between and among characters (and perhaps all women within the world of prostitution and white slave trade) is also emphasized in the final play by the fact that it ends with Mignon retching just as Hanna had in the opening moments.

29. Need may be the operative word here insofar as all of the women in the plays, because of financial need, in some way assume roles, give the audience the show they want or demand. While current thinking suggests (whether correctly or not) that not all prostitutes ply the trade because of desperate poverty, surely some do and certainly all realize some economic gain. 30. One should not overlook the fact that this exploitation has not only ethnic overtones but also patriarchal, masculinist ones. It is the females who are sold, exploited, never the males. Indeed, at the end of Historias tartaras, when Vera abandons her sons, in effect giving, rather than selling, them to Schlomo, he reacts with the words, “;Nifios! ;Si al menos fueran nifias ...! Pero los nifios, j;para qué pueden servir?” (Suarez, Las polacas, 54) [Little boys! If at least they were little girls... ! But little boys, what can they be used for’? 31. Ibid., 134-35. 32. Ibid., 28. Taken in context here, it is clear that her term hombre (man) refers to the male, not to mankind or human beings in general. 33. It should be noted that an intermission is not often a part of Argentine productions (particularly in alternative theater as is the case here). So, unlike what happens in other parts of the world, in Argentina the spectator generally passes through the lobby and public areas only twice, once on the way into the fiction/ illusion and once on the way out. 34. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 46. Similarly, Gay McAuley notes that as spectators traverse the foyer and other outer areas of the theater, “the fictional world has usually not been activated” (Space, 42). In addition, as spectators leave the auditorium to return to the lobby or foyer, they conventionally leave the fictional world behind. 35. Anne Ubersfeld distinguishes between theatrical space (that of both actors and audience) and scenic space (the space of the actors) (Diccionario, 48-51).

Transgressing Spaces: Within, Without, and Beyond the Stage and Uruguay in Gabriel Peveroni’s Theater Sarah M. Misemer SPACE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A CONCERN OF THEATER BOTH IN THE

physical, architectural sense and in the imagined, fictional sense. Marvin Carlson reminds theater critics in his study Places of Performance, that theatrical space can be conceived of in a variety of venues ranging from the medieval church to the late nineteenthcentury Romantic setting of Coombe Woods, England, and from Renaissance city streets and marketplaces to contemporary “happenings” in urban or historically important spaces such as the US Capitol and the pyramids of Egypt, among other examples.' Anne Ubersfeld and her contemporaries in semiotic studies have further refined the concept of space in performance to distinguish between the site where the fictional action of the play occurs and the social environment in which this action takes place. Others, such as Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland, envision the theater as a place for exploring historical and social constructs within a particular milieu, as well as the transformations they might undergo in a different language, context, or time period.” In contrast, theorists like Stanton B. Garner, Jr., see space as part of the phenomenological experience of theater and concentrate on the body and its physicality in a determined environment. Garner favors the corporeal presence above all other theatrical devices and constructs as a way of understanding the spectacle.? Space, as 1s apparent in just these few examples, has become a decidedly complex and evolving concept of investigation for both theater practitioners and critics. All of the aforementioned studies have undoubtedly made an enormous contribution to the understanding of theatrical space. However, recent works by Uruguayan dramatist Gabriel Peveroni lend a new and particularly River Plate sensibility to the concept of space. In Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente) (Sarajevo on the 55

56 SARAH M. MISEMER corner with Montevideo [The bridge], 2003) and E/ hueco (una tribu urbana) (The hole [an urban tribe], 2004), Peveroni confronts River Plate issues by merging them with transnational and transcultural discussions, thus blurring spatial boundaries and communi-

ties.* Of particular interest in this study is the way in which Peveroni creates complex temporal and geographic spaces to highlight the particular, local concerns of the Uruguayan context, while simultaneously configuring broader global scenarios. In both plays,

Peveroni expresses disquieting ontological queries concerning spaces that fall both within and outside the lines of traditional ways

of thinking. As such, Peveroni’s theatrical spaces are both real (constrained by economic conditions, as Uruguay has been) and mi-

metic representations of reality (spaces for representing past and present economic and political unrest), just as the theatrical miseen-scéne 1s both real and mimetic. This slippery division becomes as unnerving in Peveroni’s plays as it does on the larger stage of a global (cyber) world. This is particularly true for those countries, like Uruguay, that operate mainly outside the poles of first-world power structures but are still affected by and dependent on their cultural and economic practices. Specifically, this essay will address how Peveroni’s two dramatic works, Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente) and El hueco (una tribu urbana), manipulate marginalized, liminal spaces and recycle traditional River Plate narratives, such as the issues of immigration, politics, and the economy, in order to show Uruguay’s unstable po-

sition in the twenty-first century as it bobs between globalized world markets and third-world limitations. In both cases, Peveroni

utilizes the backdrop of military dictatorships to foreground the confusion of everyday life and theatrical illusion as they occur simultaneously in one space: the stage. These juxtapositions of space, time, and content demonstrate Peveroni’s unique ability to capture

the uneasy concerns about Uruguayan identity in the twenty-first century as a result of transnationalization and transculturation. Queries about fixed national identity arise easily enough when one considers the very titles and settings of these two plays, SaraJevo esquina Montevideo (El puente) and El hueco (una tribu urbana). Peveroni has chosen titles that remind the audience that these spaces transcend existing infrastructures. The first play suggests the intersection of thoroughfares representing two geographic sites: the cities of Sarajevo and Montevideo. This corner does not

really exist in either the former Yugoslavia or Uruguay, yet it is the indirect setting of the play’s theatrical space, which vacillates between the Yugoslavia of the 1991-95 war and a contemporary

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 57 setting in Montevideo. The subtitle, El puente, evinces this transitional movement between loci and temporal settings. As a result, identity in Peveroni’s play is simultaneously layered and dislocated because of the juxtaposition of various places and time periods. The action of the play centers around a Croatian mathematician named Bora Parzic, interned in a psychiatric ward during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, and the Yugoslavian/Uruguayan Actor who represents him in the metatheatrical play about his life. Significantly, this role was played by Ivan Solarich, a Yugoslavian/Uru-

guayan actor who represented both characters in the 2003

production of Peveroni’s play. The metatheatrical layering of personalities and ethnicities within Peveroni’s play not only exemplifies the doubleness inherent in representation, but also takes into account the deceptive nature of space in performance. Carlson supports this notion, stating that “theatrical performance . . . occupies a strange, even uncanny position midway between the arts of absence, such as the novel or the cinema, and the experience of presence we have seen in everyday life.”° Absence and presence, as we shall see, are elegantly intertwined in Peveroni’s play. We eventually learn that the ward in Sarajevo was destroyed, yet it exists si-

multaneously on the stage with the contemporary setting in Montevideo when the Actor, who plays Bora, attempts to find his own identity amidst the confusion of historical legacy and immigration. The Actor/Solarich’s generation experienced the military dictatorship in Uruguay from 1973 to 1985 and therefore relates to the complicated power struggle waged among several different ethnic and religious groups in the former Yugoslavia. Bora, the Actor, and Solarich all share the loss of loved ones and a previous way of life through the transmutations of political power. All of this 1s further confounded by the fact that the theatrical spectacle was performed by Solarich, a Uruguayan of Yugoslavian descent, in Montevideo’s Teatro Puerto Luna. Consequently, Peveroni’s play occupies the midpoint between the absent and present identities of Yugoslavian immigrants in Uruguay. Key to understanding the play’s nuances is the concept of the esquina or “corner,” a metaphorical space that exists as both a central site when it is seen as an intersection of converging lines, and a marginal site when it is seen as a remote point on the outer edges of an angular space where these lines meet. The space represented is both absent and present, central and marginal in Peveroni’s piece, as are the questions of identity that it raises. In other words, the space depicted is both real and fictional, contemporary and historical, and as a result exists outside the normal definitions of space

58 SARAH M. MISEMER encountered in everyday life. The unnerving nature of this theater space is best understood through the work of those like Ubersfeld, who reminds theater audiences that “the stage sign is doubly motivated because it is both a mimesis of something (the icon of a spatialized element) and an element within an autonomous, concrete reality.”° Thus, the corner space of Peveroni’s plays functions convincingly as a metaphor for Uruguay’s position in the global world after the 2002 banking crisis, which resulted from the high deficits incurred by the military dictatorship.’ Uruguay’s heavy reliance on banking as a major contributor to the national economy has made it dependent on international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The 2001 default by Argentina on its debt to the IMF had a ripple effect in Uruguay, causing political and economic panic. Consequently, Uruguay has become a player in international banking systems without the benefits of a fully modernized

socioeconomic infrastructure. It 1s a player, but only from the corner. The same scenario 1s also true of Peveroni’s El hueco (una tribu

urbana), a title that conjures up the notion of a gap or perforation in a system or structure. Again, Peveroni underscores the use of spatial concepts that fall outside normal definitions. The action takes place mainly in a house and hideout called el hueco (the hole) by its inhabitants, a band of misfits in Uruguay. These young people, from a generation born during the late 1970s and early 1980s, cohabit, plan crooked deals to make money, and examine their own pasts and the legacies of political repression. This unsavory group of cousins, friends, and lovers plans to use a kidnapped person (the bulto) to blackmail a rich military official. The twist in the plot, however, surfaces when a female member named Su realizes that

the kidnapped bulto is the sister she has never met. During the course of the play, Su and her newfound sister piece together the story of their lives and realize that their mother, considered a subversiva during the military dictatorship in Uruguay from 1973 to 1985, was jailed and eventually killed. During the mother’s stay in prison, Su’s younger sister was taken by the supervising military official shortly after birth. The younger sister was raised in his home and never told of her real identity. The two women are able to reconstruct their common past by relating the story that the official told six-year-old Su when they were about to torture her mother

to death to the story he later told the younger sister in his home. Before being killed, the mother had asked Su to find her sister. The play ends with the younger sister pardoning her “father,”’ while Su

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 59 continues the cruel game of hate and is weakened to the point of death.*®

In the midst of this central action between the sisters, Peveroni inserts another plot line involving cousins Tony and Patricio and their struggle for power within the gang. As in the previous play, Peveroni utilizes intersecting plot lines and vignettes, which emphasize the crisis provoked by the dictatorship and its lasting consequences.’ Like the sisters who find themselves struggling to decide how to proceed in the midst of the horrible information they are uncovering, Tony and Patricio also tread on uncertain ground as they try to determine the future of the gang. While they once shared a commitment to violence, Tony begins to question the usefulness and necessity of the harm they are causing with the abduction of the young woman. The conflict between the two finally culminates in a battle to the death in the streets. The play ends with the police executing the two cousins in the street and arresting some of the members of the gang, while others manage to flee. As with Peveroni’s Sarajevo esquina Montevideo, the title El hueco 1s key to understanding the meaning behind the dramatic action. Again, the title suggests an absent but present quality, a space that connotes a void, but which is clearly inhabited by characters. The notion of a gap presents the public with the obvious generational gap encountered by the young people who have been forcibly separated from their families’ previous generations through the difficulties created by the military dictatorship and the subsequent economic fallout. In this manner, the space of e/ hueco represents a kind of hole into which this generation has fallen because they belong neither to the nation’s history nor to the global community due to their lack of identity and familial ties. The hole also presents the audience with the notion of a perforation in the system, which in turn functions as a metaphor for the economic gap that Uruguay attempts to fill, despite debt and economic strife, through its participation in a globalized and international market. While the titles of these two plays suggest similarities with regard to the spaces they conjure, the historical context in both plays is also analogous, as the characters in each piece are marked by political violence. In the case of Sarajevo esquina Montevideo, the upheaval is part of a continuing saga of turmoil both among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and among the refugees who arrived in Uruguay only to face further political turmoil. These same political refugees, as the Actor reveals, witnessed the military dictatorship in Uruguay from 1973 to 1985. The same political strife in recent Uruguayan history again forms the

60 SARAH M. MISEMER basis of El hueco, but here the connections/conflicts are between generations of Uruguayans. The ties cannot be limited, however, to just Uruguay, as many Latin American countries endured dictatorships. In particular, Argentina and Chile simultaneously shared Uruguay’s lot in the Southern Cone during the 1970s and early 1980s. In this way, Peveroni’s use of unusual (non-)spaces, along with the highlighting of political violence, unites these two plays about Uru-

guay and links them to ever-widening regional and international spheres.

Existing theories on space hold that one either sees the theater as having a connection to reality, or, contrastingly, envisions it as cut off from reality. In the first instance, the theater 1s conceptualized

as the locus for a spatial representation of a text written for and about humans, while in the latter, it exists as an entirely fictional and independent creation. Scolnicov distinguishes between the theatrical space within and the theatrical space without.'° According to her theory, the theatrical space within is wholly perceived by the spectator because it is completely visible upon the stage, whereas the theatrical space without is conceived because it 1s a space suggested by the playwright and the actors and imagined by the spectator as occurring somewhere offstage.'' She reminds theater critics: “The theatrical space without should not be confused with the everyday world outside of the theater... . The transcendence of the theatrical space without also underlines the separateness of its perceived counterpart. Even when it engulfs the spectators, the theatrical space is not part of everyday space, but a delimited space, a magic circle marked off from the mundane and ordinary. The audience then feels the heightened effect of being drawn into the theatrical space, leaving their everyday existence behind.”!? Scolnicov’s terms are helpful in identifying the complex visible and occluded spatial relationships that form both textually and extratextually. However, in the case of Peveroni’s plays, there is a very clear connection with the so-called ordinary and mundane space of everyday life that cannot be overlooked.!* The relationship between

the past and present is, in fact, the very essence of Peveroni’s worldview in both of these plays as well as the motor for the dramatic action. Ubersfeld clarifies this interplay: Among all possible projections, among all applications (to use a mathematical term) of the textual object within stage space, there are substitu-

tive crossovers. In other words, by virtue of the multiplicity of its concrete networks, stage space can simultaneously convey the image of

a metaphorical network, a semantic field, and an actantial model... .

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 61 Likewise, once stage space can be simultaneously the figure of a given text, of a sociocultural or sociopolitical network, or of a topography of the mind, we can be sure that there are substitutive crossovers between these different shaping structures . . . that stage space indeed establishes a relationship between those models. From that it follows that concrete stage space appears as a mediation between different ways of reading the text; moreover stage space (pertaining to performance) allows us to read both the poetics of the text and the relation of that poetics to history at the same time.!4

For Ubersfeld, the metaphorical quality of the stage implicitly suggests infinite possibilities for conceiving spaces both in the miseen-scéne and beyond. The stage in Ubersfeld’s account does not exist aS a Separate space, but rather as the site for a network of associations between the text and the performance, and also between the theatrical spectacle and its sociopolitical context(s). At the same time, Ubersfeld specifically refers to the “topography of the mind” as a way of suggesting the imagined spaces of the text and the relationship constructed by the spectator/reader with past or present ep-

isodes, which may or may not appear on the stage. In this way, space is both figurative and literal. In Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente), the stage directions

for the opening scene, “Entrada” (Entrance), serve as an initial marker for this simultaneous use of space." Los espectadores son conducidos al lugar donde se representara E/ puente. Todo esta en penumbras. El Camarografo los filma, de uno en uno. Se escuchan sonidos de tiroteo, a veces tiros aislados, otras rafagas. Algun que otro fogonazo. Ningun grito humano. Nada. Silencio, balas y el ruido al mango de monitores “en nieve.”’ Mientras llegan y se instalan, se escuchan algunos dialogos de los personajes.!°®

[The spectators are guided to the place where E/ puente 1s to be represented. Everything is in shadows. The Cameraman films them, one by one. Gunfire is heard, sometimes isolated shots and sometimes in spurts. Several explosions. No human cries. Nothing. Silence, bullets and the sound of the row of monitors showing “snow.” While they arrive and are seated, some of the characters’ dialogue is heard. |

During this opening scene, the conversations heard by the public are disparate bits of dialogue taken from other scenes in the play and function as a kind of foreshadowing for the subsequent action. Though the public does not yet fully realize it, the play sets up a temporal and spatial simultaneity by introducing the foreshadowed dialogue. This dialogue is at the same time a reconstruction of

62 SARAH M. MISEMER events that occurred in the ward in Sarajevo between several characters: a young couple, Lejla (a Muslim) and Gligoric (a Serbian); the Doctora and her lover Bora, the Actor, who repeats several times the line “Hay una sola forma de cruzar este rio” (5) [There is only one way to cross this river]. The river at once represents the Drina, the Atlantic Ocean, and the metaphorical river of blood shed during the armed conflicts between rival groups in the former Yugoslavia.!’ The same line, uttered four times, serves to unite several geographical spaces within the former Yugoslavia and suggests the connection with Uruguay. The use of other dialogue from later scenes in

the play also thrusts the spectators into a complicated temporal game. The dialogue, which really refers to past actions, occurs as a disembodied present as well as a projection toward future events that will unfold in the course of the dramatic action. Furthermore, the filming of the audience by the cameraman implicates the spectators as part of the dramatic action. As such, the opening entrada, in which the audience participates, suggests a concurrent use of time

periods without regard to sequence, as well as an invocation of overlapping topographies (both geographical and sociohistorical). The inclusion of the audience makes clear the network of relationships that trap the spectator in the action. Throughout the play, Peveroni uses the symbol of the bridge to span the divide between the former Yugoslavia and contemporary Uruguay and between the Bosnian/Serbian war of 1991-95 and the

military dictatorship of 1973-85 in Uruguay. The notion of the bridge, which appears several times in the text/performance (Bora constructing a bridge from wooden pieces; the historical bridge crossed by those mandated to pay the “tributo de sangre” by sending their Christian children to be indoctrinated into Islam; and the ancient bridge the Bosnians will bomb to prevent the Serbs from crossing), finds its likeness in the metaphors of bridges between generations of Yugoslavian refugees in Montevideo, like the Actor and his mother, who recount stories of the past. The concrete referent of the bridge onstage and the metaphorical bridges referenced in the dialogue remind the spectator/reader that the spaces within and without are ever-present and inextricably conjoined.'® Even when the space of Yugoslavia is not the setting of the action, the same actor plays both Bora and the Actor, thereby implicitly recalling the off-space.'? Likewise, whenever the war in Yugoslavia is

presented, the audience is reminded of the war in Uruguay, in which the grandfather was murdered by the government. The Actor recounts in the scene titled “Baile”:

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 63 Sé que estas en la primera fila. Sé que estas ahi, madre. . . . Todo esta por terminar. . . . La obra, claro. Esta obra. El puente va a estar roto. Definitivamente roto. Igual que Bora. [gual que mi abuelo, tu padre. (A/ publico.) Sefiores: esto es ficci6n, ficcion sobre ficcion. Una historia dentro de otra historia... . Ya se lo dije a mi madre y se los digo también a

ustedes: acepté el personaje porque tiene mucho de mi. {Qué se preguntaran? No se adelanten. Por eso, porque me gusta la ficciOn, sé que se puede cambiar, tocar el papel, cambiarlo, transformarlo. Soy actor y soy Bora. (14) [I know you’re in the first row. I know you’re there, mother. . . . Everything is ending. .. . The play, sure. This play. The bridge will be broken. Definitively broken. The same as Bora. Just like my grandfather, your

father. (Jo the audience.) Gentlemen: this is one fiction on top of another. A story within another story. . . . I already told my mother and I will tell you too: I accepted the character because he is like me. What? You may ask. Don’t go any further. That’s why I like this fiction, I know that one can change, touch the role, change it, transform it. I am an actor and I am Bora.]

Although the Actor reminds the audience that this presentation 1s merely a representation, a fiction in which he breaks the bridge of illusion, the spaces were/are real and the characters were/are real. The perceived and conceived spaces are synchronous, and therefore, as Ubersfeld maintains, the stage space allows us to read the “poetics of the text” with relation to the “poetics of history.” Recalling Ubersfeld’s concept of the stage as the mediator between text and other networks, it is important to note that the program received by the audience was a printed copy of the play. The program contains the stage directions, dialogue, opening remarks by the set designer Roberto Lopez Belloso, Peveroni, and the director, Maria Dodera, as well as a full explanation of the cast and other contributors to the production. In this way, the stage becomes the mediator for the public between the printed text and the performance. Likewise, the direct interpolation of the audience by the Actor in scenes where he breaks the fourth wall reinforces the impression that there is a distinct connection between the content of the play (poetics of the text) and the experience of the spectator (poetics of history). Like the players in the story set in Yugoslavia, the people of Uruguay have also experienced the ravages of war and exile. Peveroni recycles the theme of immigration through the conver-

sations that the Actor has with his mother. In the scene titled

“Baile” (Dance), after the actor finishes addressing his mother and

the audience, another character named Sandra enters. A young

64 SARAH M. MISEMER child who also inhabits the ward, Sandra invites the mother onto the stage to dance along with Lejla. The scene suddenly turns from one of jubilation to a battlefield showing the deaths of Lejla and Bora

as they are filmed by the cameraman. Sandra laments that they should have escaped when they had the chance and ends her dialogue with the words “muy triste” (very sad), to which the mother responds: Yo también estuve triste. Largos afios. No vi la guerra. La senti por mis padres. Y por las cartas de los parientes desde alla, desde Yugoslavia. Sentia la tristeza en mi padre cuando leia silenciosamente esas cartas después de que mis hermanas y yo nos dormiamos. Yo a veces lo espiaba y veia sus lagrimas. ... Y afios después, cuando. . . . No puedo volver a eso. Lloré, lloré muchisimo, y fue mi hijo, mi unico hijo, el que me veia llorar y preguntaba. (14)

[I too was very sad. Long years. I didn’t see the war. I felt it through my parents. And through the letters of relatives from over there, from Yugoslavia. I felt the sadness in my father when he silently read those letters after my sisters and I were asleep. Sometimes I spied on him and

saw his tears... . And years later, when... . I can’t return to that. I cried, cried a lot, and 1t was my son, my only son, who saw me crying and asked. |

The story of the mother’s family parallels that of many families who arrived in Uruguay at the turn of the last century in an effort to escape hardships in their native lands. The line “No puedo volver

a eso” (I can’t return to that) has a double meaning for this play. On the one hand, the mother refers to the pain she felt when her father was killed by the Uruguayan military for his association with “el Partido” (the Party). On the other hand, the phrase also recalls the immigrant condition of never being able to return to the nostalgic concept of the homeland. As Svetlana Boym points out, “Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) 1s a longing

for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.’’?° The mother, like so many immigrants, is caught between lands, languages, and customs. Although these River Plate narratives are inserted into the larger global context through the war in Yugoslavia, they address typically

regional concerns. These concerns were emphasized even more when many Uruguayans (as well as Argentines and Chileans) fled from Latin America and returned to their former homelands during the violent years of the dictatorship only to find that their identities were completely altered and that they no longer belonged to either

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 65 space.?! The mother’s advice to her son in the scene titled “Espejos” (Mirrors) is particularly insightful: ““Tenés que darte cuenta

de donde venis para conocerte. No se puede vivir a lo loco” (11) [You have to recognize where you come from to know yourself. You can’t live without thinking]. Because the mother also occupies

the space of the audience in the metatheatrical play presented by the Actor, we can see her as a stand-in for the audience viewing Peveroni’s play. Using the theories of Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi postulates that nostalgia can be seen as stemming from “a certain ‘deficiency’ in the present, causing the interest in the restoration of the past, and the symbolic availability of the past, maintaining a painful awareness of its definitive absence. Both of these conditions involve a dialectic of change and identity, of rupture and continuity, and both put nostalgia in tandem with an other, a time and/or place, whether it is deemed retrievable/ accessible or not.”?? The mother/audience/Uruguayan population

experiences this same problem of identity: to know where one comes from is of paramount importance, but this knowledge also unleashes a storm of uncertainty and unanswerable questions. In Peveroni’s play, these conundrums find themselves reproduced on the stage through the simultaneity of space, experience, and time, linking everyday encounters to global events, as well as the alternately off (conceived) and on (perceived) spaces of Uruguay and the former Yugoslavia. Similarly in El hueco, Peveroni displays the same kind of fascination with the interplay between theatrical text and sociohistorical

context(s). Here again, Peveroni takes up River Plate concerns about the economy and politics of Uruguay, just as he did before with immigration. Like the internal and external spectators in Sarajevo esquina Montevideo, El hueco’s players, and by extension the audience, find themselves picking apart questions of identity and origin. In this play the concern is more local/regional, as the generation born during the dictatorship in Uruguay attempts to piece to-

gether evidence about the histories that have been destroyed or

hidden. The opening scene in E/ hueco holds clues for the spectator, just as the first scene did in Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente).

In this scene, “Pesadilla” (Nightmare), all of the inhabitants of e/ hueco are sleeping the night before the kidnapping. The character

Santi is haunted by a nightmare and wakes the entire group. Alarmed, Santi repeats to several members of the group the lines “Vienen” (They are coming) and “Vienen por nosotros” (They are

66 SARAH M. MISEMER coming for us).*? Tony attempts to reestablish peace, but Cabeza, Peque, Agus, Patricio, and Su add to the drama: Cabeza. Fuiste vos, Santi. {Te acordas? Peque. Dejalo tranquilo, por favor. Cabeza. Fuiste vos el que le reventaste la cabeza de ese enano idiota. Agus. Idiota sos vos. No sigas. Tony. Basta. No empiecen de vuelta. Cabeza. Y ahora van a venir los zombis a buscarte. Tony. Basta, die. Agus. Tranquilo, Santi. Ya se te va a pasar. Santi. No fui yo. Patricio. Qué te vas a acordar s1 estabas borracho. Su. Yo vi cuando lo pisaste al Enano. Yo estaba ahi. Santi. No me acuerdo de nada, pero no fui yo. (2)

[Cabeza. It was you Santi, remember? Peque. Leave him alone, why don’t you? Cabeza. It was you that destroyed that idiot midget’s head. Agus. You’re the idiot. Stop it. Tony. Enough, I said. Agus. Calm down, Santi. You'll get over it. Santi. It wasn’t me. Patricio. Like you’d remember when you were drunk. Su. I saw when you stomped the Midget. I was there. Santi. | don’t remember anything, but it wasn’t me. ]

After this section of dialogue, the group discusses the plan for the following morning and the bulto (stash) they will acquire. The final lines belong to Tony and Santi, who state, “Lo que va a venir es

una tormenta. ... Una tormenta. ... Una tormenta” (3) [What’s coming is a storm. ...A storm. ...A storm]. In this manner, the

initial scene of El hueco establishes not only the mysterious and sinister tone of the play, but also reinforces the connections between past and present crimes, as well as the emotional terror that lingers from historical violence. The bulto, who the audience learns

is Su’s missing sister born during the military dictatorship and raised by the military official, is in one sense the unknown entity whose arrival is hinted at by Santi’s nightmare. She, along with the baggage she carries, arrives and confronts Su and the gang with a series of problems concerning their identities and motives. The word zombis, used by Cabeza, might simply be the name of another rival gang, but the word also conveys the sense of those haunted by supernatural powers reanimating the dead. These ghosts from the past take the form of the sister, who appears before the group, and

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 67 by extension the dead mother, who represents those killed under the dictatorship. In this sense, the sister and the past return to haunt the gang in the immediate present of the play’s action, which serves as a metaphor for Uruguay’s legacy in the larger historical context. The other important element of this opening scene is the violence

of the gang members. The episode between Santi and the Enano (midget) evoked in the opening dialogue introduces the theme of assault into the play and foreshadows the later revelations by Su and her sister about the military official’s treatment of their mother, the fight between Tony and Cabeza, which leads to their death in

the streets at the end of the play, and finally the fifth scene titled “Desvio” (Detour), in which Su kills the older woman also living with the gang members. This scene is especially important for understanding the correlation between official History and the personal histories of the generation represented by the gang, along with the associations between those many networks of meaning to which Ubersfeld alludes in her study. The title of the scene suggests the detour that Uruguay and other countries in the Southern Cone took during their stints with military juntas at the helm, the fallout from which is still being felt by subsequent generations.”* In this scene Su, the bulto, and the Vieja interact and trace their histories, as well as that of Uruguay. At the beginning of the scene, the Vieja attempts to leave, but Su insists she stay to hear her story, along with the Nifia. Su slaps the older woman for interrupting, and be-

gins, “Es mi historia... . gentendid?” (19) [It’s my story... . understand?]. When the sister protests that the older woman has nothing to do with the recounting, Su exclaims, “Vos, silencio, que te voy a contar una historia” (19) [You, be quiet, I’m going to tell you a story], and later explains the rape of their mother. The story ends with Su offering her sister a gift: “Y ahora sentate aca, al lado mio, que te voy a hacer un regalo... . ; Y usted! j|Siéntese ahi, vieja asquerosa! ... ; Vamos, muévese!... Y no chille que no me gustan los animales miedosos.” (19) [And now, you sit here, by me, I’m going to give you a present. ... And you! Sit there, you disgusting old bag! ... Come on, move it! And don’t whimper because I don’t like scared animals.| The stage directions then indicate that Su suffocates the older woman with chloroform and shocks her with an electric prod, the infamous picana so linked to the torture of subversivos during the military dictatorships.” The abduction of the sister, combined with the torture and murder of the Vieja (representing the previous generation), parallels the atrocities committed during the 1970s and early 1980s under Uruguay’s military dictatorship. However, these acts are combined with

68 SARAH M. MISEMER the telling of Su’s personal history and that of the sister, thereby offering the spectator a look into the present. Su exclaims to her sister, “Estamos jodidas” (19) [We’re screwed], and the legacy of violence remaining from the past confirms this statement as it spills into the contemporary setting of the hueco. This inherited violence persists even as the two sisters attempt to kill off the original sinners. The Vieja becomes another phantom in the long string of zombis that haunt the troubled contemporary and future generations of Uruguay. Her death signals the infinite repercussions and the inherited violence plaguing the Southern Cone as seen through the cyclical actions that culminate in this unnecessary homicide. The stage

again connotes the simultaneous experience of spaces and times, which are at once perceived and conceived through the repetition of History in personal histories. Peveroni suggests, through this overlapping of time periods and reproductions of violent attacks, that Uruguay is still grappling with the definition of its postdictatorship identity. This is also true in countries like Argentina and Chile, where former torturers and dictators have been pardoned and continue to live “normal” lives. The immediacy of the past and its legacy are further reinforced

by the 2004 staging of El hueco. Under Dodera’s direction, the stage space again becomes the mediator between the text and other networks. In a reversal of the normal seating arrangement, the audience for El hueco is required to enter through the back door and to

occupy the wall at the back of the stage space, while the actors stage the play in the area normally allotted for the audience. In this configuration, spectators find themselves questioning the theatrical-

ity of the play and wondering who is really on display.”° Consequently, a conflation occurs between not only the perceived space of the hueco and the conceived space of the past, but also between the mise-en-scéne and the greater stage of Uruguay. As a result, the magical circle referred to by Scolnicov is widened, or perhaps rendered obsolete in Peveroni’s play. This effect of reversed staging further heightens the theatricality of that which was considered inconceivable (the deaths of so many ordered by their own nation), but it also has the opposite effect of demonstrating how commonplace murder had become for Uruguayan audiences. The spectators, like the Vieja in the play, occupy a space of culpability as they passively observe the atrocities committed and are observed in turn by the angry postdictatorship generation. Peveroni thereby assures that the “substitutive crossovers” described by Ubersfeld demonstrate

the many ways in which Su’s exclamation of “Estamos jodidas”

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 69 (We’re screwed) is very real in the contemporary setting of Uruguay and as it is staged in El hueco. In conclusion, Peveroni’s plays El hueco (una tribu urbana) and Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente) lead us to musings on the nature of (inter)national identities and transnational political and economic practices in the twenty-first century, as they overlap in ever more complicated global networks of political unrest, exile, and economic markets. Peveroni demonstrates how complex associations between local, regional, and international environments coalesce to shape Uruguayan cultural and political behaviors on stage and in everyday life. These two original works conjure images of the past as they mingle with the present, demonstrating the co-opting of historical metanarratives on immigration, economics, and politics within the staged spaces of Uruguay and beyond. Unique spaces, both perceived and conceived, within and without, allow Peveroni to weave together text and history, resulting in a new poetics of Uruguayan drama. In Peveroni’s hands, this new poetics exemplifies the shifting nature of “Uruguayan-ness”’ as internal and external forces displace traditional notions of fixed political or cultural identities. The presence and influence of off-spaces such as

Yugoslavia make Uruguay’s space in the world decidedly more complex, despite the fact that its physical, geographical borders have not changed. NOTES 1. Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 14-37. 2. See Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999) and Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland, eds., The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 199. 4. Both of these plays debuted in Montevideo, Uruguay, and have garnered recognition from the public and critics alike. Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente) debuted in the Teatro Puerto Luna in April 2003. It has been published by Ediciones Trenes y Lunas in Montevideo (2003) and by Casa de América in Madrid, in the volume Premio Dramaturgia Innovadora (2003), as part of the contest in which this play was a finalist. Peveroni’s play also received a mention in the MEC Dramaturgy Award (2002), and was nominated in several categories (Best Actor, Best Scenic Design, and Best Text) in the 2003 Florencios in Uruguay, where it received an award for its leading male actor, Ivan Solarich. In the case of El hueco (una tribu urbana), the premiere was held in the Centro Cultural Florencio Sanchez, in Montevideo, in May 2004. The play has been published with fi-

70 SARAH M. MISEMER nancial assistance from the Editorial Santillana and was nominated in several categories in the 2004 Florencios (Best Direction, Best Text, Best Sound Design, Best Set Design, Best Costume Design). 5. Marvin Carlson, Theatre of Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 96. 6. Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 101. Ubersfeld defines the stage sign as “the totality of spatialized signs.” 7. Uruguay’s position within the global market is precarious, as the events of the late twentieth century demonstrate: the increasingly high deficits the dictatorship incurred ultimately led to the instability of the 1980s and 1990s. Was the situation much different in 2004? Although the repressive control of military dictators

ceased with the 1984 democratic elections, the economic outlook is much the same: banking crisis, enormous debt, social and political instability. In 2002, following the resignation of Uruguay’s Economy Minister Alberto Bension in the face of a plummeting currency, bank closures and waves of public panic brought on by the Argentine crisis, the BBC reported: “The Uruguayan economy—which is largely dependent on agriculture, tourism and banking—hasn’t seen any growth since 1999.” “Uruguay’s economy minister resigns,” BBC News, July 23, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2145979.stm. In 2003, the BBC reiterated the same message when Alejandro Atchugarry hurriedly left office. “Uruguay’s economy minister resigns,” BBC News, August 19, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ business/3164969.stm. Though the major fallout had already occurred, at the moment of Atchugarry’s resignation Uruguay still faced a $3 billion loan agreement with the IMF. While partial responsibility for the continued economic crisis might be traced to the devaluation of the Mexican peso in 1985, most agree that the major cause is Argentina’s 2001 default on its debt of more than $140 billion to the IME The debt in Argentina is, of course, also related to the military dictatorships of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, and to the nation’s attempt to escape the inflation sparked by its policy of “dollarization.” Uruguay, along with its fellow Southern Cone countries, faces deep-seated problems stemming from past failures in democracy and modernization. 8. It is unclear in the play whether Su’s subsequent death is the result of physical injuries or psychological abuse caused by her father. 9. A more detailed account of the play’s action can be found in Sarah Misemer, “Still in Crisis? Gabriel Peveroni’s El hueco (una tribu urbana),” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispdnicos 31 (2007): 455-72. 10. Hanna Scolnicov, “Theatre Space, Theatrical Space, and the Theatrical Space Without,” in The Theatrical Space, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 14. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Other plays by Peveroni include Rojo (Red, 1993), which was staged by several high school students in Montevideo and won a municipal prize; Groenlandia (Greenland, date unknown), premiered as a “performance”; Vuelo 1072 (Flight 1072; 2003); the monologue Como un juego (Like a game, 2003), and Luna roja (Red moon), written before El puente. 14. Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, 110. 15. All analyses of the plays discussed are based on the stage directions and descriptions given by Peveroni for the original productions directed by Maria Dodera. 16. Gabriel Peveroni, Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (Montevideo: Trenes y

TRANSGRESSING SPACES 71 Lunas, 2003), 5. Page numbers for all subsequent quotes will be included in the main body of the essay. 17. The dialogue, which exists as memory in 2003, is enacted later in the play by actors representing Bora and the other characters, who in turn represent the many caught up in the civil conflict in Bosnia. The image of the bridge, which is mentioned repeatedly, refers to the bridge constructed over the river Drina for the “tributo de sangre” (blood tribute), in which a number of children between the ages of ten and fifteen were to be converted into Islamic followers during the sixteenth century. 18. For a more detailed discussion of the river, see Sarah Misemer, “Bridging the Gaps in Cultural Memory: Carlos Gorostiza’s El Puente and Gabriel Peveroni’s Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (El puente),” Latin American Theatre Review 39, no.1 (2005): 29-47. 19. While other more canonical texts, such as Rodolfo Usigli’s Corona de sombra (Crown of Shadows) and René Marqués’s Los soles truncos (The Fanlights), or more contemporary works, such as Sabina Berman’s Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman), utilize overlapping historical and “modern” spaces in their stagings, Peveroni’s use of the audience and layered metatheatre lend a unique dimension to the fusion of past and present on the stage. Here, Peveroni’s historical sites are not just local and do not just explain one country’s past, but rather extend to other regions and incorporate global issues. The same could be said of Chilean playwright Marco Antonio de la Parra’s Madrid/Sarajevo, which shares Sarajevo esquina Montevideo’s references to the Yugoslavian war, but lacks its transatlantic perspective on Southern Cone political and economic issues. 20. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001),

Xi.

21. See, for example, the play Gris de ausencia (The grayness of absence, 1981) by Roberto Cossa, or the film Tangos: l’exil de Gardel (Tangos: Gardel’s exile, 1985) by Fernando Solanas, which discuss the themes of diaspora, exile, and return in the River Plate. 22. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 33. 23. Gabriel Peveroni, El hueco (una tribu urbana) (Montevideo: Mado, 2004), 2. Page numbers for all subsequent quotes will be included in the main body of the essay.

24. See, for example, Diana Taylor’s discussion of the group H.I.J.O.S. in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 25. For a discussion of the similarities between this scene and a similar one in Eduardo Pavlovsky’s El Sr. Galindez, see Misemer, “Still in Crisis?” 26. Also on display is the financial situation of the cast and the country of Uruguay. The backdrop of the play is one of urban decay, an environment in crisis. The props are minimalist and industrial: large rusted steel drums, chain-link metal, and exposed architectural elements of the theater itself make up the scenery. While the scenery clearly reflects the poor conditions of the gang, Peveroni explains that these are the same conditions under which the production itself operates. The play was enacted by the group Deteneo, comprised of twelve actors plus seven musicians and rappers of Latejapride. The large number of participants at once added a financial strain to the production and accurately reflected the economic situation of the River Plate in 2004 (and one might argue, throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries): not enough money or jobs to go around. The production, like the country in which it was staged, was economically strained.

The Politics of Tradaptation in the Theater of Sabina Berman Jacqueline Bixler Each translation is a creation, a new text. —Octavio Paz, Posdata

ADAPTATION IS OFTEN VIEWED AS THE EASY WAY OUT, AS A LESS

“creative” means of creating, since it is based on preexisting materials. Regardless of its commercial and/or critical success, an adap-

tation is normally considered minor, secondary, derivative, and inferior to the original. In the movie Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002), the endlessly self-reflecting epitomization of adaptation, frustrated screenwriter Charles laments, “I feel like a walking cliché,” while his twin brother, a wannabee screenwriter, merrily creates an absurd pastiche of classic films that range from Casablanca to Psycho. In her recent book, A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon suggests that while adaptations have often been regarded as “middlebrow, culturally inferior” parasites, our current era might well claim to be the age of adaptation.' She observes, “We postmoderns have clearly inherited this same habit [of adapting from one medium to another], but we have even more new materials at our disposal—not only film, television, radio and the various electronic media, of course, but also theme parks, historical enactments

and virtual reality experiments. The result? Adaptation has run amok.”’?

Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of plays currently being staged in Mexico are not original works, but “tradaptations,” a term used by French Canadian director Robert Lepage to signify the combined processes of translation and adaptation and to “convey the sense of annexing old texts to new cultural contexts.”? Derrick Cameron expands the definition, stating that tradaptation is “a wholesale re-working and re-thinking of the original text, as well as its translation and/or translocation into a new, non-European, aes72

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thetic context.”* The present essay proposes to examine the political implications of tradaptation, using as an example the hit play

eXtras (2003), tradapted by Sabina Berman from Marie Jones’s highly successful Irish play Stones in His Pockets (1999), and focusing in particular on questions of translation and cultural transposition. Translocated from County Kerry, Ireland, to Chiconcuac, Morelos, eXtras shows what happens when a crew of Hollywood filmmakers invades an impoverished town and provides employment as movie extras to locals who have been raised on Hollywood movies and whose dream has always been that of crossing over to the greener pastures that lie north of Mexico. Theories developed by Cameron, Hutcheon, and others on adaptation, translation, and tradaptation bring to the fore the ironic duplicity of Berman’s work as both a commercially successful example of adaptation and a scathing critique of globalization and its deleterious effects on cultural identity. More importantly, Berman verifies both the relevance and the political potential of adaptation by transferring to Mexico both the text and the context of Jones’s play. Her successful translation and transatlantic relocation of the Irish original does not imply that “foreign is better,” but rather confirms the devastating impact of Hollywood in particular and of globalization in general on local cultures.

But what exactly is globalization? In the words of Ulrich Beck, globalization is the blanket term used to refer to “the processes through which sovereign national states are criss-crossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects of power, orientations, identities and networks.’’® This is just one of many definitions, for the truth is that globalization 1s a source of constant debate, in which detractors and supporters respectively emphasize its disjunctive and integrative effects. The majority of intellectuals and artists, like Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, see it as a thinly veiled means of spreading American military, economic, political, and cultural domination.’ Given Mexico’s geographic proximity to the US and the immediate impact of the Free Trade Agreement signed in 1994, most Mexican intellectuals view the term globalization as a euphemism for Americanization. According to Mike Featherstone, Americanization has long been a popular, albeit oversimplified, perspective on the process of globalization: “Here a global culture was seen as being formed through the economic and political domination of the United States which thrust its hegemonic culture into all parts of the world. From this perspective the American way of life with its rapacious individualism and confident belief in progress, whether manifest in Hollywood film characters such as

74 JACQUELINE BIXLER Donald Duck, Superman and Rambo or embodied in the lives of stars such as John Wayne, was regarded as a corrosive homogenizing force, as a threat to the integrity of all particularities.”*® While globalization is clearly not limited to the imposition of the Ameri-

can way of life, it is undeniable that signs of Americanization abound in Mexico, the most egregious of which is the huge WalMart built in 2004 within view of the majestic Toltec pyramids to the Sun and the Moon. Other international ventures in Mexico (e.g., Melia, Benneton, Blockbuster, Kentucky Fried Chicken) pale in comparison to Wal-Mart, which has built or taken over nearly eight hundred supermarkets, Supercenters, Sam’s Clubs, restaurants (including VIPS), and department stores since entering the Mexican market in 1991. In 2005 alone, Wal-Mart opened ninety-three new outlets in Mexico. eXtras stages the pernicious spread of American cultural and economic influence in numerous ways, among them the Americanized Spanish spoken by the two lead characters, the young Cutberto’s insistence that they call him “Brad Pit” (sic), and the fact that one of them, Charlie, signed on as a film extra when Blockbuster moved to town and put his little video rental shop out of business. In a personal statement, Berman makes no attempt to disguise her contempt for the steady invasion of American culture and consumer goods: “It sounds really nice when we say that globalization means a world market governed only by the laws of free trade. In practice, however, from the point of view of Latin American filmmakers or dramatists, and given the huge economic imbalances between our countries and the ‘first world,’ globalization is a euphemism and a facade for ruthless imperialism.” !° Bruno Bichir, one of the actors who play the two extras in Berman’s tradaptation, speaks for himself and for all the “extras” of the world when he states: “Within the text there are parallel ideas that move me and matter greatly to me. The idea of globalization bothers me given recent international events. I find it intolerable that the United States should decide what the world is like and what Mexicans are like.”!! Significantly, the play’s premiere in Mexico City coincided with the onset of the US invasion of Iraq and the subsequent, short-lived Mexican boycott of American consumer goods. Ironically, Berman seems to buy into this process of cultural globalization when, rather than write an original play, she decides to tradapt a European play that has been a commercial hit in London, Broadway, and other first-world locations. Nonetheless, by tradapting the play to a specifically Mexican context, she ultimately expresses a scathing critique of globalization a la mexicana. In her study of eXtras and “‘la

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ansiedad de la globalizacion” (the fear of globalization), Laurietz Seda explains that “Berman creates a multi-layered text in which, on the one hand, she places herself among the processes of globalization by translating and adapting an Irish play to Mexican reality. On the other hand, she questions these same processes by presenting their negative effects as a form of American cultural imperialism.” !? As theorist Lawrence Venuti notes, tradaptation inevitably

contains an inherently political agenda, wherein “the domestic terms of the inscription become the focus of rewriting in the translation.”’'> Accordingly, Berman underscores the translatability of the original text and its message with a translation/adaptation that is thoroughly Mexican and at the same time undeniably global. To adapt is to adjust, to alter, to change something to suit different conditions or a different purpose. Hutcheon defines adaptation as the following: e An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works.

e A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging. e An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work.'4

Obviously, this third aspect is limited to the adapter if the audience is not familiar with the adapted text. Hutcheon uses the term knowing audience to refer to the receiver who experiences the work as adaptation, aS opposed to those readers/spectators unfamiliar with the adapted text.'° While all publicity, from posters to theater program, openly advertised eXtras as an adaptation of Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets, it 1s safe to say that very few of the spectators would have had access to the text and/or language of the Irish original. As Hutcheon explains, those who are not familiar with the original experience the work “without the palimpsestic doubleness that comes with knowing. From one perspective, this is a loss. From another, it is simply experiencing the work for itself, and all agree that even adaptations must stand on their own.’’'® In the case of eXtras, even those unfamiliar with Stones in His Pockets cannot fail to recognize and respond to this tragic story of Hollywood, cultural domination, economic exploitation, and dashed dreams. Furthermore, as will be discussed in this essay, beyond its dual status as process and product, adaptation presents itself on multiple levels as a theme. In sum, the play can and does stand on its own, meaning it is equally

enjoyable and relevant to the “knowing” spectator as it is to the spectator unfamiliar with the original text or performance.

Berman’s seemingly sudden interest in tradaptations was met

76 JACQUELINE BIXLER with a certain amount of consternation from her critics and audience, especially those familiar with the original works that she has created since the late seventies. With regard to eXtras, Mexican theater critic Olga Harmony notes, “Once again voices are heard criticizing Sabina for making commercial theatre, which it undoubtedly is, but very well done and within a broad context.” !’ After the tremendous critical and commercial success of original works like Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman, 1992) and Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud

(Happy new century, Doctor Freud, 2000), why would Berman need to do an adaptation? Was she selling out for a larger audience’?

A bigger theater? Commercial gain? If any of these reasons were

true, it would hardly be surprising. In a recent issue of Mexico City’s weekly entertainment guide, Tiempo libre (Free time), more than half of the capital’s theatrical offerings were indeed adaptations. Canonical Spaniards such as Calderon de la Barca and Garcia Lorca hogged the stage along with Brecht, Strindberg, Diirrenmatt,

and others. The big winner, however, was Shakespeare, whose works were being staged in no less than seven venues. Indeed, virtually all of the biggest (1.e., most heavily funded) productions in Mexico City during the summer of 2005 were translations, if not tradaptations of the English Bard. Yet rather than lament the notable

lack of Mexican works, theater critics like Bruno Bert applaud these foreign classics: “Perhaps we could think that when any society is suffering too much pain in its daily reality, we tend to view it and reinterpret it through those works that we call ‘classics.’’’!® Granted, Shakespeare is an indisputable member of the canon precisely because his works continue to transcend temporal as well as geographic borders, but what does all this generously funded staging of Shakespeare have to say about the current state of Mexican theater, about audience preferences, or about originality and theater in general during this age of globalization? While one could easily dismiss Bert’s statement as yet another example of malinchismo, a term commonly used in Mexico to condemn the preference for foreign imports over local products, Linda Hutcheon suggests that adaptation is both ubiquitous and purposeful. She notes, for example, that Carmen and the famous tale of the seductive gypsy have been

adapted at least seventy-seven times to the silver screen, which leads her to the conclusion that “there must be something particularly appealing about adaptations as adaptations.” '? Among the reasons that she proposes are the pleasure that comes from the recognition of stories, the intellectual stimulation provided by the intertextual palimpsest, and the possible discovery of new political

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relevance within a familiar context. In the case of eXtras, | would propose that its commercial and critical success is due not to the fact that it is a foreign import, but rather to Berman’s clever tradaptation of Marie Jones’s tragicomic critique of globalization and to the combination of brilliant directing, acting, lighting, and marketing.

As a prelude to the discussion of eXtras, it is important to note that this is not the first time that Berman has found inspiration beyond the borders of Mexico. In earlier plays such as Rompecabezas (Puzzle, 1981) and Herejia (Heresy, 1983), she offers dramatic reworkings of the ways in which European history has played out on Mexican soil in such events as the assassination of Trotsky and the

Inquisition conducted by greedy colonial authorities.”° Later, in Moliére (1998), Berman recreates and dramatizes the life and times of Moliere to underscore the translatability of the comedy/tragedy dichotomy, the politics of the theater world, and certain behavioral vices such as envy and ire.*! Two years later, in Feliz nuevo siglo,

Doktor Freud, she cleverly uses the personal history and cultural legacy of Sigmund Freud to show how little has changed during the

past century in terms of cultural and sexual politics. Feliz nuevo siglo was actually inspired by her own reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (Hands Around, 1900), a play she titled 65 contratos

para hacer el amor (65 contracts for lovemaking). This last piece, never staged or published, has since been incorporated into a playin-progress tentatively titled Seleccion natural (Survival of the fittest), wherein she applies Darwinian theory in an attempt to explain how humans select and adapt to their mates. In sum, over the course of the past twenty-five years or so, one can perceive a certain dramatic evolution in Berman’s theater from original works inspired by Mexico’s national history to tradaptations of texts from places as remote as Austria and Australia. Berman’s initial experimentation with non-Mexican texts and contexts in Moliére and Feliz nuevo siglo, doktor Freud soon led to flat-out adaptation in eXtras (2002) and Marionetas del pene

(Puppetry of the penis, 2004), at which point her spectators— particularly those who only wanted to see Mexican works—began to entertain the possibility that Mexicans could do great things with non-Mexican texts.?* Of particular interest is the ease and success with which texts translate and translocate from one cultural/historical/political context to another. Indeed, based on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Hutcheon notes that an adaptation, as a traveling story, “can be thought of in terms of cultural selection,” meaning that only the best survive the journey.”* This cultural journey

78 JACQUELINE BIXLER of ideas and concepts is succinctly captured by Edward Said in his traveling theory: First, there 1s a point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse. Second, there is a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence. Third, there 1s a set of conditions—call them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances—which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be. Fourth, the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea 1s to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place.”

Although we are talking here of memes (units of cultural transmission) rather than genes, there is no doubt that some stories do adapt better than others to a new cultural environment. Like the orchids in the novel The Orchid Thief—the adaptation of which provides the gist of the movie Adaptation—stories undergo a process of mutation, hybridization, and adaptation that allows them to survive and thrive in the foreign culture. A collection of essays, Moving Target: Theatre Translation and Cultural Relocation, edited by Carole Upton, offers theoretical perspectives from diverse countries and ethnicities on translation, adaptation, and tradaptation.*? The title itself captures the mobile, elusive, and slippery nature of translated works. Plays are not normally translated and/or adapted simply because they are considered good plays, but rather because they travel well in the sense that their target audience is likely to relate to the meaning as well as the message of the original. Hutcheon suggests that “adapters must have their own personal reasons for deciding first to do an adaptation. ... They not only interpret that work but in so doing they also take a position on it.”?¢ Therefore, rather than view adaptations as the quick route to commercial gain or as cheap and easy sell-outs to foreign culture and the forces of globalization, Upton, Hutcheon, and others encourage us to reevaluate adaptations as a way of communicating across cultures, of celebrating the universal nature of certain stories, and of engaging in a broader social, cultural, and political critique. The field of cultural studies, with its attempt to erase geographical borders as well as other forms of markers—including genre, gender, and ethnicity—has given rise to a number of trans terms. The prefix trans, derived from Latin to mean “across,” “beyond,”

POLITICS OF TRADAPTATION IN THE THEATER OF SABINA BERMAN 79

and “through,” now headlines terms such as transgender and transgenre. In terms of translation, the original Latin word translatio refers significantly to both “metaphor” and “translation,” while the English term translation means “physical transference” as well as “equivalence of linguistic structures.”’’ Ironically, in Spanish, the famous false cognate traslacion (rather than traduccion) signifies “movement” and “metaphor,” which, when combined, accurately describe Berman’s desire to transfer the work to Mexico and to a Mexican context and at the same time retain the governing metaphor of the adapted text. Accordingly, she underscores the translat-

ability of both the original text and its ideology by creating a faithful yet distinctly Mexican “translation.” While Hutcheon notes

that, as a result of resetting and recontextualizing, “the meaning and impact of stories can change radically,” the political impact of eXtras lies precisely in the fact that the story and metaphors of exploitation, postcolonialism, and cultural appropriation play as well in Ireland and in English as they do in Mexico and in Spanish.7®

The concept of metaphor is particularly relevant in the study of translation and tradaptation, for it is in the moving space of metaphor where language and ideology most commonly collude. Theorist Ruth Evans underscores “the value of current metaphorical uses of translation .. . as they concern relations of power.” ’? In Gender in Translation, Sherry Simon proposes a more specific use of translation as metaphor to convey “the increasing internationalization of cultural production and. . . the fate of those who struggle between two languages.”°° This line of thought draws our attention to the metaphorical might of eXtras in both linguistic and geopolitical terms, as Berman translates and transfers to the Mexican stage and to a Mexican audience the overarching metaphor of cultural appropriation. As Rustom Bharucha laments, “We are living today with the most acute disequilibrium of cultures.’’*! Using adaptation in an ironic way, Berman affirms not only this cultural disequilibrium, but also the political, social, and economic commonalities that exist between two countries seemingly so diverse as Mexico and Ireland and, by extension, all countries experiencing the process of globalization.

eXtras, like the Irish original Stones in His Pockets, is short on paper, long on stage, and incredibly difficult to summarize.** Both Berman and Jones employ just two actors to play two on-stage extras, who in turn play fourteen roles that include other film extras, the Hollywood director, his assistant directors, the pampered Hollywood starlet and her neurotic male lead, the townspeople, the priest, local farmers, and even the cows that were once the bread and but-

SO JACQUELINE BIXLER ter of the regional economy. A side-by-side comparison of the two texts shows that Berman is remarkably faithful to the language, the structure, and the ideological thrust of the adapted text. The fertile yet poor valley of County Kerry finds its equivalent in Chiconcuac,

Morelos, a state not far from the Mexican capital and the cradle of zapatismo; Jake and Charlie become José and Charlie; the pub becomes la cantina; the starlet Caroline Giovanni is now Mexican American Karina Santos; gin translates to cerveza; egg and onion sandwiches turn into tacos al pastor; and Mickey Riordan, the last surviving extra from The Quiet Man is now Don Macario, the last surviving extra from ;Viva, Zapata!*> The tradaptation of Stones in

His Pockets, however, involves much more than a transatlantic crossing from Ireland to Mexico, including a completely different title, the theatrical translation from page to stage, and the continuous performative adaptation that took place as Sabina and her staff observed night after night the audience’s reaction to the performance.**

Like Stones, eXtras shows what happens to an impoverished, rural area when Hollywood literally comes to town. Everything moves along according to the usual filming routine until a young extra and would-be Hollywood actor, Cutberto (a.k.a. El Brad Pit), is thrown out of the local cantina and out of the movie, whereupon he goes to the lake, fills his pockets with stones and drowns himself. In the second and final act, and in the wake of this real-life tragedy, the local extras, grieving and unable to play their assigned role as euphoric peons in the final celebratory scene of the movie, unite in an act, albeit symbolic, of cultural resistance by literally refusing to “go on with the show.” eXtras 1S, on a most basic level, a translation from English to Spanish and Spanglish, but more importantly, it is an adaptation of a play from one culture to another, a form of adaptation that normally involves one or more of the following: a change of language, a change of place, or a change of time period. More importantly, as Hutcheon notes, “Almost always, there is an accompanying shift in the political valence from the adapted text to the ‘transculturated’ adaptation. Context conditions meaning.” *° The political agenda of Berman’s tradaption can best be discerned through the careful analysis of those aspects of the original that are omitted, those aspects that get translated word-for-word, and those that are tradapted to another politicocultural context. As Simon asserts, “Translators are necessarily involved in a politics of transmission.’ °° Transmission in turn involves choices, choices that reflect the translator’s ideological agenda. The most basic choices include: (1) literal, word-

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for-word translation; (2) cultural transposition, which is a nonliteral “attempt to transfer the contents of the source text into the context of the target culture”; (3) the choice not to translate but to leave as

is; and 4) deletion, addition, or any other conscious change that might be made to the original text.°’ An initially baffling example of literal translation is Berman’s de-

cision to translate almost verbatim the continuous reference to

cows, which are not exactly an icon of Mexican culture. Yet, despite the seeming nontranslatability of these beasts, both adapted text and adaptation use cows as a metaphor for passive consumption and the “herd effect” of globalized culture, a culture in which, according to those who consider globalization as a process of homogenization,

everyone aspires to consume the same. As Schechner points out, “Resistance is not easy, especially when giving in 1s a way of earning necessary hard currencies such as American dollars or Japanese yen.” > In a flashback scene, eight-year-old Cutberto expresses his

dream to have the best herd of cows in the valley of Morelos, a dream later cut short by his father’s decision to sell their land to Japanese investors. In another flashback, Cutberto reads aloud a school essay in which he inadvertently predicts his own fate as a “cow”: “Las vacas son un negocio porque mucha gente vive de ellas y no dan molestias mientras uno les da de comer. .. . Si yo fuera una vaca me sentiria muy util’%? (Cows are the business because many people live off cows and they give you no bother as long as you feed them and milk them. . . . If I were a cow I would feel very useful).*° Up until their final refusal to “act” happy, the film extras are basically a bunch of placid locals who seem content as long as they have food and water. Berman takes full advantage of this same bovine metaphor to satirize and ironize the negative impact of Hollywood/Americanization/globalization on Mexico’s rural reality. For example, the young Cutberto’s concept of usefulness later plays out on the Hollywood set, when the extras are ordered to perform the role of dispossessed farmers and shovel cow manure while they await, both on and off the set, the return of their land. In a further example of Berman’s tradaptation of Jones’s mordant irony, the extras are criticized for their inability to relate to their assigned role as dispossessed campesinos: “Pueblo. Cara de desposeidos, por favor. Desposeidos, 0 sea sin posesiones, 0 sea

desposeido”’*! (Pueblo. Faces of the dispossessed, please. Dispossessed, that is, without possessions, that is, poor).*? The meta-

phorical merging of cows and human extras is again implicit in young Cutberto’s prediction that when the new landowners finish replacing all the farm hands with machines, even the cows will have

82 JACQUELINE BIXLER to leave for America. Just as cows follow one another in search of greener pastures, millions of Mexicans have crossed the border, as the Irish have crossed the Atlantic, in search of the promised land, only to find that the so-called Quiet Valley is merely an illusion, a part of the big silver screen. Incidentally, in both plays, the Hollywood crew is filming a movie titled The Quiet Valley, which in the original play was understood to be a satirical reference to the Hollywood flop, Far and Away, filmed in Ireland and starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. While the Mexican audience most likely would

not make the connection between these two movies, any spectator with a basic knowledge of Mexican history would catch the irony involved in the translocation of this quiet valley to Morelos, the birthplace of Emiliano Zapata and the cradle of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, where the extras are now being asked to play the role of dispossessed farmers in this peaceful, pastoral setting, on land that formerly belonged to their ancestors. Olga Harmony succintly connects cows, economics, and globalization when she suggests that Berman’s tradaptation “can be a metaphor for the loss of a peaceful world, represented by the cows (which graze our fields in danger since the onset of the North American Free Trade Agreement), in the throes of globalization, and the desire to conserve this world as expressed in the impossible script conceived by the two extras at the end of the play.” *3 Indeed, the play closes with a scene in which Charlie and José take on the role of cows, using red bandannas to swish their tails while they ruminate.

Charlie and José’s final, joyful conception of a movie in which the cows and current extras will be the protagonists and the Hollywood actors will serve as the extras is not, however, the only expression of cultural resistance. Following the wake for Cutberto, a drunk, disorderly, and grieving Don Macario walks off the set and

out of the movie before the directors can throw him out, but not

before he reminds them that they can take away everything but his cultural ancestry: “Mura la tierra que estas pisando, escuincle, el

duefio de esa tierra era mi abuelo y antes mi bisabuelo principe nahua y tu me estas ordenando a mi un Pérez y Pérez que me saque de mi tierra.” ** In the original text, Mickey Riordan says, “You see

this ground you are standing on ya jumped up gobshite, this belonged to my Grandfather, and you are telling me a Riordan to get off my land,’’*° a passage that underscores the translatability of not only the words but more importantly the concept of cultural identity and appropriation. Even more striking is the word-for-word transla-

tion of a friend’s response to the suicide: “This could happen to any kid, any rural kid” / “Esto podria pasarle a cualquier chavo, a

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cualquier chavo rural.’’*° Needless to say, this sentence transcends both Ireland and Mexico and translates to any poor, rural culture, as could the shattered dreams of Hollywood that led to Sean/Cutberto’s suicide. While most of the translation is remarkably faithful, in the tradaptation, where the word meets the physical, visual performance, there are places where Berman has deviated significantly from the

original and where, not surprisingly, her own political agenda, meaning her own cynical and ironic perspective on cultural and economic globalization, becomes more transparent. Hutcheon bor-

rows from Patrice Pavis’s theory on intercultural performance when she explains that “adapting across cultures is not simply a matter of translating words. For audiences experiencing an adaptation in the showing or interacting modes of engagement, cultural and social meaning has to be conveyed and adapted to a new environment through what Patrice Pavis calls the ‘language-body.’’’*’ For instance, instead of the long row of shoes that the two Irish actors used to adopt new roles, Berman decided to use paliacates, simple red scarves that move quickly from head to hand to neck to waist as the two onstage actors become women, men, Mexicans, gringos, directors, extras and finally cows.*® Nonetheless, given the geographical, political, and economic setting of the play, one could

easily associate the red bandanna with a general resistance epitomized by Mexico’s zapatista rebels, who on the first of January, 1994, the day on which the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, launched a massive rebellion that subsequently became a metaphor for native resistance to a neoliberal economy con-

trolled by the US. Not surprisingly, the red bandanna, which serves—like the black, knit face mask (pasamontafas) worn by Subcomandante Marcos—as a symbol of cultural and economic resistance, is featured prominently both in the performance and in the publicity. In discussing the presentation and reception of adaptation, Hutcheon singles out hype, “advertising, press coverage and reviews. The celebrity status of the director or stars is also an important element of its reception context.”*? There is no question that Berman holds celebrity status, not only as a writer of original texts, but also

as an adapter, a director, and a producer. Ironically, the extras in Berman’s tradaptation are played by the three Bichir brothers, all well-known stage and screen actors, with the further ironic twist that one of them is always on hand as an off-stage extra, a problem that was resolved when they decided to flip a coin to see which two brothers would perform on any given day.*° Some spectators even

84 JACQUELINE BIXLER returned to the theater for a subsequent performance just to see a different combination of actors. As Harmony explains, part of Berman’s continued success is based on her business acumen and her uncanny ability to match actors to roles.°! On a stage virtually devoid of objects and lit with large colored panels designed by Phillipe Armand, Berman directs her actors in a performance that relies strictly on the essence of theater: lights and acting. As part of her publicity campaign, Berman changed the original title, which she claimed meant nothing to her.°? While the title of a play may seem like a minor detail, the decision to change Stones in His Pockets to eXtras was nothing short of brilliant. Both the publicity poster plastered throughout Mexico City and the program dis-

tributed in the theater catch the eye and tease the mind with their graphic configuration of the title (all lower case except for a large, red, capital X) and with the multiple meanings of the word extras. In Spanish, as in English, extra has many connotations, most of which are negative, if not derogatory. Even as actors, extras are de-

nied recognition. To be an extra, on or off stage, is to be at once anonymous and superfluous. An extra is a faceless, replaceable member of the masses. An extra is what is left over when the process, in this case the filming, is complete. The term extras easily translates beyond the aspiring locals to the whole town of Chiconcuac, which is one of thousands of extra, marginal, and easily forgotten or ignored towns of rural Mexico. El Brad and the others are not only feeling left out of the movie, but left out of life in general. Humans are, like cows, a commodity, in this case part of a financial transaction with Hollywood and, by extension, US economy and culture. The lower-case e and upper-case X further diminish the status of the referents of the title, denying them a proper name and at the same time underscoring their anonymity. Una persona X is a term often used in Spanish to mean “So-and-So” or “John Doe,” while the X, commonly used as a signature by the illiterate, further precludes individuality. In sum, Berman’s magnified X connotes the anonymous, the nullified, the X’ed-out, which is an accurate description of the perception that many rural Mexicans have of themselves vis-a-vis the global economy as well as their own national government and its neoliberal politics.°> Her use of the title, with its large, red X, both complements and expands Jones’s critique of

globalization as a process that, in the opinion of its detractors, strives to make everyone the same, and thereby equally anonymous.

eXtras 18 a mise en abyme of texts and extratexts. Even those spectators who are not part of what Hutcheon terms the “knowing audience,” are exposed throughout the performance to various lay-

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ers of adaptation. Adaptation occurs not only in the staging of the translated text, but also within the play itself, as the Hollywood directors produce the usual distorted, made-for-Hollywood version of local culture. Like Marie Jones before her, Berman takes full advantage of the opportunity to lambast the “hollywoodization” of cul-

tural products pertaining to other countries and ethnicities.

Hutcheon observes that “for Hollywood, transculturating usually means Americanizing a work,”°* while David Edelstein openly states his disdain for Hollywood adaptations: “[Hollywood has] a coarsening effect on the foreign properties it remakes. . . . In this area, as in few others, studios live up to their reputation as titanic forces of philistinism.”°> Historical fact and cultural accuracy are thrown to the wind in the interest of producing a movie that will sell to US audiences. For example, after the star Karina butchers her line, “Ustede han sufrido mucho queridos amigous miosssss,” José comments, “No manches. Si me dices que hablaba en ruso me lo creo,” to which Charlie responds, “Asi hablan los mexicanos en las pelis ... No problema: Trafficc . . . Es espafiol globalizado.”’*° Indeed, bad translation and this “espafiol globalizado” provide con-

stant humor as the townspeople and Hollywood crew struggle to communicate with one another despite differences in language and/ or social register. In linguistic terms, Berman’s adaptation of Stones

is not only more humorous, but also considerably more complex than the adapted text. To convey the distinct levels of power and exploitation, for example, Berman includes various levels of social register in Spanish, including the simple, colloquial Spanish spoken by the townspeople of Chiconcuac, the Spanglish spoken by those who have crossed the border or watched too many Hollywood mov-

ies; the lisping Castillian Spanish spoken by assistant director Simon, and the comically incorrect and mispronounced Spanish of the Hollywood starlet. At one point, Charlie sits among the spectators and makes them aware of their own status as extras and members of the same herd, particularly when he turns to the audience

and translates the Hollywood director’s expletive “fucked” as “chingados.” Further peeling away the layers of translation and adaptation, we

see the two main extras unsuccessfully pitching Charlie’s film script, which is a pastiche of every bad movie ever made, or what José describes as “la mayor cantidad de mamadas que he leido en mi existencia.” (Jake. It is the biggest load of oul bollicks I have ever read in my life.)°’ When they fail to peddle the idea to the Hollywood director, Charlie and José adapt the script and in the process perform a final, carnivalesque act of cultural resistance. In this new

86 JACQUELINE BIXLER version, titled... eXtras, the young suicide, El Brad Pit, will be the protagonist, surrounded by huge cows, while the Hollywood actors will serve as extras. Finally, the continuing evolution of the “play” adds irony to irony and layer to layer. Stones in His Pockets, a play about Hollywood’s translation, or appropriation, of the foreign, is reportedly now being made into a movie. Meanwhile, Berman’s eXtras has been translocated to southern California and translated into Latino Spanglish.°® All of this leaves us with the question as to where these translations and adaptations of adaptations will stop?

The answer seems to be “never.” Since its premiere in 1999, Stones in His Pockets has been performed in some twenty countries and sixteen languages, a Statistic that further corroborates the play’s translatability and ability to adapt to foreign environments. As Venuti explains, “Because translation traffics in the foreign, in the in-

troduction of linguistic and cultural differences, it is equally capable of crossing or reinforcing the boundaries between domestic audiences and the hierarchies in which they are positioned.”°? In other words, eXtras, like the source text, underscores through the act of tradaptation, both on and off stage, the translatability of the loss or blatant sell-out of local cultures to the forces of globalization. eXtras problematizes the already problematic concept of globalization, both within the text itself and as a work that tradapts and ironically capitalizes on a foreign text that traffics in the theme of globalization. At the same time, while seeming to buy into foreign goods, Berman delivers a powerful political punch by foregrounding two local extras, who, like the cows around them and—to extend the metaphor—like many of the spectators, eat and ruminate while coveting the greener pastures that lie on the other side of the fence/border/ocean. In her study on the art of adaptation, Hutcheon concludes that adaptations have the potential to “destabilize both

formal and cultural identity and thereby shift power relations. Could that subversive potential also be part of the appeal of adapting for adapters and audiences alike?’’°° Given Sabina Berman’s status and popularity as one of Mexico’s most artistically subversive and politically committed dramatists, this question would in-

deed seem to explain at least part of her recent interest in and success with adaptations. In short, a translation, adaptation, or tradaptation 1s not necessarily a pastiche of clichés, a recycled piece of junk, or even a malinchista-type sellout to the foreign market. Viewed within the larger

scheme of things, meaning our global culture, works like eXtras have the capacity to transcend, translocate, and translate, while forcing the audience to acknowledge that a cow is a cow Is a cow,

POLITICS OF TRADAPTATION IN THE THEATER OF SABINA BERMAN 87

and that a tradaptation can be just as political and at the same time just as Mexican as the nondomestic original.

NOTES

1. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), 2. 2. Ibid., xi. 3. Quoted in Derrick Cameron, “Tradaptation: Cultural Exchange and Black British Theatre,” in Moving Target. Theatre Translation and Cultural Relocation, ed. Carole-Anne Upton (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2000), 17. 4. Ibid, 17. There is some debate concerning the source of this term. According to Georges Bastin, the term tradaptation was coined by Quebec poet and translator Michel Garneau to express the close relationship between translation and adaptation. See Georges L. Bastin, “Adaptation,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (New York: Routledge, 1998), 9. 5. Not surprisingly, Stones in His Pockets has traveled well, receiving rave reviews not only on Broadway and in other parts of the US, but also in Canada, Australia, Iceland, Japan, Israel, Poland, and several other European countries. 6. Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000), 11. 7. Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, “The New Global Culture,” TDR: The Drama Review 45, no. 1 (2001): 7-30. 8. Mike Featherstone, “Global and Local Cultures,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Culture, Global Change, ed. J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertston and L. Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993), 170. 9. Knight Ridder, ““Wal-Mexico: Wal-Mart’s Biggest Success,” News and

Press on-line, Jan. 25, 2006, http://www.laborrights.org/press/Wal-Mart/ mexico_knightridder_012506.htm. 10. Sabina Berman, “El eufemismo de la globalizacion,” in Informe Mundial

sobre la Cultura 2000-2001: Diversidad cultural, conflicto y pluralismo, http:// www .crim.unam.mx/cultura/informe/informe%20mund2/eufemis.htm. I am indebted to Laurietz Seda for this source. “La ansiedad de la globalizacion: eXtras de Sabina Berman” (paper presented at the meeting of the Modern Languages Association, Philadelphia, December 2004).

11. Myrra Yglesias, “El trabajo de extra es digno y masoquista: Sabina Berman,” La Jornada on-line (February 21, 2003), http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ 2003/02/21/O8anlesp .php?origen = espectaculos.html. 12. Seda, “La ansiedad.”’ 13. Lawrence Venuti, “Translation, Community, Utopia,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 469. 14. Hutcheon, Theory, 8.

15. I actually experienced the adapted text and adaptation in reverse order, meaning that I saw the performance of eXtras before I read Jones’s dramatic script. Hutcheon regards this reverse order, however, as positive and postmodern in the sense that it challenges “the authority of any notion of priority. Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically” (Theory, xiii). In other words, even if we read the source text after seeing or reading the adaptation(s), we will still experience a constant “oscillation” between the works (ibid., xv). 16. Hutcheon, Theory, 127.

17. Olga Harmony, “Sutilezas y discrepancias,” in Sediciosas seducciones:

88 JACQUELINE BIXLER Sexo, poder y palabras en el teatro de Sabina Berman, ed. Jacqueline E. Bixler (Mexico City: Escenologia, 2004), 110.

18. Bruno Bert, “Si gustas de Shakespeare ... ,” Tiempo Libre 25, no. 1312 (June 30—July 6, 2005): 21. 19. Hutcheon, Theory, 4.

20. For a detailed discussion of Berman’s postmodern (re)working of particular topics of Mexican history, see my essay “The Postmodernization of History in the Theatre of Sabina Berman,” Latin American Theatre Review 30, no. 2 (1997): 45— 60. Translations of Rompecabezas and Herejia can be found in Adam Versenyi, The Theatre of Sabina Berman. The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays (Carbon-

dale: Southern Hlinois University Press, 2003). This collection also includes Suplicio del placer (The Agony of Ecstasy) and Bill (Yankee). 21. In November 2005, at a symposium held at Miami University of Ohio, Berman explained that her play Moliére “translated” so well to Spanish and to Latin America that the government of Fidel Castro banned the planned performance of the work. The official reason was a problem with fire codes, though the dramatist suspects that the portrayal of Louis XIV and his cultural politics had the potential to be understood as a “translation” of Castro himself. 22. Berman’s interest in tradaptation actually dates back even further, to two children’s plays based on works by German Michael Ende: Ladrones del tiempo (Theives of time, based on Ende’s 1973 novel Momo), first staged in 1991 and more recently in 2005, and El drbol de humo (The tree of smoke, 1993). The more recent Marionetas del pene is an adaptation of Australian Simon Worley’s play Puppetry of the Penis, which has been adapted in many countries besides Mexico, where it premiered in 2004 under the direction of Carlos Pascual. While Sabina did not direct Marionetas, she was a producer of the play and closely observed the process of tradaptation. Furthermore, once she signed the newspaper ad for auditions for the male leads, her name was inextricably linked with the production, which not only presented the penis as a toy, but also presented it frankly, openly, and even enlarged on a video screen for those not in the front row. Of late, Berman has become involved in adaptations of novels as well as plays to the silver screen.

In addition to her own original film script, Backyard, she is preparing a movie adaptation of Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love. 23. Hutcheon, Theory, 167. 24. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226-27. 25. See note 3. 26. Hutcheon, Theory, 92. 27. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, MA.: MerriamWebster, 1986), s.v. “trans” and “translation.” 28. Hutcheon, Theory, xvi. 29. Ruth Evans, “Metaphor of Translation,” in Upton, ed., Moving Target, 150. 30. Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation (New York: Routledge, 1996), 134. 31. Rustom Bharucha, “Negotiating the ‘River’: Intercultural Interactions and Interventions,” TDR: The Drama Review 41, no. 3 (1997): 32-33. 32. For a more thorough discussion of the many texts and extra-texts imbedded in this work and its staging, see Jacqueline E. Bixler, “Performing Culture(s): Ex-

tras and Extra-Texts in Sabina Berman’s eXtras,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 429-44, 33. These are the Mexican equivalents that Sabina Berman uses in her unpublished script of eXtras.

POLITICS OF TRADAPTATION IN THE THEATER OF SABINA BERMAN 89

34. Anyone who has worked with the theater of Sabina Berman knows that her plays are forever works-in-progress (see my introduction to Bixler, ed., Sediciosas seducciones). A consummate perfectionist, Berman continually revises her texts both on stage and in published form. In the case of eXtras, she continually adapted her own adaptation. She welcomed suggestions not only from her actors, but also from her production assistant, Héctor Chavez, who sat through each performance

and observed the audience’s response, with the result that the play script has changed considerably since eXtras first premiered in February 2003. The play has changed venues as well. After 230 shows in the Teatro Julio Castillo, the piece was restaged in the enormous 600-plus seat Teatro de las Artes of the Centro Nacional de las Artes. Most recently, the play was performed at the Teatro Julio Castillo on June 4, 2006, as part of the Puerta de las Américas festival held in Mexico City. 35. Hutcheon, Theory, 145. Although Hutcheon uses the term transculturation various times throughout her study on adaptation, she does not discuss the source of this popular term. Diana Taylor notes that ““Transculturation,’ a term denoting the transformation of cultural material as it passes from one society to another, is a term coined by Fernando Ortiz (Cuba) in 1940 [to describe] a three-part process in the acquisition of foreign cultural material which results in the loss of the autochthonous culture but then yields a new original.” Theatre of Crisis. Drama and Politics in Latin America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 15—16. 36. Simon, Gender, viii. 37. Sandor Hervey, Ian Higgins and Louise M. Haywood, eds., Thinking Spanish Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 20.

38. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies. An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 230. 39. Sabina Berman, eXtras (unpub. ms.), 37. 40. Marie Jones, Stones in His Pockets (New York: Applause, 2001), 65—66. 41. Berman, eXtras, 8.

42. These lines do not appear in the original play by Marie Jones, but rather come from an unpublished English translation of eXtras prepared by Kirsten F, Nigro, with the assistance of Cherrie Moraga (p.10). Berman’s addition of these short and simple lines to her tradaptation merely underscores the irony implicit in the fact that the Mexican “extras” do not need to pretend to be “dispossessed,” having lost their native lands to foreigners ranging from the Spanish conquerors to US and Japanese investors. 43. Olga Harmony, “Extras,” La Jornada Virtu@I (February 13, 2003), www jornada .unam.mx/2003/02/13/04aa1cul.php?origen = opinion. html 44. Berman, eXtras, 45—46. 45. Jones, Stones, 85. 46. Jones, Stones, 49; Berman, eXtras, 91. 47. Hutcheon, Theory, 149. cf. Patrice Pavis, “Problems of Translations for the Stage: Interculturalism and Post-modern Theatre,” in The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, ed. Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 48. Unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to see a performance of the Irish text. It is significant, however, that Berman based her tradaptation strictly on the published script of Jones’s play. Indeed, her acquaintance with the performance was limited to the fact that she knew that shoes had been used to indicate changes of role. Online reviews of Stones indicate that the performance was likewise a tour de force that highlighted and reconfirmed the raw, simple power of extraordinary acting.

90 JACQUELINE BIXLER 49. Hutcheon, Theory, 143. 50. The story behind the adaptation of Stones is quite simple. Berman heard about the play, read the published script, found the perfect expression of her own preoccupation with globalization, and thought: “Shoot, why couldn’t I have written that play?” When she tried to purchase the rights to adapt and stage the play, she was surprised to find that the rights had already been acquired by the Bichir brothers, who were in the process of looking for a translator, adapter, and director. The rest is history. 51. Harmony, “Sutilezas,” 110.

52. While the original Irish title, Stones in His Pockets, refers to the young man’s suicide, the event that later serves as the catalyst for the extras’ final act of resistance, Berman explained that the title was likely to mean nothing to a Mexican audience and therefore “translated” it to something entirely different. 53. See Stuart Day’s book for a thorough discussion of the ways that Mexican playwrights, including Sabina Berman, have used the stage to critique Mexico’s neoliberal political and economic systems. Staging Politics in Mexico. The Road to Neoliberalism (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004). 54. Hutcheon, Theory, 146. 55. David Edelstein, “‘Remade in America’: A Label to Avoid,” New York Times, November 4, 2001. 56. In Nigro/Moraga’s translation of eXtras, these lines are translated as: Karina. You have suffered enough . . . que..rr-ri-dos amiguuus meeos. Jose. No shit. If they’d told me she was speaking ruso I'd believe it. Charlie. Pos, | believed her. That’s how we Mexicans talk in the movies. Or at least in the ones you see around the world. Hasta la vista, amigou: Schwartzeneger. Jose. Aha. Nou proublima: Traffic. (8)

57. Berman, eXtras, 42; Jones, Stones, 82. While Berman retains the name used by Marie Jones, Charles is, coincidentally, the name of the frustrated screen writer in the movie Adaptation. Brother Donald’s own attempt at screenwriting results in a pastiche of every cliché ever invented in Hollywood, much like the script that Berman’s Charlie has “written” after watching up to five videos a day in the video rental shop that he ran until Blockbuster came to town and ran him out of business. José mocks the inclusion of “ovnis contra charros” (Berman, eXtras, 43), much like Charles, in the movie Adaptation, derides his brother’s liberal borrowing and mixing from genres ranging from thrillers to police movies. 58. At Miami University of Ohio, in November 2005, Berman explained that she had asked Kirsten Nigro and Cherrie Moraga to translate eXtras into Spanglish so that it could be staged in Southern California. Berman also said that, during a recent stay in Los Angeles, she could not help but notice not only the number of

Latinos, but also the fact that most of them were working in places where they were invisible and thus less likely to be discovered and deported. It occurred to her that the exploited, anonymous extras of Chiconcuac become doubly anonymous once they cross the border to the “promised land.” 59. Venuti, “Translation,” 477. 60. Hutcheon, Theory, 174.

Theater Transformations: Reading Race in Abelardo Estorino’s

Parece blanca Camilla Stevens By ALL ACCOUNTS, THE SUMMER OF 1994 IN CUBA WAS ONE OF THE

hottest on record, and not just in the literal sense. In July, Abelardo Estorino’s new play, Parece blanca (She seems white), an adaptation of Cirilo Villaverde’s classic nineteenth-century novel Cecilia Valdés, received warm applause despite its blackout-induced, blazing afternoon premiere.' On the streets, however, conditions really heated up a few weeks later on August 5, when the eroding social and economic circumstances that have defined Cuba’s Special Period came to a head and tempers exploded in what has been called the largest public disturbance since the 1959 revolution.” Notably, the riots had racial undertones; the majority of the protestors were

black and mulatto, groups that have been disproportionately affected by the economic crisis and the resultant resurgence of discriminatory practices. As on other occasions, the Castro government used emigration as an escape valve to defuse tensions and did nothing to stop some thirty thousand rafters who took to the seas. By reading Estorino’s play and its production history against this

backdrop of contemporary race relations and the diaspora, this essay illustrates how the traveling life of a play—aits performance under the guidance of different directors and in different contexts— transforms its politics and adds layers of meaning well beyond the author’s original artistic vision. In his essay “Traveling Theory” Edward Said takes as his point of departure the fact that like peoples and institutions, ideas and theories also travel through individuals, time, and space. Accordingly, the present essay takes as its premise the idea that the theater embodies all of the above: live bodies and institutions, ideas and theory. Plays travel from one theater to the next, circulating ideas that assume a new critical consciousness in different contexts. Said 91

92 CAMILLA STEVENS describes the process of an idea moving from one time and place to another in terms that sound much like the Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz’s notion of transculturation, a process that includes deculturation, the loss of certain elements of a culture as it enters into contact with another; acculturation, a period of readjustment; and,

ultimately, the creation of a new culture, neoculturation.* Said writes:

First, there 1s a point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse. Second, there is a distance transversed [sic], a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence. Third, there is a set of conditions—call them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances—which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be. Fourth, the now full [sic] (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea 1s to some extent transformed by its new uses, 1ts new position in a new time and place.

Similarly, as theater productions travel, the ideas they embody undergo transculturation. Performances of plays in new locations and

temporal contexts necessarily place a plurality of cultural discourses into dialogue with one another. Through this contact, ideas may be lost or altered, only to gain components that form new variations on original themes. Cubans have been familiar with the tale of Cecilia Valdés since the nineteenth century, when Villaverde’s 1839 short version of the

story, which he later expanded into the full-length abolitionist novel, Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Angel (Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill; 1882), provided the defining model of the Caribbean mulata, a woman of indeterminate racial category, stereotypically characterized as instinctual, exotic, and beautiful, and whose transgressive sexuality often leads to a tragic end.° Parece blanca transplants the figure of Cecilia Valdés, already mythologized in Cuban fiction, film, musical theater, and popular culture, to the new socio-

historical context of Cuba’s Special Period.’ The play translates Villaverde’s nineteenth-century novel into a piece of postmodern theater, one that is further transformed as it travels through different artistic visions and receptions. Some of the highlights of the play’s production history include Estorino’s original 1994 production in Havana, his direction of the play in 1998 at New York’s Teatro Repertorio, and the 2002 collaborative Cuban and US-Cuban production directed by Cuban exile Alberto Sarrain that was projected to

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 93 be performed in both Havana and Miami.® Rather than detail the play’s artistic transformations, however, this essay will focus on how the play’s shifting reception framework spawns new ideas and broadens the reading of its racial theme. Specifically, reading race in Parece blanca from the perspective of las dos orillas (both sides of the Florida Straits) transforms the play’s racial politics, for it draws attention to current issues of race for both insular and exilic Cubans and underscores how race must be factored into discussions of Cuban national reconciliation.’ Cuba’s most celebrated dramatist within the revolutionary context, Estorino mentions that when he was considering new themes to develop into a play, he looked for a Cuban myth: “And suddenly I realized that our great myth was the mulata, it was Cecilia Valdés, it was the mix of races that distinguishes us, that makes us Caribbean, Cuban, and that gives us our character. From there I studied what is so popular, the search for identity.”’'° As Estorino notes, the search for identity forms part of an artistic movement in the Special Period that counters the insecure present by critically examining national values and traditions. Moreover, Parece blanca exemplifies a

shift in Cuban theater practices. Since the 1990s, Cuban playwrights have sought to revitalize theatrical form and content through a fusion of performance traditions and the use of metaphor and parody—that 1s, through a postmodern poetics of fragmentation with respect to history, myth, language, and dramatic structure.!! Estorino’s dramatization of the Cecilia Valdés story revisits, in a new historical context, the iconic figure of the mulata as embodi-

ment of the collective identity discourses of mestizaje, or racial mixing. Miscegenation, as Estorino and many others have observed, may have given Cuba its unique identity, but as Vera Kut-

zinski argues, its corresponding racialized and _ sexualized nationalist discourse tends to celebrate “racial diversity while at the same time disavowing divisive social realities.” !? This discourse

promotes a myth of racial equality that is often invoked to deny the existence of racism, and it also contains the positivist notion of blanqueamiento, or whitening, which assumes that the lighter results of racial mixing closer approximate a white ideal. Furthermore, the symbolic privileging in cultural discourse of the image of the sexy mulata stands at odds with the social invisibility—the material reality—of this marginalized group.'* As almost all critics

have noted, Estorino’s play represents a “new take” on one of Cuba’s most memorable mulata narratives, but much of what has been written on Parece blanca begs an important question: what is this story’s relevance to Cuba today?!* Namely, what are the con-

94 CAMILLA STEVENS nections between recent representations of the mulata, Cuban discourses of racial democracy, and the island’s current crisis? According to Alejandro de la Fuente, historically most Cuban political crises have had a racialized dimension, and the Special Period is no exception: “Political transitions in Cuba’s modern history have often resulted in racially defined social tensions, even violence. Given the centrality of race in the construction and representation of the Cuban nation, this is hardly surprising. It is during periods of crisis and transformation, when competing visions of the nation and its people openly clash for legitimacy and consolidation, that the place of Afro-Cubans in society has been more vividly contested.” '° The disproportionate participation of blacks and mulattos in the 1994 summer riot in Havana was a surprise to the Cuban government since the regime had counted on the unconditional support of the principal beneficiaries of the revolution’s social and economic policies. On the one hand, the government might have antici-

pated growing discontent given that the economic reforms

implemented to weather the Special Period have affected social eroups differently, dividing them along racial lines. Some of these reforms favored a dollar sector of the economy, to which blacks have had limited access, and have resulted in inequalities and preju-

dices that had been diminished by the revolution.'® On the other hand, although the benefits that blacks have reaped from the Cuban

socialist experiment have been eroded, they still tend to have a more positive opinion of the revolution and its policies than whites and view impending political change with some apprehension. One

of the focuses of a 1994 survey conducted by de la Fuente and Glasco was the way black Cubans perceive issues of race and their role in a future, post-Castro political crisis.!’ Since the exile community is largely white, “a political change in the island will almost certainly involve the potentially traumatic reintegration of the white exiles in the economic, social, and political life of a country with a much larger darker population.” '* The survey’s findings, however, suggest that the regime has not been entirely successful in discrediting the Cuban exile community (primarily the Miami population) as racist, and that young blacks are less concerned than older generations about the racial implications of the possible end of the revolution. In other words, while black Cubans on the island are uneasy about a political transition that would put the revolution’s social advances in jeopardy, they do not necessarily equate the participation of white Cuban exiles in this process with a major social reversal involving race discrimination. The travels of Estorino’s play—ostensibly a drama treating nine-

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 95 teenth-century themes—create a framework that sheds light on the text’s relationship with contemporary Cuban problems. Although Estorino’s subtitle labels Parece blanca as a “versiOn infiel de una novela sobre infidelidades” (an unfaithful version of a novel about infidelities), he follows the original story closely and includes many of the key episodes and motifs that illuminate themes of racial and social oppression—topics, judging by the play’s positive reception, still relevant to contemporary Cuban audiences. In his adaptation of the novel into drama, Estorino relies on showing rather than telling, transforms diegetic indirect speech into mimetic dialogue or monologue and capitalizes on the theater’s capacity to present visual im-

ages. As a result, his stage version is particularly effective in accentuating the theme of racial mixing, and, as the title suggests, racial masquerade. Moreover, Estorino is able to leave intact much of the original anecdote involving a wealthy young white man’s affair with a mulata who turns out to be his half-sister, and still create

a compact drama by experimenting with the order in which the story 1s dramatized and by freeing the play from the novel’s costumbrismo.'? Lengthy episodes from the novel that detail Cuban customs, such as the elaborate dance party scenes and the visit to the Gamboa sugar mill, are eliminated. The minimalist set includes a handful of furnishings signifying spaces representative of different social classes, while the lighting serves to propel the action by breaking spatial and temporal confines. Most significantly, Estorino adds a metatheatrical layer to the story that displaces the narrative authority of the novel’s omniscient point of view and opens up Vi1llaverde’s novel to new interpretations. The characters in Estorino’s

play—aware that they are from the novel—frequently consult a copy of the original on a podium on stage throughout the performance. They sustain witty dialogues full of intertextual references and comment on their roles, in many cases resisting them. How-

ever, aS one reviewer states, they are ultimately “bound by the book” and forced to play out the story including the tragic end designed by Villaverde.*°

On a general level, the play’s circular structure, intertextuality and self-referentiality highlight a metaphor of entrapment that relates to Cuba’s current political and economic situation. The play begins and ends with the story’s tragic outcome—Pimienta’s assassination of Leonardo at his wedding with Isabel—suggesting that

whatever dramatic action develops, the ending will be the same. The key to the play is the characters’ awareness that they are reenacting a great, yet ultimately tragic, national myth. Rosa, Leonardo’s mother, especially desires to unravel the story and insists that

96 CAMILLA STEVENS they reread the novel. They ironically refer to the authority and tradition that the novel epitomizes, calling it “la gran epopeya nacional” (307) [the great national epic], and at the same time resist its

plotlines, questioning the author’s godlike status as creator. One reading of the play’s metaphor might be that interrogating the book and even closing it in search of answers elsewhere suggest that Cubans might turn to a new chapter in their history. This new chapter could be read as Cuba’s post-Castro political transition, in which new voices would write a social and political narrative with fresh roles for Cubans.

Metaphorically, the characters’ voiced sense of asphyxiation evokes possible political changes on the horizon. In performance, particularly, references to heat and time convey a sense of urgency or desire for action. In the novel and in the play, the motif of Leonardo’s coveted Swiss watch serves to underscore the Gamboa family’s power dynamics and values, but Estorino’s use of the “tic toc” sound of a clock has a different effect. Chepilla, Cecilia’s grandmother, hears the clock sound during the last moments of her life and futilely begs for more time in order to reveal to Cecilia the secret of her birth (331). For the audience, however, the sound effect of the clock might suggest monotonous timelessness, a space suspended in time, or conversely, a sort of time bomb and the aware-

ness that it is only a matter of time until something happens. Immediately following Chepilla’s demise, the stage directions indicate that heat floods the stage. The characters react as follows: Nemesia. ;Qué calor! Leonardo. Esta cayendo fuego. Cdndido. Esta Isla es un infierno. Cecilia. El sudor me corre entre las tetas como un rio. Rosa. {Una limonada! Isabel. ;{Una penca! Pimienta. ;{Un poco de brisa, Dios! Cecilia. Me ahogo. (331) [Nemesia. What heat! Leonardo. It’s raining fire. Candido. This Island 1s a hell. Cecilia. Sweat 1s running like a river between my breasts. Rosa. A lemonade! Isabel. A fan! Pimienta. God, a little breeze! Cecilia. | can’t breathe. ]

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 97 Director Sarrain uses these lines as a chorus and repeats them in certain moments of the performance. The repetition adds a ritualistic quality and underscores the immobilizing power of the heat, suggesting that Cubans are trapped in time. The frequent allusions to the heat also call to mind Virgilio Pifiera, author of two of the play’s primary intertexts, Aire frio (Cold Air, 1958) and Electra Garrig6é (1947). Not only are the characters trapped in Villaverde’s novel (whose characters are, in turn, limited by the Spanish colonial regime), but the Pifiera plays recall another

time of oppression in Cuban history as well, the Batista dictatorship. Moreover, the trapped characters in Parece blanca break free from Villaverde’s text only to cite other texts in which the characters are equally powerless. The choral references to the heat in Parece blanca echo the protagonist Luz Marina’s famous first lines in Aire frio: {Qué calor! (Pausa.) ;Qué caloor!’”’ (What heat! [Pause. ]

What heeaat!).?! In Aire frio, the heat becomes a constant topic of conversation and thus helps create the play’s static quality. Luz Marina’s dream of combating the heat by purchasing a fan is deferred for almost twenty years and, in 1958, the year in which Aire frio was written, cold air, the work’s metaphor for change, had yet to arrive. The contemporary moment evoked in Parece blanca, the stagnation of the Special Period, seems similarly poised for movement. In another scene, Rosa begins reciting lines from Electra Garrig6é

and replays with some variations the moment in which Orestes (whom she imagines to be Leonardo) leaves the family home. As I

have argued elsewhere, in Cuban drama the space of the family home embodies the nation.” Thus, in the context of Sarrain’s USCuban production, when Rosa (as Electra and played by a Cuban actress) says, “Vas a salir, quieres cruzar las columnas y partir... . Te llamo, grito tu nombre, te digo: ‘j;No cruces, Orestes!’ Ya es demasiado tarde. La gente aplaude” (309) [You’re going to leave, you

want to cross the columns and depart. .. . I call you, shout your name, I say “Don’t cross, Orestes!” It’s already too late. The people applaud], the leave-taking might be associated with exile as an

exit from an oppressive political situation. Similarly, as Lillian Manzor, the literary advisor to the Sarrain production, points out, Leonardo’s reply to his father’s accusation that he is a traitor and an enemy of God and the king—‘“Soy cubano y no me inclino ante ningun rey” (335) ['m Cuban and I bow for no king|—1s received differently knowing that Leonardo is played by a Cuban American actor.** That is, asserting his cubania (Cubanness) and his defiance of Cuba’s “king” in a Miami playhouse is sure to be met with a

98 CAMILLA STEVENS positive audience reaction, whereas a response in Havana might range from disapproval and skepticism to esteem and solidarity.

These examples construct a narrative of frustration that tells a second story only tangentially related to the Cecilia Valdés plot. Within the metafictional mode, much of the characters’ dialogue seems to allude to a lack of freedom of expression under the Castro government and to suggest that the country might be better off trying a different “script.’’ For example, in the following scene, Leonardo fatalistically accepts the novel’s impending calamity. While Leonardo points out the advantages of living in a prewritten plot,

Rosa states that the real tragedy is to be a fictional being with no free will. Rosa associates agency with being a “real” person in the world of the reader:

Leonardo. Tal vez es mejor saber cOmo terminara todo y no la incertidumbre en que viven los lectores. Rosa. Pero los lectores escogen qué libro leen, con quién se casan, quién los gobierna. Leonardo. (Si? Rosa. jClaro! Los lectores son completamente libres. No se pasan toda la vida bajo el gobierno del General Vives. Para ellos la historia sucede, no es estatica. Leonardo. ,Y ta como lo sabes? Nunca has vivido en el mundo de los lectores. Rosa. Pero uno suefia, hijo, uno siempre suefia con llegar a ser real y poco a poco, con los afios va entendiendo a los seres que de verdad existen. Si durante mucho tiempo ves como los mismos hechos se repiten, rechazas la repeticion y comprendes que la vida es otra cosa, que todo puede cambiar. Eso es ser real. (339) [Leonardo. Maybe it’s better to know how everything is going to end and not the uncertainty in which readers live. Rosa. But readers choose which book they read, who they marry, who governs them. Leonardo. Really? Rosa. Of course! Readers are completely free. They don’t spend their whole lives under the government of General Vives. For them, history unfolds, it’s not static. Leonardo. And how do you know? You’ve never lived in the world of readers. Rosa. But one dreams, son, one always dreams of becoming real and, little by little, over the years, comes to understand those beings who really do exist. If for a long time you see how the same acts are repeated, you reject repetitions and you understand that life is something else, that everything can change. That is being real. |

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 99 On a general level then, Estorino’s play addresses the idea of change (or lack thereof), a profoundly relevant theme in 1990s Cuba. It announces itself as unfaithful to the original novel, and the

characters hope that rejecting repetition in favor of change will bring them one step closer to leaving a “fictional world”—Cuba under Castro—and joining the “real” world of the reader/spectator—Cuba in a political transition and out of insularism—where they might exercise more control over their destiny. On a more specific level, simply by replaying the Cecilia Valdés narrative in the context of the Special Period, and, as we will see, in the context of the diaspora, the nineteenth-century racial theme

emerges with different nuances. One might suspect that Estorino turned to this particular national story precisely in the 1990s to warn Cuban audiences that the nation was gradually returning to an antiquated narrative of racial and social oppression. In distilling the novel into a play, Estorino experiments little with the overall plot

or outcome, but he does shift the focus on certain characters. He gives Nemesia, the parda (dark-skinned mulata) character, a greater

voice and more compelling stage time than Isabel, Leonardo’s white bride-to-be. As a result, in the play, the Leonardo-CeciliaNemesia love triangle virtually eclipses the novel’s central Leonardo-Cecilia-Isabel love triangle. The emphasis on the two women of color vying for Leonardo’s attention transfers, to some extent, the position of object of desire from the mulata to Leonardo. Estorino’s playful exaggeration of the oedipal relationship between Leo-

nardo and his mother hinted at in the novel further supports Leonardo’s status as object of desire. One scene shows all four women standing center stage and individually speaking of Leonardo in varying sexual terms, but all referring to him as a “potro” (colt), in a sly intertextual reference to Federico Garcia Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba.** Leonardo becomes Lorca’s Pepe el Romano, alpha male (embodied by the stallion kicking against the stable walls in Lorca’s play), except that, unlike Pepe, Leonardo is a visible—and at times shirtless—presence on stage. Redirecting the spectator’s gaze from the beautiful and mesmerizing mulata to the white male is fitting for the times, given the increasingly popular practice of jineterismo (a horse-related term that refers to jockeying), in which oftentimes-eroticized dark women seek relationships with white tourists in hopes of resolving (or riding out) their dire economic situation. The confluence of race, nation, and sexuality in the figure of the muldata during the Special Period, it seems, differs little from nineteenth-century Cuba. In both the fictional world of Cecilia Valdés and in Cuba today

100 CAMILLA STEVENS the image of the mulata suggests survival and even arguably female empowerment, but it also confirms the fact that race is still a determiner of social and economic classification, in spite of the revolution’s efforts toward achieving racial equality. Estorino’s focus on the Cecilia Valdés story, then, seems to be in line with the view that nationalist discourses of mestizaje, in which the mulata figures as a celebrated symbol of collective identity, mask problems of racism. Although less blatantly parodic and deconstructive than Reinaldo Arenas’s 1987 novel La Loma del Angel, which Arenas describes as “a compendium of irreverences against all the conventionalisms and precepts of that period and, in general, of those today,” Estorino’s reworking of the Cecilia Valdés story also addresses Cuba’s

present as much as it does its past. The racial tensions and social divisions that surfaced during the Special Period coincided with, or perhaps helped to produce, a greater radicalization of consciousness and interest in examining the racial question on the part of Cuban intellectuals and artists. The election of black politicians to significant posts, the resurgence of santeria, the publication of important studies on Afro Cuban culture and history, and the rise in Afro Cuban performing arts groups and filmmakers mark the increasing visibility of Afro Cuban culture on the national scene.*° At the same time, the artistic overtures made between insular and diasporic Cuban populations constitute a different but, in my opinion, intersecting trend during the Special Period. In the theater world of the 1990s, the publication of critical essays calling for an inclusive vision of Cuban theater and of anthologies that include both Cuban and Cuban-exile authors signaled a concerted effort to make cultural connections between the island and exile communities.*’ One of the most far-reaching endeavors was the coproduction of Estorino’s Parece blanca by Cuban-exile

director Alberto Sarrain’s company La Ma Teodora and Cuba’s Consejo Nacional de las Artes Escénicas (CNAE). Sarrain assembled a mixed cast of primarily Cubans from /as dos orillas in a production that was to premiere in Cuba and then travel to the US for performances in several cities, including Miami. The Herculean task of organizing such a project involved negotiating with shifting cultural and immigration policies, and in the end, financial issues and visa problems prohibited the production from traveling to the US and completing the cultural bridge envisioned by its organizers. Nevertheless, articles in the British, Spanish, Cuban, and American press celebrated the symbolic importance of a project in which Cubans would act together in a play written by a revered revolutionary playwright, under the direction of an exile director, on both na-

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 101 tional stages.*® Interestingly, the 1997-98 CubaTeatro exchange launched by Gilberto Zaldivar, Cuban cofounder of New York’s Teatro Repertorio, did not generate as much press, although it met with better luck and was able to complete the mission of bringing a Teatro Repertorio production of Revoltillo (Broken Eggs) by Cuban American playwright Eduardo Machado to Cuba and later presenting Cuban theater artists and playwrights in New York (one of the plays produced in New York was Parece blanca, directed by Estorino and composed of a mainly Cuban cast with some US-resident Cuban participation). Neither Sarrain’s Parece blanca nor Teatro Repertorio’s Revoltillo were hailed as artistic triumphs by Cuban critics, but the standing ovations the performances received affirmed the audience’s support of creating new relationships among Cubans.”? Conversely, Estorino’s direction of Parece blanca in New York was critically well received (and relatively little was said about the play’s role in a cultural exchange). The cultural politics of Cuban and US-Cuban artistic exchanges, however, are complex. The Sarrain/CNAE production involved a higher level of artistic collaboration; it is one matter for a play, under the guidance of its author and original director, to travel and be performed in front of a diverse New York audience, while it is quite another for a play to return to its country of origin under the artistic control of a Cuban exile and with a cast made up of actors from /as dos orillas. We can only speculate on how the production might have been received in Miami, but we might safely assume that the audience would have been predominately made up of Cuban exiles particularly attuned to the play’s antiauthoritarian themes. Similarly, it is tempting to consider how the play’s treatment of race can be read when informed by the context of the diaspora. Just as reading Parece blanca in relation to the Special Period draws out the play’s resonance with contemporary racial concerns on the island, reading the Sarrain production from the perspective of Greater Cuban (island and diaspora) race relations exemplifies how the politics of a play are transformed in its travels.°° On the one hand, Parece blanca plays well to both island and exile audiences because of the wide familiarity with the Cecilia Valdés story, and because the play contains a veiled criticism of the regime, whether or not one sees race, as I do, as a part of this criticism. As Sarrain puts it,

Parece blanca is a foundational play “that speaks, as only this leader of Cuban playwrights can, of Cubanness and the birth of a nationality.”>! For a project grounded in the creation of a collaborative (theater) space wherein political differences might be left aside and cultural ties remembered and strengthened, working with a

102 CAMILLA STEVENS story of Cuban origins and identity seems to be a good strategy. At the same time, however, we must remember that this foundational

narrative is ultimately about racial conflict, which is a potential problem that Cubans might face in the looming post-Castro period. In the following description of the play, Manzor makes explicit the play’s relevance to exile audiences: “She Seems White is, on both shores, a metaphor of the re-founding of the nation, of how to rethink what fits in it, in Cuba as well as in Miami.” ** To follow, one might ask: what does reimagining Greater Cuba as a reconciled, transnational space encompassing different economic, political, and cultural settings entail? For one, race is as central to understanding Cuba’s past as it is to making sense of its present and to imagining its future. In the nineteenth century and throughout the early republic, concern about de-

mographics and the proportion of blacks to whites frequently appeared in discourses on Cuban collective identity. Racial whiten-

ing as a personal goal meant social mobility (as evidenced in the Cecilia Valdés story), while for some politicians, as a national goal

it meant civilization and progress. Twentieth-century history shows, however, that since the revolution, the mass exodus of white Cubans has opened the door for a discourse of darkening to be employed to distinguish islanders from exiled Cubans. Thus, Miguel A. de la Torre argues that “any serious discourse on intra-Cuban reconciliation must unmask the hidden tension existing between seemingly white Exilic Cuba and black Resident Cuba.” *? Whether or not there is hard evidence of race as a factor in any animosity on the part of US Cubans toward their compatriots on the island, or in the apprehension some islanders might feel when faced with na-

tional reconciliation, it is undeniable that skin color figures into how these groups can be constructed as different. To complicate matters, perceptions of race within the Cuban community in the US add another dimension to the question of insular and exilic race re-

lations. As Mirta Ojito documents in her chronicle of two Cuban friends, one black and one white, each arriving in Miami via raft after the 1994 riots, US racial dynamics force Cubans to become aware of race in new ways.*‘ In the eyes of both the black Cuban and his white friend, the black friend has become somehow less Cuban because of his association (driven by Miami’s divisive race relations) with Afro American culture. The racial identifications among Cubans residing outside of the island, therefore, must also be taken into account in order to avoid an exclusionary reconciliation among whites from /as dos orillas. To echo Edward Said’s phrase, Parece blanca is a profoundly

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 103 “worldly” text that demands acknowledging the social world outside of the play and the historical moment in which it is located and interpreted.*> My position within this world may allow me to ask difficult questions on contentious issues such as race and the diaspora understandably not raised in other contexts. In short, reading race from different reception standpoints challenges the use of the iconic mulata—the contradictory embodiment of the discourses of racial harmony (mestizaje) and racial erasure (blanqueamiento)—to celebrate the foundations of Cuban identity and to invite audiences

to imagine a (re)united Cuban nation. In the context of insular Cuba, the play would appear to parody the concept of whitening in an effort to remind Cubans of the need for solidarity in a time of crisis. Yet in the context of diasporic Cuba, while the project of acting together is undoubtedly a serious and worthwhile effort to join Cubans, the choice of text that symbolically refounds the Cuban nation on a unifying myth such as mestizaje seems problematic, given that race is implicated in the social and economic barriers to

be confronted in whatever path post-Castro Greater Cuba might

take. The consideration of the production history of Parece blanca—tits travels in the world—broadens interpretations of a text that might be mistaken for a formal experiment in adapting a novel for the stage. Most importantly, it brings to the fore the racial implications in the complex project of Cuban national reconciliation and reminds us of how plays in performance cross geographic and temporal borders, transforming their meaning and transacting politics in new frameworks of reception. NOTES

1. Norge Espinosa Mendoza calls the play’s premiere “glorious” in spite of “that hot 1994, of afternoon shows under the pressures of the Special Period” and rumors that the play’s star might be too old to play the vivacious Cecilia Valdés. “Estorino parece joven,” Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana 26—27 (2002): 46. 2. After the ideological collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered what Castro has called the “Special Period in Times of Peace,” during which the devastated economy has forced Cubans to endure strict austerity measures. 3. Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, “Race and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Black Cuban Consciousness,” in Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, ed. Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 5. I do not mean to imply that there was a black exodus in 1994, although since the 1980 Mariel boatlift, more working class and more black Cubans have emigrated compared to the earlier waves of primarily white and well-off €migrés. However, black Cubans still constitute a relatively small percentage of the exile community. According to US census statistics,

104 CAMILLA STEVENS between 1960 and 1990, a total of 16.2 percent of the immigrants identified themselves as blacks or in the category of “other race” (probably meaning mixed race), whereas 83.5 percent identified themselves as white. Silvia Pedraza, “Cuba’s Refugees: Manifold Migrations,” in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, ed. Silvia Pedraza and Rubén G. Rumbaut (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1996), 274. Statistical tools such as censuses, however, depend on racial self-identification, which always reveals race to be a subjective social conStruct.

4. Fernando Ortiz, “Del fendmeno social de la “transculturacion’ y de su importancia en Cuba,” in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azucar (Barcelona: Ariel, 1973), 134-35. 5. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1983), 226-27. ;

6. Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Angel, ed. Jean Lamore

(1882; repr., Madrid: Catedra, 1992).

7. More than simply a popular folkloric character, the mulata has come to symbolize the Cuban nation. According to Vera Kutzinski, Cuba “encodes its national identity in the iconic figure of a mulata—that of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the coppery Virgen of Charity who is Cuba’s patron saint—not to mention the countless images of mulatas that have been circulated in the island’s literature and popular culture for roughly the past two centuries.” Sugar’s Secrets: Race and Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 7.

8. My analysis is drawn from Estorino’s published text, Parece blanca, in Vagos rumores y otras obras (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1997), 301-51, and the September 12, 2002, production at the Teatro Nacional de Cuba in Havana, Parece blanca, dir. Alberto Sarrain, Dali Media Lab, 2002, digital video recording. The Miami premiere never took place, as I will explain further on. All subsequent quotes will be from the published version and will be cited in the body of the text. 9. National reconciliation entails reintegrating and reconciling Cubans living on the island with those who reside abroad. At the level of the state, national reconciliation implies a post-Castro political transition to democracy. At the societal level, national reunion would have to confront the inextricability of race in the social and economic inequities both within resident and exilic Cuban communities and between them. 10. Abelardo Estorino, “Yo soy el otro y escribo teatro. Una conversacion con Abelardo Estorino,” interview by Omar Valifio and Maité Hernandez-Lorenzo, La Jiribilla, September 21, 2001, http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2001/n21_septiembre/ 626_21.html. Abelardo Estorino (born 1925) left a career in dental surgery to become a professional writer after the 1959 revolution. In 1992, he was the first playwright to win the Cuban National Prize in Literature, and in 1997, he won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to work in New York City with Teatro Repertorio. More recently, he won the Cuban National Prize in Theatre (2002) and was honored, along with Jesus Orta Ruiz, at the 2005 Cuban International Book Fair. Estorino’s earliest pieces are realist and portray machismo in the provincial Cuban family. In the 1980s, he began experimenting with realism by using intertexts and metatheater in plays such as Ni un si ni un no (Neither a yes nor a no, 1980) and Morir del cuento (Death from a story, 1983). According to some critics, his masterpiece is Vagos rumores (Vague rumors, 1992), a reworking of his censored 1973 play about the famous nineteenth-century Cuban poet Don José Jacinto Milanés.

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 105 11. Rosa Ileana Boudet, “New Playwrights, New Challenges: Current Cuban Theatre,” trans. Nancy Westrate, South Atlantic Quarterly 96 (1997): 32. 12. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets, 5. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. Rosa Ileana Boudet, for example, considers the play’s postmodern stylistic devices and mentions the connections between race, power, and patriarchy in nineteenth-century Cuba. “Estorino: decir la verdad y no engafiarnos,” in Vagos rumores y otras obras, by Abelardo Estorino, 11-12. Espinosa writes that the play’s title, which leaves out the title character’s name, indicates Estorino’s desire to escape the limitations of the Cecilia Valdés myth and to offer a new view of a wellknown story (“Estorino parece joven,” 46). In somewhat more specific readings of the play’s relation to present-day Cuba, Reinaldo Montero and Vivian Martinez Tabares praise how Estorino touches upon current Cuban issues without falling into the trap of actualizing the Cecilia Valdés story. Reinaldo Montero, “Otra con-

tribucion al mito,” Tablas 1—2 (1994): 38; Vivian Martinez Tabares, “Parece blanca: una relectura de Cecilia Valdés desde el teatro cubano,” in Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura siglos X VI-XIX, ed. Luisa Campuzano (Havana:

Casa de las Américas, 1997), 2:99. The play, in short, signals certain enduring aspects of Cuban culture and incorporates universal themes at the same time as it comments on the present. My reading of the play forms part of a longer study on the representation of race in Cuban theater and film since the 1990s and, while I do not want to suggest that the play’s meaning is limited by a particular historical context, my interest here is to examine more closely the links between the text and contemporary Cuban race relations.

15. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 1.

16. Since the 1990s, in the lucrative tourism industry, a major source of hard currency in the dollar economy, blacks have not had the same employment opportunities unless one counts the informal system of jineterismo, a form of prostitution that targets foreign visitors. Annual family remittances of about $800 million also help maintain the economy afloat, but if 83.5 percent of Cuban immigrants in the US identify themselves as white, it can be assumed that the black population on the island does not receive as many remittances as whites do (de la Fuente, A Nation, 319). In an effort to better control currency coming from abroad, Castro and the Cuban Central Bank revoked the dollar’s status as legal tender in the fall of 2004. This reversal has created an even bigger burden for Cubans (and their relatives abroad). Most recently, Castro has closed a number of foreign businesses, reversing the effort to attract foreign investment in the 1990s. 17. Alejandro de la Fuente and Laurence Glasco, “Are Blacks “Getting Out of

Control’? Racial Attitudes, Revolution, and Political Transition in Cuba,” in Toward a New Cuba? Legacies of a Revolution, ed. Miguel Angel Centeno and Mauricio Font (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 55. 18. Ibid. 19. A minimal plot summary concerning the central characters of the story, but leaving out the novel’s abolitionist narrative, is as follows: Cecilia Valdés, whose

color is light enough that she can pass for Spanish, is the daughter of a mulata (Charo), who lost her mind when her white lover took infant Cecilia to an orphanage to hide the evidence of their affair. Cecilia is later raised by her grandmother, Sefia Josefa, or Chepilla. Her grandmother’s hope that Cecilia might improve her station by marrying a white man backfires when Cecilia falls in love with Leo-

106 CAMILLA STEVENS nardo Gamboa, the legitimate son of Charo’s Spanish gentleman lover, don Candido Gamboa, and his criolla wife, dofia Rosa. Both don Candido and Chepilla unsuccessfully try to impede the affair. Leonardo lusts after the beautiful Cecilia (who looks strangely like his sister Adela), and Cecilia falls in love with both Leonardo and the possibility of improving her social status. Cecilia’s friend, Nemesia, also sets her sights on Leonardo, while Nemesia’s mulatto brother, Pimienta, is in love with Cecilia. A tailor by day and a musician by night, Pimienta might be seen as Cecilia’s potential mate, but she rejects him, only to be scorned by Leonardo. The action reaches a climax when Leonardo marries his fitting (white) counterpart, Isabel, the owner of a neighboring coffee plantation. Cecilia, desperate, implores Pimienta to stop the wedding, but he misunderstands her pleas and, instead of killing the bride, fatally stabs Leonardo with his tailor’s scissors. 20. D. J. R. Bruckner, “Parece blanca (She Looks White): Book Bound, or, Trapped by the Page,” review of Parece blanca, dir. Abelardo Estorino, New York Times, November 26, 1998, http://theatre2.nytimes.com/mem/theatre/treview.html. In a different sense, Estorino is also “bound” by the novel. The omnipresent book might be read as Estorino’s favoring of the European lettered city—Villaverde’s written word—over the orality of uncivilized others, the embodied culture of Afro Cubans. One might ask whether Estorino’s attachment to Villaverde’s tragic narrative unwittingly reaffirms the superiority of one legacy over the other. Like his characters, is the playwright stifled by the very book he uses to make a pointed commentary on contemporary Cuban politics? 21. Virgilio Pifiera, Teatro Completo (Havana: Ediciones R, 1960), 277.

22. See my study, Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), in which I examine how Cuban and Puerto Rican domestic drama from the second half of the twentieth century enacts problems of national identity. In many of these plays, the contiguous spaces of the stage (often configured as a family home) and the auditorium (the theater, or the national house) make patent the links between theater and society. As the private affairs of the onstage house play themselves out in the public space of the theater, spectators are encouraged to envision themselves as members of a community, although many might question any affiliation with the image of the national family represented on stage. 23. Manzor 1s cited in Zoila Sablon, “Parece blanca: Refundar una nacion,” La Jiribilla, September 2002, http://www. lajiribilla.cu/2002/n72_Septiembre/1703_ 72.html. 24. In an ironic twist, the green dress of Bernarda’s youngest daughter—one of the five potras or “fillies” in the family stable desperate for Pepe el Romano’s attention—also makes an appearance in this scene. In Parece blanca, while the four women deliver monologues on Leonardo, the matronly Rosa sews a green dress—a symbol of youth and rebellion in Lorca’s play—and comments that Leonardo likes her in particular shades of green (328). 25. Reinaldo Arenas, La Loma del Angel (Miami: Mariel Press, 1987), 9. 26. For specific examples, see Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs, “Race and the Politics of Memory.” 27. Iam thinking, for example, of the article by Rine Leal, “Asumir la totalidad del teatro cubano,” Ollantay 1, no. 2 (1993): 26-32; the anthology of contemporary Cuban theater edited by Carlos Espinosa Dominguez, Teatro cubano contempordneo: Antologia (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1992); the attempt in 1993 to arrange a meeting between Cuban and Cuban-exile theater practitioners and scholars (Lillian Manzor, Pedro Monge Rafuls, and Alberto Sarrain partici-

THEATER TRANSFORMATIONS 107 pated in this effort); the first steps leading to Repertorio Espafiol’s CubaTeatro exchange; the New York premiere of Vagos rumores by Estorino in 1997; Heidrun Adler and Adrian Herr’s anthology of critical essays, De las dos orillas: Teatro cubano (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1999); the participation of Cuban artists in the First International Festival of the Monologue at the University of Miami in 2001; and the presence of Cuban American theater companies in recent international theater festivals in Havana. Most recently, Manzor and Sarrain’s book on Cuban theater written in the US was published in Cuba. Teatro cubano actual: Dramaturgia escrita en Estados Unidos (Havana: Ediciones Alarcos, 2005). 28. Note the similar article titles referencing the 2002 production: Reny Martinez, “Actores cubanos de Miami y La Habana crean nuevo puente” (Cuban actors from Miami and Havana create a new bridge), Reuters—Noticias Latinoamericanas, September 13, 2002; Fernando Ravsberg, “Obra teatral para las dos orillas” (A play for both shores), BBC Mundo, September 9, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ hi/spanish/misc/newsid_2246000/2246315.stm; Mauricio Vicent, “El teatro cubano tiende puentes entre La Habana y Miami” (Cuban theater constructs bridges between Havana and Miami), El Pais, September 16, 2002; and Angel Tomas Gonzalez, “Actores cubanos ‘conectan’ La Habana con Miami” (Cuban actors “con-

nect” Havana with Miami), EJ Mundo, September 14, 2002, http://www.elm undo.es/papel/2002/09/1 4/cultura/1228462.html. 29. In the video of the Sarrain production, the audience reaction 1s rather flat throughout the performance, but the actors and director receive a standing ovation at the end. Although anecdotally I have heard that the reception of Sarrain’s artistic vision was negative, in Granma, Cuban critic Amado del Pino offered constructive criticism of the production: “She Seems White carries out a longstanding and beautiful dream of collaboration. Commenting with a mix of enthusiasm and sincerity is the only way this critic has to applaud it as it deserves.” “Blanca parece, cubanisima es,” Granma, September 14, 2002, http://www.granma/cubaweb/cu/2002/09/ 14/cultura/articulo03.html. The New York Times reported on the animated audience reaction to the 1998 performance of Revoltillo in Cuba. Mireya Navarro, “Building a Bridge, a Theater Troupe From the U.S. Is Embraced by Havana,” New York Times, September 29, 1998.

30. The phrase Greater Cuba, used by Ana M. Lopez in her article on exiled Cuban filmmakers, refers to a particularly expansive way of imagining the Cuban nation. She argues that exiled artists since as far back as the 1890s have “often participate[d] in what may be called a ‘Cuban’ political culture or political imagi-

nary that exceeds the geographical boundaries of the island nation.” “Greater Cuba,” in The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, ed. Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 43. 31. Alberto Sarrain, “Viaje al punto de partida,” interview by Andrés Abreu, Granma, Aug. 19, 2002, http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2002/08/19/cultura/arti culo04.html. 32. Manzor, cited in Sablon, “Parece blanca.” 33. Miguel A. de la Torre, “Masking Hispanic Racism: A Cuban Case Study,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 6, no. 4 (1999): 57. As de la Torre points out, the tensions are not simply whiter versus darker exile and island populations. As

is well known, the practice of denying blackness is deeply embedded in Latin American culture. For Cubans, this longstanding form of racial prejudice has persisted in spite of revolutionary policies intended to create racial equality; it has persisted for Cubans in the context of the US as well, in spite of the fact that they have been forced to negotiate with different constructions of their racial identities.

108 CAMILLA STEVENS Moreover, in both communities still, whites have remained at the top of the socioeconomic ladder while Afro-descendents are at the bottom. What remains to be seen is how both revolutionary and Cuban-American race relations will figure into imagining a post-Castro Cuba. 34. Mirta Ojito, “Best of Friends, Worlds Apart. Joel Ruiz Is Black. Achmed Valdés Is White. In America They Discovered It Matters,” New York Times, June 5, 2000, http://www .nytimes.com/library/national/race/O60500ojito-cuba.html. 35. Said, The World, 4.

Transposing Professions: Vicente Lefiero and the Politics of the Press Stuart A. Day Transpose: To write or perform in a Key other than the original. —Webster’s

RENOWNED AUTHOR VICENTE LENERO HAS LED A DOUBLE LIFE.’ AS

a journalist, a fiction writer and one of Mexico’s leading playwrights, Lefiero has written about reporting, and the press in general, in myriad texts. Yet despite Lefiero’s multiple vocations, when treating the theme of journalism this wordsmith’s creations are analogous to those of a musician: he transposes the same work, the same theme, in different keys. In the Manual de periodismo (Journalism manual, 1986) Lefiero the journalist presents an ethics of the profession, while Lefiero the fiction writer must proffer the same theme in different tones and (dis)harmonies, in parodies that supplement ethical ideals with a violent, corrupt reality.2 The most salient case of this transposition—and the focus of this essay—is the play Nadie sabe nada (No One Knows Anything, produced in 1988 at the Teatro Galeon in Mexico City and published the following year), which treats the (failed) opportunity on the part of two reporters to have their newspaper print in black and white the details of a Mexican Watergate.

In the United States, the year 2005 saw the confirmation that “Deep Throat,” whose identity had been one of the best-kept secrets in Washington for over three decades, was the former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, W. Mark Felt. As one of the heroes of the political play (staged in part at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee), Felt met with Bob Woodward in a parking garage and passed the information that per-

mitted Woodward, and fellow Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, to confirm and expose the moral malevolence that led to the impeachment and resignation of Richard M. Nixon in 1974. 109

110 STUART A. DAY Woodward’s intimate connections to US government officials, and

specifically his role in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case— Woodward knows how to Keep a secret—have been questioned, and Felt’s reasons for leaking information about the Nixon administration appear to have been motivated as much by revenge as by moral

rectitude. These are imperfect heroes, but a confluence of events allowed the story to break and to become one of the most celebrated examples of the power of the pen.* Writing for Mexico City’s La Jornada, correspondent David Brooks highlights the potential effectiveness of the press and hints at the exemplary status of Watergate on the international stage: “Deep Throat is tied to one of the most famous feats in the history of US journalism, and offers one of the best examples of the role of the media to confront and question power, and to reveal to the public what politicians really do.” For many journalists in the US and abroad, Watergate represents a

dream, a dream of notoriety mixed with the promotion of public good. Given the political intrigue of Watergate, imbued from the beginning with theatrical elements (Woodward, for example, would place

a flowerpot on his balcony when he wanted to rendezvous with Felt), it is not surprising that authors beyond the United States

would be attracted to the theme. Such is the case with Vicente Lefiero, who in Nadie sabe nada presents his two characters, reporters from a Mexico City newspaper, with the fantasy of a Mexican Watergate, though in the end the author does not permit the triumph of truth; his heroes, or potential heroes, as part of a system in which simulation reigns supreme, are destined to fail. When Lefiero discussed his desire (with Mexican director Luis de Tavira) to write a Mexican thriller, he underscored what he saw as a significant hurdle: “There are no detectives like Spade or Marlowe here, nor any investigators who get to the bottom of things. Here there are just crimes and more crimes. There are no detectives, and there is no justice.”° Lefiero knew that his Mexican audience would reject the illusion of integrity; he knew that Watergate, when transposed to

the Mexican stage, would be played in a different, oppositional key—it would present the discordance that is the heart of parody, and it would serve as a counterweight, a supplement, to Lefiero’s nonfiction writing on the subject of journalism. Lenero describes his aversion to classic detective fiction, at least for the Mexican context: “Adhering to my own criteria, in a joking spirit, but still very serious, I proposed a ‘cookbook for the author of Mexican detective novels.’ Some of these recipes—I later discovered—yjustified a pri-

ori the principles that govern . . . Nadie sabe nada.” This recipe

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 111 calls for restraint on the part of the author: For the “lead investigator,” Lefiero’s advice (to himself) 1s to make the character “as corrupt as any”; for the text’s final scenes, Lefiero implores, “Please, don’t attempt to make good triumph over evil. In life—the life that every writer knows and that every Mexican suffers—evil almost always triumphs over good.’’®

Nadie sabe nada is an entertaining (though none-too-comical) parody of Mexican politics, and, more important for the purposes of this essay, a parody of the profession of journalism. This “Thriller en dos actos y catorce escenas” (Thriller in two acts and fourteen scenes), as the subtitle reads, takes place over a two-week period: three days one week (act 1) and three the next (act 2). The notes to the version of the play published in 1994 by Escenologia indicate that the action continues simultaneously in nine scenic spaces, which include a newsroom, governmental offices, a cabaret, a taco stand, and a private club, among others: “Durante cada escena, cada uno de estos espacios tiene vida propia durante el tiempo que dura la escena. La accion-guia gobierna la narraciOn en un escenario, pero de ninguna manera borra lo que ocurre en los otros

escenarios, simultaneamente” (During each scene, each one of these spaces will have a life of its own for the duration of the scene.

The main action will control the narration, but should in no way prevent what is happening in the other spaces from being understood).’ This “dramaturgia de la simultaneidad” (simultaneous dramaturgy), developed for the 1988 production by Vicente Lefiero, Estela Lefiero, Luis de Tavira, and Ivan Guzman, heightens tension during action scenes and gives the spectator a sense of city life in Mexico, including street vendors, crime, a parade, and numerous other small details that come together to form a unified whole.® Kirsten F. Nigro writes on the credible chaos that this production em-

phasized: “The impression of the proximity of what’s ‘real’ to what’s documentary in Nadie sabe nada is a product not only of the scenic spaces but also of the ambience they create. It is one of unmitigated corruption and extreme violence easily recognized as a correlation to what people lived for a long time in Mexico, especially during the six-year term of Lopez Portillo, when it seemed like nobody knew anything about so much that was going on.”? One could argue that the protagonist of Nadie sabe nada is a thin folder containing sensitive documents that have recently crossed the desk of the president of Mexico, and for which the government is willing to pay eighty thousand dollars. If there is an untarnished character in this play it is Lorenzo Salcido, who passes documents—which presumably disclose massive corruption on the part of the Partido

112 STUART A. DAY Revolucionario _Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party)—to Pepe Gutiérrez, a journalist for a Mexico City newspaper. Pepe and fellow reporter Juan José Tagle refer to Salcido as their “Garganta Profunda” (Deep Throat). They know that the elusive documents he offers Pepe (for free) could represent Mexico’s Watergate, especially if they were working in a “real newspaper”: Juan José. Tienes que encontrarlos, pinche Pepe. {Te imaginas? A lo mejor resultan pintados para un Watergate. ... Un Watergate mex1cano, no estaria mal, ya es hora. Ya te veo a ti y a mi como esos dos periodistas gringos, {te acuerdas?, que le pusieron su cuatro a Nixon. {No te gustaria ponerle un cuatro al sistema? .. . Capaz que le damos un susto y en un chico rato la armamos en grande, jpor qué no? Asi empiezan luego las revoluciones. (Pausa.) {De qué te ries? [Juan José. You’ ve got to find them, Pepe. Just think. They might give

us our own Watergate. ... A Mexican Watergate. Not bad, huh? About time. I can see us now, just like those two gringo journalists, remember? The ones who put the screws to Nixon. Wouldn’t you like to put the screws to the whole system? We could just put a scare into them this time and then later on we could go for the big time. Why not? That’s how revolutions are started. (Pause.) What’s so funny’?]'°

Pepe’s laughter, perhaps echoed by the spectators, is produced by the absurd possibility of realizing this dream. As the play continues, corrupt agents from different government agencies pursue Salcido, and later Pepe, to recover the documents, to please their superiors, and to gain power in order to further their own usually corrupt careers. By the end of the play, Salcido has been murdered, his mentally ill sister has been raped, and Pepe turns over the documents to a government agent, from whom they are stolen by another government representative and eventually returned to the office of the president. Pepe’s motives are, in part, ambiguous. He hands over the documents after Salcido’s sister Dalila, with whom he has had a brief affair, is taken hostage by government agents. As he turns them over, he tries unsuccessfully to claim the reward. At the end of the play, of course, what is published is a sanitized version of the events the spectator has witnessed on stage—the massive corruption of the PRI that the document would have exposed. It is possible that Pepe would have either tried to publish the documents or turn them over to an opposition political party if it had not been for Dalila. However, within the context of the play it is hard to believe that he is the only honest reporter at his newspaper. Lefiero affirms, in Vivir del teatro 2 (Living off the theater 2), that his original model

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 113 for Pepe was a reporter at his own news magazine, Proceso (Proc-

ess), but that “when the character decided to make a profit from the documents, I realized that he didn’t have anything to do with [Francisco] Ortiz Pinchetti and I changed his name.’’'! Lefiero was targeting another type of reporter; Nadie sabe nada is a parodic rebuke, not a tribute. When characterizing the theater of Vicente Lefiero, one thinks of the apparent nemesis of parody: documentary gravity and clear-cut social commentary. The dramatic themes of this author rarely produce laughter, and so perhaps it seems odd to classify Nadie sabe nada as parody. Yet while Webster’s defines parody as “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule,” recent critics have worked to reiterate the historical definitions of the term.'* Simon Dentith notes that for the Greeks, and later the Romans, parody was used “to refer to a... widespread practice of quotation, not necessarily humorous, in which both writers and speakers introduce allusions

to previous texts.’ Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Parody, atfirms that parody “is a form of imitation, but imitation character-

ized by ironic inversion. ... Parody is... repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity.’’'* This definition, while allowing for the humor associated with the contemporary definitions of parody, by no means requires that humor be placed at center stage. The success of political parody, in part, lies in the reaction of the parodied subject or subjects. In “Mi vida con la censura” (My life with censorship), Lefiero describes the censorship that Nadie sabe nada (one of numerous cases of censorship, direct and indirect, that he has experienced) generated: “When the fool De la Madrid had almost completed his term in office, Nadie sabe nada—a political thriller—was staged. Immediately following the debut of the play, the spectators who were bureaucrats voiced trivial fears . . . because the national anthem was played at the end of the show and it represented an insulting irony; because one could hear the voice of the candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari; because ... And so on.” !> Hutcheon indicates that parodic repetition creates a distancing that can

vary “between conservative repetition and revolutionary difference” because parody, like irony, presents two voices at once.!® In other words, parody (like irony) needs to be wielded with caution because the parodic effect (or lack thereof) resides within the individual spectator’’ (though it is unlikely that the use of the national anthem in the final scene of Nadie sabe nada, for example, would have been interpreted as anything but a resounding critique of the

114 STUART A. DAY government). It may have been played in the same key, but it was transposed onto a new context, a context that the government was eager to suppress. Mexico City theater critic Olga Harmony did, however, note a conservative impulse, or at the least an intransigent reinforcement of the status quo, in Lefiero’s presentation of the press: “It is unjust that exactly now, with the emergence of solid, valiant, and honorable journalism, there is not, for the author, that “noble component of journalism’ that would later come to his defense.” '® It is true (and somewhat ironic) that Lefiero received support from multiple newspapers, in Mexico and the US, as he faced the censorship of Nadie sabe nada—it was understood that with this play he was confronting the malignant elements of journalism, and the papers sup-

ported his freedom of expression. The binary, ambivalent

relationship that Lefiero maintains with the field of journalism is what Harmony, at least in this case, fails to register. Lefiero 1s irrefutably known for criticism of that which is closest to him, for example Catholicism” or, in this case, journalism. Nadie sabe nada is an example of what might be called parodic

supplementarity; by presenting a parody (purposefully or not) of the Manual de periodismo and other texts where he promotes the ideal of the profession of journalism, Lefiero disables the possibility of surviving as an honest reporter in the laboratory that is his theatrical newspaper, one that is fictitious but not invented.”° The Manual de periodismo is a text based on the original forty lessons that Lefiero developed for a course on journalism he taught decades ago at the Escuela de Periodismo Carlos Septién, Mexico’s first school dedicated to the profession. Updated by Lefiero and fellow journalist Carlos Marin, the coauthored introduction hints that the elements of the Manual might not correspond to the professional field to which students will be exposed: “Como toda actividad intelectual, el periodismo cumple su funcion en la medida en que se desarrolla no solamente con relativa libertad sino como un ejercicio de liberacion tanto de quien lo practica como quien lo digiere. El periodismo pervierte su funciOn cuando tergiversa, cuando miente, cuando negocia y cuando escamotea informacion” (Like any intellectual activity, journalism fulfils its mission in the measure that it is carried out not only with relative freedom, but also as a liberating exercise by those who practice it as well as those who digest it. Journalism betrays its function when it distorts, lies, negotiates, and when it conceals information). The authors understand that they

are presenting—as they should—an idyllic guide that could potentially cause laughter in certain company. They affirm: “el pe-

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 115 riodismo implica la honradez, la incorruptibilidad del periodista” (journalism implies honesty, the incorruptibility of the journalist).”! In these two texts one observes the struggle between ideals and theatrically documented reality: Nadie sabe nada 1s the supplement that the Manual de periodismo had always already demanded, while the Manual is the admirable antidote to the negative inclinations of the corrupt, purchased press. In this case the dramatic supplement is not a useless appendage, as Rousseau might have it. Jacques Derrida, questioning Rousseau’s affirmation that the supplement is a superfluous appendage, lays bare the complexity of supplementarity, noting that it can signify both fulfillment and accessory. Der-

rida argues in “That Dangerous Supplement .. .” that if a

supplement completes a concept there must exist what he has called

an “originary lack’’—meaning that if something can be supplemented, it is incomplete. This is the process that can be observed in the work of Lefiero: his nonfiction writing on the press from its inception demands a supplement in the form of a reality check, while his fiction yearns for idyllic ethics in an oft-corrupt profession. As Joseph Adamson affirms, “[For Derrida] the supplement represents paradoxically both a violent usurpation and a compensatory substitution.’ The violence in Nadie sabe nada, of course, is not of the philosophical bent but rather the “real life” drama of a necessary transposition. In a 2002 interview on a variety of topics, I asked Lefiero about a comment Luis de Tavira had made regarding La noche de Hernan Cortés (The night of Hernan Cortés). In the introduction to Lefiero’s play, which was directed by de Tavira, the latter noted that with the present-day lack of faith in veracity, “if theater and journalism become blurred, if they fulfill the same function, if

they are structured in the same way, if they are dedicated to the same content, one of them is superfluous.” 7 Lefiero, in his answer, plays Derrida to de Tavira’s Rousseau: “Yes and no,” Lefiero answered, “I believe neither one is superfluous; rather, they complement each other.” 4

The editors of the Cuban edition of the Manual de periodismo indicate that “in his daily struggle, the journalist plays a part in keeping alive the link between humans and their surrounding reality.”*° Lefiero and Marin, in their introduction, share these ideas, ideas that beg to be contextualized, supplemented: “El periodismo es una forma de comunicacion social a través de la cual se dan a conocer y se analizan los hechos de interés publico” (Journalism is a form of communication through which events of general public interest are made known and analyzed).*° Their text recognizes, of course, ambiguity and subjectivity, the impossibility of finding a

116 STUART A. DAY single, overarching “truth.” “Implicita o explicitamente,” they write, “cada texto periodistico entrafia una carga subjetiva, politica, originada en la formacion de cada periodista y en el interés econo-

mico, politico, ideologico, de cada empresa periodistica” (Implicitly or explicitly, every journalistic text carries a subjective, political charge that emerges from the training of every journalist and the economic, political, and ideological interests of every journalistic

enterprise). Nevertheless, the predominant theme in their text, as mentioned above, is the search for the veridical: “Los elementos de cada hecho de interés publico tienen valores consustanciales que correctamente evaluados han de prevalecer en la practica profesional” (The elements of every event of public interest contain values that, correctly evaluated, will prevail in the practice of the profession).?’ As Froylan M. Lopez Narvaez notes in the prologue to the Manual de periodismo, the authors shun postmodern notions of relativity: “They believe there is an entity, a social and professional reality, one that is intentional and moral, called journalistic objec-

tives... . They suppose and want autonomy to be at the heart of journalism and guide the journalist; they want the journalist to determine the rules of informative journalism, its deontology and teleology.” And if the authors do affirm, as Lopez Narvaez indicates, “the tendency to look for a likeness of truth rather than truthfulness,” they also hold that journalists, among other responsibilities, should exercise “a fondness for truth as a responsibility.” Above, I quoted Lefiero’s affirmation that he could not use Pro-

ceso reporter Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti (because he was too “clean” ) as a model for Pepe in Nadie sabe nada. This journalist’ s work is, however, used as an example in the Manual de periodismo; specifically, Lefiero and Marin include in their book an exemplary article by Ortiz Pinchetti entitled “Cuando los narcos de Chihuahua apuestan, ni el gobernador los para” (When the narcos from Chi-

huahua bet, not even the governor can stop them).?? While Ortiz Pinchetti assails the state government of Chihuahua (among others)

through serious reportage, in Nadie sabe nada the reporters offer no criticism of state governments; rather they are supported by them, as the following conversation indicates: Ric. Sigue contando, Efrén. {Qué paso? ;De a como estuvo el chayote? Efren. De a doscientos. Ric. {Doscientos mil pesos nomas? . . . ; Ya! Tonio. Pero si Sonora es un estado rico. Ric. No se compara con Querétaro. ... El gober de Querétaro nos dio quinientos chuchulucos. Medio melon a cada reportero que fue a cu-

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 117 brir el informe. ... A los de la fuente nos toc6 un poquito mas, a los de confianza. Pero lo menos que agarro cualquiera fueron quinientos mil cerrados. Ademas de la barra libre y el desmadre. Habia hasta viejas para los que quisieran, me cae. [Ric. Tell us more, Efren. What happened? How much did he give you? Efren. Two hundred thousand. Ric. Only two hundred thousand pesos? Sure! Toro. But Sonora’s a rich state. Ric. Not 1f you compare it to Querétaro. ... The gov of Querétaro gave

five hundred big ones to all the reporters covering his speech... . Those of us at the source got a little more, you know, to show the confidence they have in us. But the smallest wad was a full five-hundred. Plus the open bar and all the to-do. They even had chicks for those who wanted them, I swear to God. ]*°

This is a parodic repetition (with obvious critical difference and distance) of the model Lefiero and Marin present in the Manual de periodismo, where they implore journalists to resist the temptation to profit illicitly from their trade: “El periodismo implica la honradez, la incorruptibilidad. Quien accede al periodismo .. . con la idea de medrar o de satisf{acer propositos mezquinos con el trafico de influencias puede ser un eficaz negociante o un buen gestor— ‘coyote’—pero no un periodista” (Journalism implies honesty, in-

corruptibility. Whoever comes to journalism with the idea of getting rich or satisfying avaricious objectives through the power of connections can be a very effective negotiator or great manager, but

not a journalist).*! There is a fleeting facade of incorruptibility among the characters of Nadie sabe nada, but it crumbles quickly when confronted with the undeniable assertions of knowing colleagues: Ric. Pues las obreras si que dejan buena feria, ;no Juan José? , Tu cuanto sacas cada mes? {De cuanto es tu sobre en la CTM?

Juan José. Yo no agarro sobre... . RIC. Como que no. Hazte el pendejo. Claro que agarras lo que venga. En el aniversario de la CTM, jno te toc6d un embutazo? .. . ;De cuanto fue? {De quinienton? Juan José. (Sonriendo.) Bueno, cuando me insisten mucho. .. . Efren. Yo también agarro embute, como dicen que decia Artega, porque no me corrompe. Si me corrompiera, no lo agarraria, me cae. Risas.

[Ric. Well, the unions leave a pretty penny, don’t they, Juan José? How much do they drop you every month? How much 1s in that envelope you get from the CTM?

118 STUART A. DAY Juan José. | don’t get an envelope... Ric. Sure you don’t. Play dumb. You take whatever you can get. On the anniversary of the CTM, didn’t you get a take? How much was it? A five-hundred spot? Juan José. (Smiling) Well, only when they insist. Only when they insist

alot...

Efren. | let them give me my take too, because they can’t corrupt me. If the money corrupted me, I wouldn’t take it. Laughter. |**

The characters know their role on the political stage, although at times a rehearsal is still required—as when Juan José presents Pepe with two versions of an article about the then-leader of the Confederacion de Trabajadores de México, Fidel Velazquez. In this case, of course, the script was written by the CT'M; Juan José simply becomes one of many spokespeople for the ultrapowerful and notoriously corrupt labor leader—he 1s the “coyote” about whom Lefiero and Marin write. There is a long history of “collaboration” between the elite class

and the press in Mexico (not to mention other countries, like the United States). In Born in Blood and Fire, John Charles Chasteen writes on the porfiriato, affirming that for journalists “Diaz offered two alternatives: pan o palo.” *? Enrique Krauze, in the introduction to Mexico: Biography of Power, adds the following details: “Dur-

ing Diaz’s reign, the press was hobbled by the Ley Mordaza.... A journalist could be imprisoned for a ‘psychological crime’ or even through a report to the police of his ‘intentions’... . Significantly, from 1896 on, El Imparcial, subsidized by and representing the government, became the most widely read newspaper in Mexico.”*4 In October of 2000, Tim Weiner of the New York Times recalled this longstanding tradition of ethical compromise: “For decades, many

of this nation’s newspaper editors, publishers and reporters were bribed with money, sex, promises of power and other pleasures by the leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has run Mexico since 1929. .. . Many newspapers depended on the money they regularly received for publishing ‘gacetillas,’ paid propaganda posing as news. Many reporters printed the party line in exchange for payoffs. Two-thirds or more of Mexico City’s dailies worked this way, said several editors.” Weiner reported on several clear signs that the rules of the game were about to change, including “the news that Excélsior, born with the 1917 revolution, was broke. Raymundo Riva Palacio, the editor of the respected daily Milenio, said the collapse of Excélsior was the perfect case study to explain

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 119 the change coming to Mexico, its former leading party and the press. ‘It was the most important newspaper in the last century,’ he said. ‘But now the demolition of the old regime is taking its toll, and the newspapers that rely on government financing are having

second thoughts.’”*° This explicit reference to Excélsior ties in with Lefiero’s profession as a journalist*° and indicates a change (perhaps not as abrupt as Weiner describes) in the way politicians and corporations influence the production of news. In our conversation about his first years at Proceso, Lefiero explained that “there was brutal, practical conditioning related to politics; the government owned everything, even the paper. You couldn’t print a newspaper unless they gave you the paper. So journalism made certain

concessions, some corrupt, like selling the eight columns of a paper. If the secretary of the government wants the eight columns, then they would be worth a given amount.”’*’ José Carrefio Carlon,

in “Una historia de subordinacion y apertura en los medios” (A history of subordination and opening up in the media), affirms, writing about Mexico City, that in the past the media “had the State as a principal interlocutor, and the media saw the State as their sus-

tenance, their counterpart, the source of subsidies that topped-off salaries for its journalists, which was a form of subsidizing the company, too. The State underwrote electrical and telephone bills. .. . With the accumulated changes by the 1990s, a larger group of media players had to turn toward the market.”°° In spite of the privatization of the economy, which placed more control in the hands of corporations, Carrefio Carlon, among others, signals that “the fact is that the State has not ended its discretional management of funds tied to the media. It is also true that there is still a culture of subordination and collusion of interests in all areas of society,

including the media. That the dominant actor is no longer the State—in particular, the president, the executive branch, and its entourage—that the State is no longer the principal counterpart of the media does not prevent these, unfortunately, from being inscribed in that deep-rooted culture of corruption.’’*?

We see this contagious corruption that penetrates all social classes in Nadie sabe nada, though Mexican society 1s controlled— and thus corrupted—by the elite. The impudence of the opportunist reporters criticized by Lefiero and Marin in the Manual de periodismo 1s 1n part a result of the circumstances in which they operate, something Lefiero underscores in the final words of his play, just before the national anthem is to be played. As the sensitive documents are being handed over, the editor of the newspaper, Sagrario, speaks with Funcionaria Mayor and the President of the Republic:

120 STUART A. DAY Funcionaria Mayor. (Al teléfono.) Lo logramos sefior. (Sonrie satisfecha y dice a Directora, mientras le pasa la bocina.) El sefior quiere

hablar con usted. Directora Sagrario toma la bocina. Directora Sagrario. (Al teléfono.) —Si sefior. —Si sefior. —Si sefior.

Directora Sagrario devuelve la bocina a Funcionaria Mayor. Funcionaria Mayor. (Al teléfono.) Para eso estamos, sefior Presidente. [High Official. (Into the phone) We got it, sir. (She smiles happily and says to the Editor, while she hands her the receiver: ) He would like to speak to you. Editor Sagrario takes the phone. Sagrario. (Into the phone) —Yes, sir. —Yes, sir. —Yes, sir.

Sagrario returns the receiver to High Official. High Official. (Into the phone) That’s what we’re here for, Mr. President. ]|*°

Kirsten F. Nigro explains the circularity of the play: “When the play ends, the distance traveled is null, for the linear quality of time becomes circular in space: the documents are returned to the executive branch, and everything 1s just like it was before, with ‘nobody knowing anything,’ despite there being, with few exceptions, few innocents. Because of cowardice, corruption, or greed, the majority of the characters are deeply involved in what takes place. Of course,

they all know a lot, but by keeping quiet they do not give on to those who really know nothing.’’*! In spite of the corrupt connections of most characters, however, reporters like Pepe have no op-

portunity—at this type of newspaper—to be “divulgadores de conocimientos” (divulgers of knowledge) even if they wanted to. They are there to say “yes,” even when the answer should be the opposite. Funcionario Mayor, speaking with Pepe, employs the same coercive techniques that have been used since (at least) the porfiriato, pan y palo:

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 121 Funcionario Mayor. Desde luego todo esta bajo control y no hay posibilidad alguna de filtraciones pero no nos gustaria que se provocaran mas muertes ni conflictos extraordinarios. .. . Por eso le agradezco muy encarecidamente su disposiciOn a cooperar. .. . Funcionario Menor. Usted entiende. Nadie que se ofrezca a cooperar con nosotros saldra defraudado. El gobierno en estos casos . . . es muy generoso. [High Official: Naturally everything’s under control and there is absolutely no chance of infiltrators, but we wouldn’t want there to be more deaths or extraordinary conflicts. ... That’s why I am so grateful and indebted to you for your inclination to cooperate with us... Low Official: You understand. No one who decides to cooperate with us will be disappointed. In these cases the government .. . 1s very generous. |*

In a telephone conversation on August 26, 2005, Lefiero declared

that the Manual de periodismo is “a practical guide for the reporter” and that in Nadie sabe nada and other documentary plays he has published “one sees what needs to be corrected, not what has already been corrected.” The Diccionario del espafiol usual en Mexico indicates that corregir, among other connotations, means to “remove the elements or false and misguided ideas from reasoning, substituting them for the true and correct ones,” and to “introduce certain data or complementary results from a complex observation in order to adjust the final result.”** Nevertheless, in the two parallel facets of Lefiero’s career, represented here by Nadie sabe nada and the Manual de periodismo, among other possible examples, one sees not this “final result” but a constant ebb and flow, a constant transposition from one key to another, from professional ideals to documentary realism. In the Manual, the authors prescribe, while in Nadie sabe nada Lefiero—the master of documentary theater— describes. Nadie sabe nada, a concave mirror through which discordant distortion becomes harsh reality, parodies the text by Lefiero and Marin. This parodic supplement represents a perversion that the original has desired since its creation; the Manual de periodismo

contains ex ante a supplement, a latent parody of Nadie sabe nada—a parody of its corruption, of its lack of faith, of its author’s inability to write a traditional thriller that would offer a reporter options, options for a Mexican Watergate. This parodic dialectic un-

derscores the reporting anxiety that divides Lefiero in two, and while it is true that the interpretation of parody resides with the spectator, few would find a conservative impulse in the work of Lefiero. On the contrary, we see a social commitment without

122 STUART A. DAY equal, a constant questioning of the status quo that 1s a step toward social justice, whether or not it provides solutions. We also see, in

the end, that what is published in black and white, fiction or not, always takes on shades of gray. NOTES

1. A version of this essay has been published in Spanish. “Vicente Lefiero y la ansiedad periodistica,” Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contempordnea 11, no. 27 (2005): 51-61. 2. Many music definitions of transpose refer to the rendering of a composition in a different key while maintaining the relative integrity of the original; however, transpose also implies the displacement of the original, “natural” piece of music. In theater terminology, the term refers to the recontextualization of a play.

3. Of the many literary and cinematic references to Watergate, perhaps the most famous is the film version of All the President’s Men (1976), in which Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford play the roles of Bernstein and Woodward.

4. David Brooks, “Sale a luz identidad de Garganta profunda,” La Jornada, June 1, 2005, http://www. jornada.unam.mx/2005/06/01/052n1mun.php.

5. Vicente Lefiero, Vivir del teatro 2 (Mexico City: Joaquin Mortiz, 1990), 138.

6. Ibid., 142. 7. Vicente Lefiero, Nadie sabe nada, in Pelearon diez rounds; Los hijos de Sdnchez; Nadie sabe nada (Mexico City: Escenologia, 1994), 194; No One Knows Anything, trans. Myra S. Gann (Potsdam, NY: Danzon Press, 1995), 5. 8. In the “teatro de la simultaneidad” (simultaneous theater) that Lefiero proposed for the production of Nadie sabe nada, the influence of cinema on the author is clear. Yet while Lefiero has written or co-written over thirty screenplays, Luis de Tavira, as Lefiero writes in Vivir del teatro 2, felt that Nadie sabe nada was “truly theater . . . because only in the theater was it possible to experience nine scenes simultaneously” (144). 9. Kirsten F. Nigro, “;Queé ha pasado aqui? Realidad e hiperrealidad en Nadie sabe nada de Vicente Lefiero,” in Essays in Honor of Frank Dauster, ed. Kirsten F Nigro and Sandra M. Cypess (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1995), 211. 10. Lefiero, Nadie sabe nada, 293; No One Knows Anything, 76. 11. Lefiero, Vivir del teatro 2, 143. 12. Webster’s New World Dictionary and Thesaurus, s.v. “Parody.” 13. Simon Dentith, Parody (New York: Routledge, 2000), 10. 14. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 6. 15. Vicente Lefiero, “Mi vida con la censura,” Pasodegato 1, no. 6 (2003): 21. 16. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 77. 17. Ibid., xvi. 18. Quoted in Lefiero, Vivir del teatro 2, 153. 19. Lefiero’s play Pueblo rechazado (A rejected people, 1968) is one example of his ability to question Catholic ideology, as represented by both the “masses” and the Vatican. 20. Lefiero, in Vivir del teatro 2, notes: “I did not want nor did I need to invent it. El Dia existed as the prototype of the leftist press, supposedly independent and

TRANSPOSING PROFESSIONS: 123 at times contestatory, though in its daily routine it functioned as an official mouth-

piece. Regarding E/ Dia, the characters had to refer to a director—Socorro Diaz—who in my original version does not appear on stage. Later, when we decided to present her in the flesh, I baptized her with a single name: Sagrario” (143). 21. Vicente Lefiero and Carlos Marin, Manual de periodismo (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), 18, 26. 22. Joseph Adamson, “Supplementarity,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 637-38. 23. Luis de Tavira, introduction to La noche de Hernan Cortés, by Vicente Lenero (Mexico City: Ediciones El Milagro, 1994), 17. 24. Stuart A. Day, “Entrevista con Vicente Lefiero,” Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 33, no. 2 (2004): 24. 25. Vicente Lefiero and Carlos Marin, Manual de periodismo (Havana: Editorial Pablo de la Torriente, 1990), x1. 26. Lefiero and Marin, Manual de periodismo, Grijalbo edition, 17. All subsequent citations are to this edition.

27. Ibid., 18. 28. Froylan M. Lopez Narvaez, prologue to Manual de periodismo, by Vicente Lefiero and Carlos Marin (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1986), 15, 23. 29. Lefiero and Marin, Manual de periodismo, 241. 30. Lefiero, Nadie sabe nada, 230, 232; No One Knows Anything, 31, 33. 31. Lefiero and Marin, Manual de periodismo, 18, 26-27. 32. Lefiero, Nadie sabe nada, 235-36; No One Knows Anything, 34-35. 33. John Charles Chasteen, Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (New York: Norton, 2001), 193. 34. Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810-1996 (New York: Harper, 1997), 9. 35. Tim Weiner, “Mexico Ending Coziness for Press and Powerful,” New York Times, October 29, 2000. 36. In 1976 there was an exodus of cooperatistas from Excélsior as a result of political persecution on the part of the government of President Luis Echeverria.

Shortly thereafter, several of the excollaborators from Excélsior, led by Julio Scherer and with Lefiero as spokesperson, formed a news agency. In November 1976, the last month of Echeverria’s sexenio, they published the first editions of Proceso, the news magazine of which Lefiero 1s still part owner, although he is no longer involved in day-to-day operations. Lefiero documents the Excélsior debacle

in his “novela-testimonio” Los periodistas (Journalists), a text that, like Nadie sabe nada and the Manual de periodismo, addresses the issue of ethics and journalism. Danny J. Anderson notes: “In Journalists, the movement of the novel, from the beginning of the conflict to its crises and resolution, is joined to a Manichean characterization of ‘good’ journalists against bad ones. This suggests how honest journalists were able to resist and overturn the underhanded manipulation of ‘bad’ journalists.” “Novela, mundo, critica: el género como estrategia en la novelistica de Vicente Lefiero,” in Lecturas desde afuera: Ensayos sobre la obra de Vicente Lefero, ed. Kirsten F Nigro (Mexico City: Ediciones El Milagro, 1997), 35. 37. Day, “Entrevista,” 19. 38. José Carrefio Carlon, “Una historia de subordinacion y apertura de los medios,” in Escenarios de la transicioén en México, ed. Gaston Luken Garza and Virgilio Mufioz (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2003), 102.

39. Ibid., 102-3.

124 STUART A. DAY 4Q. Lefiero, Nadie sabe nada, 350; No One Knows Anything, 119-20. 41. Nigro, “;Qué ha pasado aqui?” 209. 42. Lefiero, Nadie sabe nada, 284—85; No One Knows Anything, 69-70. 43. Diccionario del espafiol usual en México, ed. Luis Fernando Lara (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1996), s.v. “Corregir.”

Transference and Negotiation: Sabina Berman Plots Dora and Freud Amalia Gladhart ‘THE PAST AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF IT IS A RECURRING THEME IN

plays both traditional and experimental. Staging the past becomes a

way to clarify what really happened, either in the shared, public past of historical experience or in the imagined past of invented characters. Theater is at once immediate (live performance) and distant (relegated to the audience’s memory almost at once, yet often written down in the form of a script, available to the memory of either spectator or critic). Potentially reproducible, codified yet variable, the theater provides a rich arena for the consideration not

only of the concrete events of a specific past, but of the way in which individuals or groups might have access to that past. In plays such as Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud (Happy new century, Doc-

tor Freud, 2000) and Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Pancho Villa and a Naked Woman, 1993), Sabina Berman reinvents

historical characters—and the process of historical discourse— through a theatrical lens. Berman’s plays reveal a variety of histori-

cal themes, among them the conquest of Mexico (Aguila o sol [Heads or tails], 1985), French theater (Moliére, 1998) and the Inquisition in Mexico (Herejia/En el nombre de Dios | Heresy], 1983/ 1996). This essay will consider Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud and the ways in which identities and perceptions are transferred, negoti-

ated, and reinvented in the play.'! Clearly based upon historical events, the play nevertheless hinges on the interplay of characters determined to define (or defend) a particular version of a private memory imperfectly shared. It is a play of transference and transmission, as the roles are replayed and, in the process, communicated (again) to the audience. Transference in Berman’s play might best be thought of broadly, not only in the psychoanalytic sense but

in terms of transfer or exchange, as roles are shared, gestures are appropriated, and plots are reworked or translated from one version to another, from one historical time period to another, from one individual memory to another. 125

126 AMALIA GLADHART The plot of Feliz nuevo siglo is essentially concerned with the negotiations of the characters surrounding what happens between and among them but also—perhaps more importantly for its larger theoretical implications—what happened in the past and what they make of it. The audience, too, is left with multiple, sometimes contradictory, representations. In the century that has elapsed since Freud’s analysis of Dora, myriad interpretations of his work, both laudatory and critical, have given rise to the multiple versions of Freud found in Berman’s play. Freud’s work on human sexuality has been a point of reference, even for those who take issue with some or all of his ideas. Berman’s play acknowledges Freud’s influence while drawing attention both to the content of Freud’s writings—was he wrong about Dora?—and to the intrinsic instability of any conclusions based on attempts to reconstruct and interpret individual memories. The characters’ disagreements about the plot further reflect a difficulty of representation, particularly the representation of the past, a difficulty the play highlights but which it does not necessarily resolve. Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud, first staged in Mexico City in November of 2000, presents the famous case of “Dora” that Freud describes in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” published in 1905. The play combines scenic fragmentation, few actors in multiple roles, and repeated (re)enactments of a few scenes to highlight a reading of Dora as both misunderstood and abused by the men who surrounded her. Feliz nuevo siglo comprises a rapid sequence of twenty-one scenes, many of which present action in widely separate parts of the stage. The “reading” of Dora’s case as presented in the play suggests that Dora was not, in fact, all that neurotic. The play presents Freud’s narrative of the case, Dora’s disagreement with his conclusions, her attempt to flee to Leipzig and study on her own, and her rape by Herr K on the train. Dora returns to Freud’s office some years later. In the final scene Dora and Ana Freud cross paths, and Freud begins writing, closing with the memorable words, “Una infelicidad .. . general y diffusa... es el signo .. . de la buena adaptacion” (43) [A general and diffuse

... unhappiness .. . is the sign . . . of successful adaptation]. In Berman’s play, Dora’s sexuality is a tangle of crossed desires and understandable fears; she is at once ingenuous and knowing, victimized and manipulative, self-assured and defeated. Peter Brooks argues, in Reading for the Plot, that “plots are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving.’? Brooks’s theory, drawing heavily on Freud, is particularly apt here, as it describes the work-

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 127 ings of plot and highlights the importance of transference, two elements central to Berman’s theatrical representation of Freud. The plot of Freud’s analysis of Dora must be her treatment and eventual cure, although this is frustrated in both the original case history and in Berman’s play, but the history play is structured by another level of plotting, the preexisting structure of the historical record. The intention, then, is double (or multiple), as the events of the past, perhaps relatively random or disordered in their first occurrence, are replotted into a more or less fictionalized scheme. Freud’s case study, it should be stressed, represents a first deliberate plotting,

that is, a narrative shaping of events. In addition, in the plot of Dora’s analysis itself, as detailed in the published case study and as performed in the play, there is disagreement as to intention, for the determination of what is to be cured remains at issue. Berman’s play, finally, in its representation of Freud’s case study, plots those events yet again. In doing so, it replays both the importance that Freud’s plotting of Dora has had for subsequent writers, and the ways in which Freud inserts/plots Dora into an interpretive frame-

work that she patently does not fit. The complexities of Dora’s inner conflicts, misconstrued or repressed in Freud’s analysis, evidently fall beyond the scope of his interpretive lens. Feliz nuevo siglo presents an example of what Freddie Rokem terms “performing history.”” Rokem writes: “History can only be perceived as such when it becomes recapitulated, when we create some form of discourse, like the theater, on the basis of which an organized repetition of the past is constructed, situating the chaotic torrents of the past within an aesthetic frame.”? In his discussion of contemporary stagings of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, Rokem further argues that “the theater can seduce us to believe that

it is possible for the actor to become a witness for the now dead witnesses.”* In contrast to a play like Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda, in which the one fully historical character (Villa) seems as much a figure out of a movie as out of the past, in Feliz nuevo siglo all of the characters are drawn from the historical record. Even the

young Gloria, in her 1970s attire, might be taken for Gloria Steinem.° The history performed in Feliz nuevo siglo is also a part of the history of sexuality, and particularly of Freud’s interpretation

or distortion of Dora’s sexuality and the long-lasting echoes of those interpretations across the twentieth century. Berman’s play “redoes” the case of Dora, plays it again and redoes it as one might redo a room, but also redoes it in a deeper sense, that of repeating a past action in hopes of getting it right. Thus, the actors do seem to become witnesses for the absent, misunderstood young woman

128 AMALIA GLADHART masked by the name of Dora. Whether their witnessing can achieve justice for Dora, and what shape that justice might take, remains an open question. In The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson asserts that drama “has always been centrally concerned not simply with the telling of stories but with the retelling of stories already known to its public.”®

Feliz nuevo siglo falls within this tradition and makes implicit claims to both familiarity and truth. The audience has heard the story before, and believes that the events—or some version of them—really happened. According to Rokem, “theatrical performances about historical events are aesthetic adaptations or revisions of events that we more or less intuitively (or on the basis of some form of general knowledge or accepted consensus) know to have actually occurred. The theater, by performing history, is thus redoing something which has already been done in the past, creating a

secondary elaboration of this historical event.”’ That redoing in turn is often far from simple. Rokem suggests that “what may be seen as specific to the theater in dealing directly with the historical past is its ability to create an awareness of the complex interaction between the destructiveness and the failures of history, on the one hand, and the efforts to create a viable and meaningful work of art, trying to confront these painful failures, on the other.”® Redoing a destructive or painful past reawakens some of that violence in the present—hence the delicate tension that Rokem describes. The history play’s engagement with an identifiable past may further press the audience to recognize its present in the past portrayed. The play may highlight the negotiation inherent in all communication; it may offer an interpretation of events that goes counter to accepted histories and/or questions the nature of theatrical representation. The historical episode that Berman chose to reenact centers on a

past in dispute as it took place (the question of who did what to Dora; Freud’s disbelief, mirroring her parents’ disbelief, of Dora’s accusations). Memory offers the only access to the material to be analyzed. Memory is always in a sense working on borrowed time, available and present only so long as the individual survives, and concerned with a time (the past) that is no longer directly available. Moreover, memory is conditioned by loss, and is as much a process of forgetting as of retaining information. As Freud works through Dora’s analysis, memory becomes something that hides, that is hidden. Yet Dora 1s also, with Freud, part of the memory, the historical record, of the twentieth century. And memory, of course, 1s activated in the attention of the theatrical audience as well. As Brooks points out, “memory—as much in reading a novel as in seeing a

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 129 play—is the key faculty in the capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles and ends through time, the shaping power of narrative.”’ In other words, there is no plot without memory.’ In the case study, Freud himself acknowledges the role of memory in the writing of the case, noting two, widely separated, moments of recording and interpretation: “The wording of [Dora’s] dreams was recorded immediately after the session, and they thus afforded a secure point of attachment for the chain of interpretations and recollections which proceeded from them. The case history itself was only committed to writing from memory after the treatment was at an end.” Freud does not, however, suggest that the reliance on memory undermines his case. On the contrary, he asserts that “the record is not absolutely—phonographically—exact, but it can claim to possess a high degree of trustworthiness.” !! Intriguingly, the photographic memory so often used as a shorthand description of superlative accuracy is here transposed to the realm of sound. But in transcribing his recollections of Dora’s words— transferring them to the page—Freud enacts yet another transfer, this time of medium. Dora, no longer present, takes on a purely textual existence. The Dora available to Berman’s theater is the accretion of Freud’s contemporary accounts combined with subsequent writings by Freud on other topics and by others on Freud’s work. One premise of Berman’s play would seem to be that the accuracy Freud claims to have achieved is overstated. Freud is presented as having mistaken Dora’s symptoms and their causes at every turn. If his memory has not failed him, his chain of interpretations has. When Dora resists Freud’s reading of her dream, accusing him of an unwillingness to take her side, Freud tells her that, if the dream does not mean she loves Herr K, her No must be a Yes. Dora, per-

plexed, demands, “;En qué planeta un No es un Si?” (On what planet is a No a Yes?), to which Freud replies, “el inconsciente” (the unconscious). Dora, defeated, concludes, “Si cae cara usted gana, y Si cae cruz yo pierdo” (33) [If 1t comes up heads you win,

and if it comes up tails I lose]. Here, Berman’s Dora echoes the historical Freud who, as Peter Gay notes, wrote a paper long after Dora’s partial analysis in which he “characterized the analyst’s problem of proof with the English saying, “Heads I win, tails you

lose.’ 7

Freud ascribes the failure of Dora’s analysis, in part, to the fact that he failed fully to understand the transference at work.'? Brooks

underscores this point, and goes on to suggest that Dora’s case “reads like a flawed Victorian novel, one with a ramifying cast of characters and relations that never can be brought into satisfactory

130 AMALIA GLADHART form.” '* In staging Dora’s case, Berman presents one attempt to re-

form the material, to give it a shape that might, as Brooks writes elsewhere of a process of narration and transference, work ‘“‘to make an obsessive story from the past present and to assure its negotiability within the framework of ‘real life’.”'° In Feliz nuevo siglo, an obsessive story of the past—the story of Dora so frequently reconsidered and reinterpreted—is brought into the “real lite’ of the stage. Brooks’s discussion of transference and narrative addresses certain of the tensions between past and present evident in Berman’s play. A key element in any narrative, as Brooks emphasizes, is its capacity for transmission; the teller requires a listener. Brooks argues that the analyst reshapes the analysand’s flawed, incomplete story, “attempting to translate it back into the terms of the past.” '® That is, to return to the story the meaning it had in the past, a meaning, in the case of Dora, very much in dispute. Brooks suggests that “there is in the dynamics of the transfer-

ence at once the drive to make the story of the past present—to actualize past desire—and the countervailing pressure to make the history of this past definitively past.”'’ Berman’s reenactment of a reenactment takes it a step further, as the meaning Dora’s story had in the past is given new meaning in the present. There are two sto-

ries being told in this play: the story Dora tells to Freud and the story of Freud’s analysis of Dora (a story that goes beyond the material contained in his case study).

In the play, Freud appears in triplicate. Freud 2 is also, with a slight change of costume, Herr K, the husband of Dora’s father’s mistress and the man Dora accuses of having kissed her inappropriately and sexually propositioned her. Freud 3 is also Herr FK Dora’s father. Dora 1s surrounded, and the discourse of the three becomes

equivalent. The transformation occurs in front of the audience, making the point yet more clearly. The multiple Freuds provide, among other things, a visual representation of transference: accord-

ing to Berman’s Freud, Dora saw in him first her father and later Herr K. The dual roles played by Freuds 2 and 3 make it clear that they are, for all intents and purposes, speaking with one voice. In similar fashion, the same actor plays the young Dora, Ana Freud, and Gloria. That Dora is also Gloria suggests gently that Gloria’s is “her” voice in the future. Moreover, the requirement that the same actor play both the young Dora and Ana Freud highlights Freud’s identification of his patient with his daughter. Finally, a single female actor plays all the remaining female characters, among them Martha Freud, Frau K, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Frau K Rank, and the adult Dora.

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 131 Suffering from shortness of breath, loss of voice, and a persistent nervous cough, Dora—Ida Bauer—was treated by Freud in 1900 at her father’s request, a treatment cut short by Dora herself. She has been and continues to be the subject of numerous studies, plays, and fictional accounts.'* The published Dora case is itself preceded by explanatory notes by Freud, which are in turn dramatized in Berman’s play as Freud explains to the audience his motives in publishing the case study. The three Freuds, in a mutually interrupting chorus, protest the way his publications have been read, at least in “morbosa Viena” (morbid Vienna) as romans a clef, “noveluchas” (cheap novels), “pornograficas” (pornographic), “al estilo Sherlock Holmes” (in the style of Sherlock Holmes), “sin ningun valor cientifico” (without any scientific value). Freud concludes, “Esto debido a su énfasis en el tema sexual y, seguin me han explicado, a la fina redaccion de la que soy capaz” (6—7) [AIlI this due to their emphasis on the sexual theme, and to the fine writing of which I am capable, or so I have been told].'!? What Freud’s texts say is already in dispute, even before the action of the play begins. Berman’s Dora iS NO passive victim, and she is fully aware of Freud’s textual identity. She manages to insult Freud even as she asks him to autograph his books for her, noting that the titles were extremely hard to find. Though the scarcity of his books might be an index of high demand, Freud’s response—“parpadea: tiene su orgullo, no le gusta saber

que las librerias no tienen su obra” (23) [he blinks; he has his pride, he does not like to think that the bookstores do not have his work|—suggests that he resents Dora’s insinuation that his books have been poorly distributed. Freud acts as narrator and intermediary, introducing to the audi-

ence the scenes or episodes to be enacted or redone. The three Freuds, and the dual roles played by Freuds 2 and 3, ensure that Freud’s interpretive presence is never far from center stage. Scene 2 presents the meeting between Freud and Herr F Dora’s father, in which the latter describes his daughter’s symptoms. Dora, physi-

cally separated from the two men, nonetheless experiences the physical impact of her father’s blows. When Dora accuses him of lying, Herr F in Freud’s office, states, “La abofeteé” (8) [I slapped her], and Dora receives the blow. The division of the stage allows for the dramatization of a dispute that would otherwise appear only as narrative recollection. Dora’s narrative to Freud 1s in turn a redoing or reliving of the experiences that allegedly form the basis of her hysteria. The play points up a central redoing (performing) and a memory problem embedded within the events it sets out both to reproduce and to question. The transmission of Dora’s experience

132 AMALIA GLADHART is blocked, to the extent that Freud is unwilling or unable to accept

her point of view. Freud’s explanation to the audience serves to clarify the plot and guide audience interpretation. His explanation also reminds the spectator that the issues in question on stage are also in question over time; the meaning has not yet been resolved. At various points, Freud’s explanations to the audience drown out the words of the other characters. Freud fills the stage and dominates the plot, both verbally and physically. At the end of scene 3, dialogue is reproduced through Herr F’s retrospective narration of events, yet the speakers remain physically separated, and the events described belong to the past of the play’s action. Thus, Herr F describes Dora’s suicide attempt to Freud: Herr F. Encontré la carta, subi a su habitaciO6n, como le he dicho. Dora tenia en la mano un frasco de sedantes, se lo tiré de la mano...

(En otra drea menos distante que la de su primera aparicion, Dora

tiene la mano extendida, abre la palma y caen unas pastillas

rojas...)

Herr F. Guardé el frasco de sedantes en mi saco. Ella me dijo. Dora. Has elegido. Yo debo morir. Herr F. Le pedi que fuera sensata, pero ella siguio en su tono draméatico. Dora. Es natural: te conviene creerle a él, porque tu y ella son amantes. (9)

[Herr F. | found the letter, I went up to her room, as I have told you. Dora was holding a bottle of sedatives, I tore it from her hand... (In another area, less distant than that of her first appearance, Dora has her hand extended; she opens her palm and a few red pills fall. . .) Herr F. I put the bottle of sedatives in my jacket. She said to me. Dora. You have chosen. I should die.

Herr F. I asked her to be sensible, but she continued in her dramatic tone.

Dora. It’s natural: it serves you to believe him, because she and you are lovers. |

As in the previous scene, Dora accuses her father of lying and adds, ‘Todo seria mas facil para ti y esa puta” (Everything would be easier for you and that whore). Again her father says that he slapped her; again, Dora receives the blow (9). The element of repetition 1s important, both as part of memory and as a key component of theat-

rical representation. Repetition is ultimately fundamental to all memory. Patrick Hutton describes what he terms “two moments of memory: repetition and recollection. Repetition concerns the pres-

ence of the past. It is the moment of memory through which we bear forward images of the past that continue to shape our present

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 133 understanding in unreflective ways. .. . Recollection concerns our present efforts to evoke the past. It is the moment of memory with which we consciously reconstruct images of the past in the selective way that suits the needs of our present situation.’”’° The play is an act of recollection, an evocation of the past that encloses within its action (or plot) prior acts of repetitive recollection. As an act of recollection, the play is a deliberate and selective recreation. Undertaken in the present, the act of recollection is part of a reevaluation of the significance of Dora’s case from the vantage point of the turn of the twenty-first century. The play is marked by the repetition of gestures as well as words. Freud’s habit of touching his ear so as to surreptitiously look at the clock occurs several times. This skillful staging of a small neurosis reflects, in its repetition, the obsessive nature of the characters as well as the theatricality of the piece. Dora moves physically closer to Freud over the course of several scenes, and finally, at the end of

scene 3, is seated on the divan in Freud’s office. Freud, using Dora’s own quotation mark gesture, tells her that “existen recuerdos ‘nerviosos’” [11] (there are “nervous” recollections). Freud adopts Dora’s gestures as a way of quoting, and perhaps mocking her, a small action that nonetheless contributes to the tangled relationship of mingled familiarity and distance between the two char-

acters. Importantly, the exchange of gestures works in both directions. Freud, whether deliberately or involuntarily, identifies himself with Dora. Dora, in turn, notices what Freud believes (or hopes) is a subtle gesture and takes it on as her own. As she prepares to leave their final session, Dora, too, scratches her left ear with her right hand so as to look at the clock on the desk. Dora’s appropriation of Freud’s gesture is one more way to turn the tables. She is no passive object of analysis but actively resists Freud’s interpretation—and appropriation—of her experience, her way of moving through the world. Jacqueline Bixler points out the intertextual self-reference, in Feliz nuevo siglo, to Berman’s 65 contratos para hacer el amor, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde.*! The reference to Schnitzler’s play is also important in theatrical terms, calling attention to the role of the theater in forming perceptions. In the case of Feliz nuevo siglo, we watch a play in which Dora’s memories of another play, repressed and reconfigured, are said to explain her behavior. Dora’s “perversions” are blamed on her exposure to “indecent” material. Herr K notes, rather accusingly, that Herr F has taken his daughter to see La Ronde, “el ultimo escandalo del nuevo teatro vienés” (16) [the latest scandal of the new Viennese theater].

134 AMALIA GLADHART Noting that in an hour and a half La Ronde describes some ten seductions, one every seven minutes, Herr K argues that it is perfectly normal that such a play would feed Dora’s imagination.’? Berman’s Dora, in turn, has no trouble pinpointing the source of her prob-

lems. Her own self-diagnosis clearly comprehends her physical symptoms as a reflection of her entrapment or incapacity to act, lik-

ening her cough to an active, if ineffectual, resistance. She tells Freud that her nervous cough is far preferable to the asthma she suffered as a child, and even reflects improved conditions in her home, as compared to the “ambiente. . . irrespirable” (suffocating ... atmosphere) of earlier years. When Freud asks why coughing is

preferable, Dora explains that “el asma es asi. . . Umita tener asma.) No poder hacer nada. Y toser es para afuera, asi.” (30) [asthma is like this .. . (She imitates having asthma.) Being unable

to do anything. And coughing is toward the outside, like this. |] Coughing represents a positive action, an attempt to expel a con-

taminant and to resist stasis. Dora’s attempt to speak for herself, whether with words or with

her insistent coughs, is hindered at every turn. Even those who might seem to be her allies are unable or unwilling to defend her. An important character in the play is Lou Andreas-Salomé (18611937), best remembered for her friendships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, though she was a novelist and critic in her own right and a practicing psychoanalyst.7? Lou Salomé appears as Freud’s interlocutor, listening to his description of his treatment of Dora and asking for further clarification. Lou asks Freud, “en esta sesion que usted me narra... {hablo usted o hablo ella?” (in this session which you are relating, did you speak, or did she?), to which Freud replies, “Dora,” while Lou, to the audience, confirms, “El” (He) [21-22]. Lou urges Freud to recognize Herr K’s aggression against Dora, but she is unable to redirect his thinking. The three Freuds later confirm Dora’s “homosexual tendencies” and her attraction to Frau K, desires exacerbated by her own identification with her father as well as by her father’s wish that she should be his heir. As Lou puts it, “para el padre ella también es él“ (24) [her father also sees her as himself]. When the men discuss Dora’s reaction to Herr K’s advances in terms of the sexual arousal that “cualquier mujer besada” (any woman kissed) might feel, Lou offers an alternative explanation, suggesting that Dora experiences not a spreading arousal but fear and rejection: “El rechazo. La protesta. Un NO expresado con el cuerpo entero” (Rejection. Protest. A NO expressed with the entire body). Acknowledging this No, Freud sees it only as a response

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 135 to Dora’s recognition of her a priori mutilation, the castration intrinsic to womanhood. Her cough is a protest at being “irremediablemente, solo una mujer” (25) [irremediably, only a woman]. It is not, in Freud’s view, an attempt to expel the contaminated air that she feels is poisoning her. Listening to Freud’s misogynist description of a woman as “un hombrecito sin pene” (a littke man without a penis), Lou tells the audience, “Me senti insultada, claro, y sumamente mujer. Como si un rubor recorriera todo mi femenino cuerpo” (25) [I felt insulted, of course, and extremely female. As if a flush covered all of my feminine body]. On another part of the stage, dressed in the style of the 1970s, another woman appears, Gloria, who argues, while the three Freuds enumerate the absurd results that would no doubt follow should the Viennese suffragists succeed, that it is natural for any human being to resist being enslaved. Lou admits, ultimately, that she was unable to say No to her intellectual father and points out the impossibility of applying contemporary terms to older debates. She instead underscores Freud’s genius in discovering the subconscious, which she likens to adding an entire cellar to the “house” of culture. Lou suggests that culture 1s “una casa hecha de ideas y no podemos pensar nada fuera de esa casa” (a house made of ideas and we cannot think anything outside of this house) and goes on to argue, “apenas ahora, en esta discusiOn imaginaria, se me puede ocurrir el simil de cultura y casa—por un suefio que Dora tuvo durante su tratamiento. Usted recuerda: Una casa se incendiaba y Dora dentro de la casa se asfixiaba” (26) [only now, in this imaginary discussion, could the simile of culture and house occur to me—because of a dream that Dora had during her treatment. You remember: A house was burning and Dora inside the house was suffocating]. In her dialogue with Gloria, Lou can recognize that Dora’s culture was suffocating her, yet she admits that such a critique never occurred to her at the time. She notes that “‘a nadie de los astutos y brillantes alumnos de Freud se les ocurrio. . . . Excepto—qué curioso—a Dora, una nifia de 17 afios” (26) [None of Freud’s astute and brilliant students thought of it... . Except—how curious—Dora, a seventeen-year-old girl]. In describing the situation, Lou can also call on Gloria’s cultural memory: “usted recuerda” (26) [you remember]. There is a visual irony as well, given that the same woman plays both Dora and Gloria: of course she remembers. Bixler notes that “as a woman and, moreover, as a female scientist at the end of the century, Lou cannot occupy the center of the stage. She appears and speaks several times, but always from one side of the stage and

136 AMALIA GLADHART almost always to the audience.’’** Lou is presented as a contemporary of Freud who could and should have said more and yet she is

excused due to time, circumstance, and cultural pressures. Although the actors appear to become witnesses for the long dead Dora or Lou, it is a fictional witnessing, as this exchange reminds us. The plot is a later, and also variable, construction. Dora’s pleasure in trying to shock Freud with her sexual knowledge is evident, as when she says that she talks about sex with Frau K (11). Yet Dora remains in some ways a child, so that while her description, to Freud, of Frau K’s affair with her father includes explicit references to Herr F’s impotence, when the sexual encoun-

ter is reenacted for the audience, it is highly stylized: “Como si fuera un luchador de lucha grecorromana Herr F tumba a Frau K——es la percepcion de una nifia” (18) [As if he were a GrecoRoman wrestler, Herr F knocks Frau K down—this is a little girl’s perception]. The link between narration (telling) and performance is again important here, for while Dora’s words express a self-conscious sophistication, the audience also sees her father’s affair performed as if through a child’s eyes. Yet the reenactment is at the same time a staging of Freud’s understanding of Dora’s words. The childishness of Dora’s perceptions may reflect Freud’s views much more than her own imaginings, as is suggested when Freud, drawn back from his reverie by Dora’s request for a mint, “sacude la cabeza para dejar de imaginar el coito” (18) [shakes his head so as to stop imagining their coitus]. Berman’s play goes on to stage Dora’s mutilation, invoking a cure that Lou describes as “cirugia mayor” (32) [major surgery]. As Lou explains, “Si la enfermedad de la mujer independiente es un falo imaginario, hay que cortar el falo” (82) [If the illness of the independent woman is an imaginary phallus, it is necessary to cut off that phallus]. As Freud approaches, Dora lies on a gurney in a surgical theater, covered with a sheet. When Freud uncovers her,

the naked Dora sobs “como un animal herido” (32) [like a

wounded animal], further emphasizing her less-than-human status as a woman. The surgery, however, is interrupted by Dora’s insistence that she is suffocating, in her dream, not for the reasons Freud asserts but because the cigar smoke of the men who surround her makes it impossible to breathe. Feliz nuevo siglo stages the process of Freud’s work as well as the end result. The audience sees Freud at work in his study, struggling to find the clearest expression of his ideas. Freud’s writing is interrupted by his daily life, in the person of his wife and his daugh-

ter, who at different times enter the study to call him to supper.

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 137 Meditating upon the insights gleaned from his treatment of Dora, Freud highlights among them the transference and is at that moment surprised by his daughter Ana, bearing a tray: Ana. Papa Freud 3. Tales como la transferencia— Freud. (Alzando despacio el rostro.) Si, Do... Freud 2. {Do .. .? ;Dora! Freud 3. No; Ana. Ana. (14) [ANA. Papa

Freud 3. Such as the transference— Freud. (Slowly looking up.) Yes, Do.. . Freud 2. Do .. .? Dora! Freud 3. No; Ana. Ana. |

Here Freud’s transference—not Dora’s—is enacted, as his daughter becomes his patient. Ana Freud is present for many of the discussions between the three Freuds or between Freud and Lou. She ap-

pears initially in an entirely subservient role, offering to serve coffee or tea to her father and his guests (or to the several Freuds), but she is eventually invited to sit down and join the conversation. Still, her participation in the discussion is equivocal. Although Lou confirms that “desde esa tarde, se sento a menudo con nosotros, aun cuando hablaramos de casos clinicos” (27) [from that afternoon on, she would often sit with us, even when we were discussing clinical cases], her speech is at first limited to offers of sugar or cookies; between these terse interventions, Ana freezes. The slippages of parental identification are further complicated when Freud asks that Lou “ocupe en la Psique de mi hija el lugar de la Madre” [occupy the Mother’s place in my daughter’s Psyche]. Lou, speaking directly to the audience, concludes: “Asi fue que fui la madre de la

hija de mi padre intellectual” (27) [So it was that I became the mother of the daughter of my intellectual father]. The element of humor in this scene, carried in the tongue-twisting rhythm of Lou’s repetitive “asi fue que fui,” also tends to highlight the absurdity of Freud’s proposition as he seeks an intellectual mother to his daughter, thereby redoing his own family at the same time that he seeks to treat (and cure) the families of others. Ana’s participation in later scenes, however, 1s more authoritative, and she takes her place as her father’s colleague. Although the fact that she is a woman might tend to disrupt the continuity of Freud’s work and perhaps begin to counter his misogyny, Ana remains to some extent in a subordinate

position. She is his intellectual heir, so that, in carrying out her

138 AMALIA GLADHART work, she also carries forward his. Lou, by contrast, were she to receive her due, would have to do so as an equal. Such equality, in Berman’s rendering of Freud, remains impossible. For her final session with Freud, on December 31, Dora appears dressed as a man, visually indicating that his treatment has failed. Rather than acceding to the prescribed emplotment, and the restrictive gender roles it offers, she takes on the outward appearance of

the dominant gender.*? Dora resists Freud’s arguments that she must continue her treatment, and finally leaves, wishing him a happy new year—and new century. She is off to the university in Leipzig. Yet her escape is unsuccessful; the male costume affords her neither male autonomy nor freedom of movement. On the train She encounters Herr K, who reaffirms his love for her and later, after the train has twice passed through a tunnel—evident to the theater audience in the abrupt cutting of the lights—Herr K “le ha tomado violentamente por el pelo con una mano mientras con la

otra la abraza: exactamente el mismo movimiento que le conocimos con su esposa, Frau K. Levanta su ropa y la penetra con un dedo, una y otra vez, mientras el grito de ella se pierde en el aullido del silbato del tren” (40) [has taken her violently by the hair with

one hand while he embraces her with the other: exactly the same movement that we saw with his wife, Frau K. He lifts her clothing and penetrates her with a finger, again and again, while her cry is lost in the howl of the train whistle]. If Freud’s diagnosis of homosexual desire is correct, Dora’s desire for Frau K is here punished by Herr K’s assault; Dora does not get to “have” Frau K, but is instead forced to replace her. Herr K substitutes Dora for his wife, just as Freud has earlier substituted her for his daughter. Dora becomes a kind of wild card, the token of multiple transferences far beyond the transference in her own treatment, which Freud acknowledged he had failed to master. As a celebrated case history, moreover, the experience of the historical Ida Bauer is subordinated

to the multiple rereadings and redoings of the fictional Dora and her truncated analysis. The shopworn “train in the tunnel” and the treatment of Dora that repeats the treatment of Frau K by her husband foreclose Dora’s attempted escape with another cluster of repetitions, so that the audience sees Dora trapped in her own circular

life story and in an alienating script. Dora’s life story is circular because, in a historical play, the audience already “knows” the end-

ing. More important, however, is the script of a gender role that Dora can neither adequately perform nor successfully evade. The scene in which the founders of psychoanalysis ice skate to-

gether and pose for commemorative photographs offers another

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 139 kind of redoing, an enactment of a visual document, in this case a group portrait taken at one of the various international congresses. Immediately following the presentation of Dora’s violation on the train to Leipzig, scene 19 opens with four prosperous men skating. The early luminaries of psychoanalysis introduce one another in

turn, each reciting the titles of his or her numerous books. Ana Freud takes her place at the center of the group beside her father and recites her titles as well. All of the skaters assemble for the photograph, and the scene ends with the burst of a flash bulb. The dramatization of the scene establishes a tension between the photographic image frozen in time—and our sense of the “reality” of that photograph—and the way it 1s made to move and “live” again on stage. The mannered grace of the skating rink is an appropriate ground for the highly choreographed presentation of the great men. Visually, the scene suggests that the psychoanalysts occupy shaky ground; they are poised on a slippery slope, skating on thin ice. But perhaps more important is the evocation of balance and strength, for Freud is able to glide across the ice untroubled by the “bumps” on the surface that a case such as Dora’s ought to represent. The placement of the scene within the structure of Berman’s play also implies that the peaceful, even playful, afternoon outing of this group of scholars and physicians depends upon the disappearance of Dora’s messy and uncomfortable complaints. In the play’s final scene Dora, now thirty-two years old, is again seated in Freud’s office. She is pale, worn, her heavy makeup giving her the appearance of a geisha, as if, in a way, she were now in female disguise. She describes her life to Freud—an unfaithful husband, a son, night-school classes in sociology and art history— and tells him she has heard much about his daughter’s work as a psychoanalyst. She describes her pride at being identified as one of Dr. Freud’s famous cases, but Freud ultimately does not have time for her. As she leaves, she runs into Ana Freud, and helps her retrieve some dropped papers, watching the other woman as an example of what might have been. At this point, Ana is played by the actress who also played the young Dora, so that the sense of possibilities lost is the more poignant. The play closes with Freud, carefully writing his next work. From the perspective of twenty-first-century feminism, Berman’s Freud is almost too easy a target, a straw man whose fundamental misogyny is often laughable. What the theatrical representation of Freud and Dora offers, however, is a demonstration of both the issues involved in the case and the reason for its staying power, for

Freud’s persistent influence: the performance that is the doing

140 AMALIA GLADHART again, that brings the past into the present, and that makes visible, in the staging, the repetitious patterns of memory. The citation necessarily recapitulates—repeats, redoes—the original statement, so that the theatrical Dora is at once a copy of and a variation on the original. As in the transference, the Dora on stage stands in for the off-stage, ultimately inaccessible, historical Dora. Feliz nuevo siglo suggests a plot—in the sense of complot—against Dora, a cultural plot or trap from which she cannot escape. The play presents a reading of Freud. But the play, like the Dora case, is also about the rep-

resentation of and access to the past. The past in this play, like Dora’s story, is both public and private. It 1s terribly private in this case, intimate and yet unquestionably public, in the way that Freud, adding his cellar onto the house of culture, made the subconscious available. Dora lost her privacy. Pseudonym aside, her identity is

today widely known. The witnessing power of theater offers a chance to clarify what really happened, either between characters or in the historical record. Yet that “really” may be unknowable, unattainable. The history play’s redoing is necessarily a repetition, one that cannot erase or undo Dora’s initial circumstances even as the witnessing play offers an alternative plot to guide our under-

standing. On stage, Dora becomes a witness. She acts her past again. And a new century opens, without a satisfactory resolution.

NOTES

1. Quotations in the text are drawn from the following edition of the play: Sabina Berman, “Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud,” Tramoya 68 (2001): 5—43, hereafter cited in the text. All translations are my own. The play was also published in the anthology Teatro, mujer, pais, ed. Felipe Galvan (Puebla: Editorial Tablado Iberoamericano, 2000), 59-103. Other editions include Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud (Mexico City: Ediciones El Milagro/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las

Artes, 2001), and Sabina Berman, Puro teatro (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2004). In addition, Feliz nuevo siglo was included, with works by nu-

merous other Mexican playwrights, on a compact disc distributed by SOGEM (Mexico City) in 2003.

2. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 12. 3. Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (lowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), x1. 4. Ibid., xii. 5. In the version of the play published in 2000, this character’s name is Noemi. 6. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 17. 7. Rokem, Performing History, 6. Rokem goes on to suggest that the actor becomes a kind of ““hyper-historian,’ who makes it possible for us—even in cases

TRANSFERENCE AND NEGOTIATION: 141 where the reenacted events are not fully acceptable for the academic historian as a ‘scientific’ representation of that past—to recognize that the actor is ‘redoing’ or ‘reappearing’ as something/somebody that has actually existed in the past” (abid., 13).

8. Ibid., 3. 9. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 11. 10. It might also be argued that there is no memory without plot. Where forms of memory overlap with history, this argument is similar to Hayden White’s emphasis on the “inevitability of a recourse to fictive techniques in the representation of real events” so that, in effect, there is no history without plot. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 123. White argues that “there is no value-neutral mode of emplotment, explanation, or even description of any field of events, whether imaginary or real” (ibid., 129). 11. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (“Dora’),” in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 175. 12. Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader, 202n.

13. “I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time” (Freud, “Fragment,” 236). 14. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 282. 15. Ibid., 225-26. 16. Ibid., 227. 17. Ibid., 227-28. 18. For varied discussions of Dora’s case and its reception, see Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Frederick C. Crews, ed., Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York: Viking, 1998); and Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991). Among plays that dramatize Dora’s experience see Héléne Cixous, Portrait of Dora, trans. Ann Liddle, in Selected Plays of Héléne Cixous, ed. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 2004), 35-59, and Kim Morrissey, Dora: A Case of Hysteria (London: Nick Hern, 1994). 19. Kim Morrissey’s play, Dora, opens in somewhat similar fashion, as Freud complains to the audience of “certain so-called critics of psychotherapy . . . who regard a case study as a frivolous excuse for salacious or pornographic gossip . . . a roman a clef—a romance.” Morrissey, Dora, 1. 20. Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, N.H.: University of Vermont Press, 1993), xx—xx1.

21. Jacqueline Bixler, “Sexo, poder y palabras en Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Freud y 65 contratos para hacer el amor,” in Sediciosas seducciones: Sexo, poder y palabras en el teatro de Sabina Berman, ed. Jacqueline E. Bixler (Mexico City: Escenologia, 2004), 76. 22. Although Freud and Schnitzler were familiar with one another’s work, they did not meet until after the time period represented in the play; Reigen was privately printed in Vienna in 1900, the year of Dora’s truncated analysis, but was not premiered until 1920, in Berlin. Arthur Schnitzler, La Ronde, trans. Frank and Jacqueline Marcus (London: Methuen, 1982), vi. 23. See Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomeé, ed. and trans. Stanley A. Leavy (New York: Basic Books, 1964) and Ernst Pfeiffer, ed., Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Letters, trans. William and Elaine Robson-Scott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Studies of Andreas-

142 AMALIA GLADHART Salomé include Biddy Martin, Woman and Modernity: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Susan Ingram, Zarathustra’s Sisters: Women’s Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); and Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 24. Bixler, “Sexo, poder y palabras,” 73. 25. Dora’s anachronistic cross-dressing might also reflect an acceptance, on her part, of her homosexual desire for Frau K; the image of Dora in male clothing suggests that both her own feelings and Freud’s diagnosis render her unwomanly and enact her earlier statement that she does not want to be a woman.

Transferring Terms, Translating Sin: The Search for Meaning in Rafael Spregelburd’s La estupidez Gail A. Bulman ARGENTINE PLAYWRIGHT RAFAEL SPREGELBURD’S POSTMODERN

project, Heptalogia de Hieronymus Bosch (Heptalogy of Hieronymus Bosch), challenges conventional forms of interpretation in var-

ious ways.’ From within the framework of Bosch’s painting the Seven Deadly Sins, Spregelburd’s seven plays—five of which have been published or performed to date—offer lenses through which to filter perspectives on capitalism, globalization, corruption, and crisis in a world of ever-changing boundaries and endlessly trans-

forming signs.* By manipulating and subverting the language, codes, contents, and contexts of a fifteenth-century painting as well as postmodern art forms, La inapetencia (Lack of appetite, 1997),

La extravagancia (Extravagance, 1997), La modestia (Modesty, 1999), La estupidez (Stupidity, 2000), and El pdanico (Panic, 2004) construct and deconstruct what Jorge Dubatti calls “epistemological metaphors for our way of being in today’s world.”?

Spregelburd labels La estupidez “my most complex work, and the most ambitious” of the Heptalogia.* It is the most transgressive of the Heptalogia works in both structure and themes. In this play the connection to Bosch’s painting seems more fragile and obscure than in the others, while its relationship with other art forms is more pronounced. Spregelburd, who has directed most of the play’s productions, opts for a simple set that does not translate the plastic aspects of Bosch’s painting. Instead, he prefers to let the text speak for itself because “the less that 1s put on the set, the more the spectator will be able to imagine.”° La estupidez shares certain themes and stylistic features with the other Heptalogia plays, yet it offers

wider artistic and ideological reflections on our position in the global context, converts readers/spectators into active participants in both script and performance, and uses past and present artistic 143

144 GAIL A. BULMAN codes to interrogate the meaning and function of art and life in the twenty-first century. This study examines the language and techniques, the limits and the transgression of those limits in this fourth part of Spregelburd’s Heptalogia, to show how the playwright manipulates artistic codes to transfer terms and translate meaning from Bosch’s world to our

own. Starting with a fifteenth-century art form whose doublevoiced purpose, according to Wilheim Fraenger, was to create tension between the viewers’ moral/ethical responsibilities as devout Christians and their own personal, secular introspection, Spregelburd incorporates a wide variety of artistic techniques and multiple artistic codes, including parody, game-playing, detective fiction, and cinematography.° The insertion and subversion of such codes is one of the key ingredients in Linda Hutcheon’s description of the

postmodern experience.’ After discussing the Heptalogia as a whole and its relationship to Bosch’s painting, this article will focus specifically on the structure and content of La estupidez to show how Spregelburd plays with his readers’ cultural competence by obliging them to acknowledge the codes, fill the gaps according to their own reading of these codes, and move toward an interpretation of the work.

While each play in the Heptalogia de Hieronymus Bosch is a unique and independent unit, there are many ties that bind them. The collection’s title refers the reader back to Bosch’s painting. Both thematically and structurally, the playwright imitates and deconstructs that particular artwork in the collection as a whole as well as within each play. The corpus of plays and each individual piece reflect the painting’s complicated structure, evoking what Eduardo Del Estal in his preface to Heptalogia / terms “a cartography of madness,” because it produces the frightening possibility of an unlimited number of meanings.* The postmodern also posits open structures that yield multiple meanings. The Heptalogia plays are like the seven scenes positioned around the painting’s central eye; each scene is a complete unit unto itself, while the painting’ s open structure suggests multiple interpretations.

Bosch’s “tabletop” of the Seven Deadly Sins was created between 1475 and 1480. The painted tabletop joins traditional religious iconography and themes of the Middle Ages with an almost postmodern, surrealist style and a seemingly heretical portrayal of the seven vices that were said to lead to the demise of Christians. Walter Gibson describes the painting: “The central image, formed of concentric rings, represents the Eye of God, in whose pupil Christ emerges from his sarcophagus, displaying his wounds to the

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viewer. Around the pupil are inscribed the words “Beware, Beware, God sees’; and just what God sees is mirrored in the outer ring of

his eye, where the Seven Deadly Sins are enacted in lively little scenes taken from everyday life. The Latin name of each sin is clearly inscribed at the bottom.” As Gibson suggests, the labeling is superfluous, as the sins—gluttony, avarice, envy, anger, pride, lust and sloth—are obviously portrayed in each of the seven images

around the central eye. In his plays, Spregelburd transfers these painted vices into the theater and translates them into the sins of modern man. His Heptalogia plays correspond to the seven sins in the following way: La inapetencia (lust), La extravagancia (envy), La modestia (pride), La estupidez (greed), El pdnico (sloth), La paranoia (gluttony), and the seventh play, as yet unfinished (wrath). The central eye of Bosch’s work as well as the entire painting’s religious content adheres to the medieval idea of “God spying on mankind from the sky” as a means of deterring sin.'° On the other hand, Bosch’s work also suggests a mirrorlike spiritual introspection, “wherein the viewer is confronted by his own soul disfigured by vice.”!' Viewers’ ethical formation determines how they will in-

terpret the painting, the vices it represents, and its relation to the world they inhabit. They may see the central eye either as the eye of God or as their own self-critical eye, depending on their worldview. In either case, viewers are forced into an awareness of the ideology underpinning their very existence and, as Hutcheon argues

with regard to postmodernism, there is a “paradox in this awareness” because, “on the one hand, there is a sense that we can never get out from under the weight of a long tradition of visual and narrative representations and, on the other hand, we also seem to be losing faith in both the inexhaustibility and the power of those existing representations.” !?

Spregelburd’s dramatic “cartography of madness”’ shares with the painting this multivoiced pull. Each work in his Heptalogia evokes and subverts one (or more) of the seven deadly sins portrayed in the seven scenes of the central wheel of Bosch’s painting. The plays modernize that sin and re-present it, theatrically, in a con-

temporary context. The sins of Bosch’s painting were transgressions of the boundaries of normal, natural, and accepted behaviors of his era. Bosch’s themes of excess hold true today in the sense that they underscore the struggle between limits and the transgression of those limits. Del Estal reminds us that “there must be trans-

gression in order to have limits, and the limit, insofar as it is impassable, creates desire.” '° Spregelburd’s plays mimic not only the themes of Bosch’s paint-

146 GAIL A. BULMAN ing but also the structure. As a group, the plays could be put together to reflect the complicated design of the fifteenth-century painting. As Spregelburd notes, the rare tabletop form of the Bosch

painting demands an active viewer, who must travel around the table to interpret the painting. Similarly, Spregelburd’s plays posit a unique presentation and an active reader. Seven plays, seven sins, according to the playwright, (independientes entre si pero llenas de citas como fuegos cruzados) se puede representar en una misma ciudad en siete salas distintas, o mejor aun: aprovechar la coincidencia numérica y montar una obra por cada dia de la semana. El orden en que el espectador elija verlas incide en su cosmovision, y por lo tanto retoca su vision particular de cada una de ellas.

[(andependent among themselves, but shot through with cross-references), they can be staged in the same city in seven different theaters, or even better, one can take advantage of the numerical coincidence and stage one play each day of the week. The order in which spectators choose to see them affects their view of the whole and, therefore, alters their particular vision of each one of them.]'4

Nonetheless, the plays have not been presented to date as a larger unit. Each play in the Heptalogia not only connects to the medieval painting, but also presents a unique postmodern vision of today’s world. Critic Osvaldo Pellettier1 highlights two trends in recent Ar-

gentine theater—theater of resistance and theater of disintegration—and proposes that “the purpose of these theatrical texts is to take postmodernism ‘from our perspective,’ with our limitations and perplexities, from within what we could call ‘our poverty,’ and try to assimilate it into our identity.” '° While the Argentine element is not always obvious in Spregelburd’s plays, it is there as a backdrop to show how the local and the global are inextricably connected in the twenty-first century. In La estupidez, Spregelburd works within what Hutcheon calls “the politics of postmodern representation,” which emphasizes “the ideological values and interests that inform any representation.’ '° In true postmodern form, Spregelburd displays those values and interests and, at the same time, questions them, subverts them, and transforms them. He does this by restructuring artistic codes that his readers are familiar with, such as those of detective fiction,

cinema, and game-playing, and then by parodying those same codes. As Juan Villegas argues, a theatrical work “involves connotations whose meaning depends on the reader’s cultural system and

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which, in the case of the performance, the director has to construct in view of their potential connotations for the spectator.” '’ By referring to Bosch’s painting and the sins it evokes, and juxtaposing them with more contemporary artistic codes, Spregelburd sets up his readers, working within their cultural competence and playing with the connotations they could potentially perceive. In The Politics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon defines postmodernism and outlines its manifestations 1n art: Postmodernism 1s a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory as well as unavoidably political... . It takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement. It is rather like

saying something whilst at the same time putting inverted commas around what is being said. The effect is to highlight, or “highlight,” and to subvert, or “subvert,” and the mode 1s therefore a “knowing” and an ironic—or even “ironic”—one. .. . In many ways it is an even-handed process because postmodernism ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge.'®

Accordingly, La estupidez is directly connected to many other texts: Bosch’s painting and his medieval Catholic worldview (the deadly sins); the other plays in Spregelburd’s own Heptalogia; twentiethand twenty-first-century cinematic codes; detective fiction; plays by

Chekhov; and the five stories contained within the text itself. It at once highlights those connections and subverts them, thus propelling readers into a questioning mode that is the basis of postmodernism. In this way, La estupidez posits many questions that readers must acknowledge, yet it provides no answers. As Hutcheon argues, “The postmodern is seemingly not so much a concept as a problem-

atic. .. . While postmodernism may offer no answers, these are questions perhaps worth asking.’’” La estupidez sets these questions in motion by directly evoking

and incorporating other texts and then parodying those texts.”° While the play offers a vertiginous interconnectedness of worlds, artistic codes, and signs, nothing is obvious in this play or in any of the Heptalogia plays. Spregelburd expects his readers to search for and find meanings. Pellettier1 agrees and consequently classifies Spregelburd’s work as an example of theater of disintegration, arguing that “the theater of disintegration takes its abstract theatrical language and the dissolution of the character as a psychological entity from the [theater of the] absurd—but it does not try to demonstrate anything. It believes that the meaning of the text, which is

148 GAIL A. BULMAN absolutely non-referential, must be provided almost exclusively by the spectator.”’?!

Beyond its position in the Heptalogia, La estupidez’s most obvious tie to Bosch’s painting is thematic. Spregelburd translates one of the medieval deadly sins, avarice, into the predominant “stupidity” of a global, capitalist world ruled by greed. His completion of the first version of this play in Buenos Aires during the violent New Year’s episodes of 2001—2002 transfers the medieval sin to a contemporary Argentine context. After at least two years of economic instability, the bottom fell out of Argentina’s economy in late December 2001, provoking political and social turmoil. With record

unemployment and multiple rejections for help from the World Bank and the United States, Argentine banks froze accounts and set limits on how much money people could withdraw. The future of

the Argentine peso, which had been pegged in a one-to-one relationship with the US dollar for the past decade, became questionable. These events caused President Fernando de la Rua to resign after only two years in office, followed by the resignation of Senate President Ramon Puerta and the resignation of Adolfo Rodriguez Saa after only one week in the presidency. All this instability produced massive riots and protests, resulting in the death of at least sixteen people.** With this as a reference, the theme of greed permeates all levels of the play. The play itself, however, also shows how art forms can work off and transform one another by manipulating their reader.

A 2004 review of the performance in Badajoz, Spain, summarizes the complex plot as follows: “With a frenetic sense of humor,

the work is about a group of people who try to get rich in Las Vegas. A mathematical method for beating the roulette wheel is related to the fearful mathematical equation that encrypts the Apocalypse. Two criminals must sell a stolen painting before it completely fades away. The Sicilian mafia creates a new pop star. And some patrol officers live out an intense story of betrayal. But, lamentably, all this occurs at the same time. And in Las Vegas.’’*° The twenty-two scenes of La estupidez interweave five different stories. Interconnected through certain “coincidences,” these scenes take place in different motel rooms as the characters make their way to Las Vegas and include several characters who suffer similar misfortunes. Each story—the Merchants, the Police, the Betters (Gamblers), Ivy, and Finnegan—shares the same actors, with five actors playing twenty-four roles.” Each story has its own plot, centered on the characters’ lust for money and potential get-rich-quick schemes. Each plot’s preoccu-

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pation with money, along with the crimes that the characters commit or are victims of because of this obsession, allows each of the five parts of the play to follow the formula of a basic detective story in which crimes are committed, money or objects disappear and reappear in another character’s hands, and protagonists are involved in illegal plans for personal or collective gain. The detective formula is useful for Spregelburd because it follows a certain pattern that readers can recognize. According to Cynthia Hamilton, this

“set of interrelated conventional elements” allows an artist “to

simplify material and to control, through concentration, the reader’s connotative associations.” ”° By encoding and then repeating the de-

tective story formula five times in La estupidez, Spregelburd activates one of the play’s many possible intertexts with which his readers may identify. Each plot includes different sets of characters whose lives only touch by chance, because they happen to be in the next motel room or outside the door where another set of complications unfolds. A brief description of each of the five plots shows the complexity of each story and the development of the games in each version. One story, the “Merchants,” narrates the adventures of Emma and Richard, two low-level art dealers who, while trying to make some fast money, get caught in the middle of an apparent scheme to sell a fake painting for an exorbitant sum. They meet with several possible buyers: one is a bankrupt businessman who cannot pay them anything; the second one dies of a heart attack in their motel room; and the third pays them a great sum so that she can change the name of both the painting and the artist, take the painting out of the hands of private collectors, and put it in a public space. Due to their carelessness, however, Emma and Richard never cash the check she gives them; they accidentally leave it on the bed, where it ends up stuck to the seat of Martin’s pants for the rest of the play. They also lose the briefcase with their money. Martin, who never realizes he has a check for a million dollars stuck to his pants, is one of the five “Betters.” The betters have their own story and their own get-rich-quick scheme. Their plan is to enter a casino at different times, sit down at the same table, and bet certain numbers. While at the casino table, they signal each other to determine how to bet and, when one wins the money, they all share the pot. Their plan might be flawless if it were not for the infighting that threatens the cohesiveness of their group. The “Police” form a third story and they have their own moneyrelated schemes. When motel guests see the police, they think the latter are following them due to their illicit activities. Nonetheless,

150 GAIL A. BULMAN the police have no interest in the crimes people may be committing; they are too busy covering up their own crimes. In one scene, the

police happen upon the dead body of the second buyer from the “Merchants” story. They secretly take the bag of money that was left in the victim’s room and proceed to spend it on fancy dinners, a Land Rover, and other goods. Finnegan appears to be one of the few characters not obsessed with getting rich. In his head and on a cassette that he tries to guard, he holds a secret formula, the Lorenz equation, a powerful equation capable of predicting the future, altering art forms, and transforming rational time. Indeed, the Lorenz equation could be seen as a metaphor for the entire play because its enigmatic, complex structure and suggestive powers control and mesmerize all who come in contact with it.2° Moreover, many characters want to obtain the cassette that contains this prize possession: Veronica, the journalist, wants it to get her story, while Brad, Finnegan’s son, needs it to pay off the mafiosos who threaten his life. Finnegan’s wife, Leticia, steals the cassette from her husband to help save Brad’s life. Brad does get his money, but Veronica, to whom he sold the cassette and the story, mistakenly picks up the wrong cassette. The cassette of the secret equation falls into the hands of Ivy, the protagonist of the “Ivy” scenes. Although her physical problems

remain a mystery, Ivy appears in her wheelchair throughout the play, except when she is beaten by her brother and by other intruders who search for money or lost valuable possessions. As the world goes on around her, she listens to the cassette of the famous Lorenz equation, which her brother, John, had unknowingly put into her Walkman instead of her customary music tapes. It is no coincidence that the scenes take place near Las Vegas, the

quick-money capital of the world. Nonetheless, what makes the play so fascinating 1s its structure, which challenges readers to step

into the story and, as they must with Bosch’s painting, to reflect upon their own role in the fast-paced, greed-filled stories of the twenty-first century. The play’s structure mimics that of Bosch’s painting, where the whole tabletop with its central wheel presents all the sins, while each scene, each story, though complete in itself, re-presents a piece of the larger puzzle. Amalia Gladhart notes that games have long been used for multiple purposes in Latin American theater. Spregelburd’s La estupidez might mimic what Gladhart terms “a representation of the empty or commercialized relations between individuals in an impersonal society.” ’’ Thus, the structure of the game reflects the themes of the play and vice versa. The characters all share similar issues and

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concerns (their economic problems, their greed), they share similar spaces, and, sometimes, their lives even touch. Nonetheless, they are like robots, living their empty, meaningless lives, bumping into

each other without acknowledging or helping each other in any way.

Each group of characters in La estupidez is replete with internal conflicts: the merchants double-cross each other; the police do not trust one another and argue over how to spend the money; Finnegan and his son despise each other and the former refuses to reveal the secret formula, even to help his son; among the betters, Maggie is jealous of Jane and threatens to leave the group; John loathes and abuses his sister, Ivy, and fights with his mother. These dysfunctional groups, in which no individual emerges as protagonist, create a vacuum that readers might try to fill in an effort to interpret the play. In this way, Spregelburd both constructs the text and dismantles it, pulling readers into the text and then urging them to fill the gaps the very same text has created.

In each story of La estupidez, readers are the only ones who “see” the whole picture. The play’s characters do not know that Martin has a check stuck to his pants, or that Veronica has picked up the wrong cassette, or that John destroys the only copy of the Lorenz equation (even John does not know what he has done), or any of the many other events that happen, seemingly by chance. Readers are the only ones capable of “seeing” everything and the only ones who stand even a chance of deciphering the whole story. Spregelburd establishes the importance of seeing and then manipulates what is seen, who sees it, and how it is seen, both structurally and thematically. As mentioned above, each scene takes place in or outside different motel rooms, while many scenes take place simultaneously. A window that Spregelburd scripts in his initial stage directions provides this scenic flexibility: Lo mas importante es que la pared de fondo ostenta una gran ventana. Esto permitira el armado de escenas simultaneas (dentro y fuera de la habitacion). Esta ventana tendra algun tipo de cortinado que al cerrarse oculta el afuera (estacionamiento, patio, malograda piscina) cuando fuera necesario, para permitir asi los cambios de escenografia requeridos en ese espacio exterior. [The room remains pretty much the same. However, sliding glass doors lead to an outside area which, depending on which motel room it 1s, will be variously a car park, a patio, or a swimming pool. Action takes place both inside and outside the room, often simultaneously. |”°

152 GAIL A. BULMAN While actions, dealings, and traumas take place inside the motel rooms, spectators and/or actors, depending on the setup, can often see and/or hear another scene going on outside the window or even sometimes within the bathroom of the rooms themselves. These simultaneous scenes may touch on or dialogue with another scene. The window is one structural way that Spregelburd controls what both his characters and his audience see. The window places emphasis on the act of seeing—who sees what, what is seen, how it is interpreted—and thus seeing, searching, and interpreting are inte-

eral to the code of the entire play. In addition, within each story, “truths” are altered, hidden, and interpreted in ways that transfer meanings from one text or one scene to another and engage readers in the show, since they alone have some of the key information. Spregelburd manipulates the reader’s way of seeing by creating

tension between and within scenes and by providing information unknown to the characters. Since there is no main character, no protagonist in La estupidez, readers cannot identify with any particular point of view. The text itself functions like a camera lens, moving the reader’s gaze back and forth between the lines of dialogue and the actions of characters in simultaneous scenes. This draws readers into the state of paradoxical awareness described by Hutcheon, urging them to reflect upon the dramatic structure itself and its power

over them. Short of disentangling the play’s simultaneous action into a sequential reading of each plot line—a possibility available to readers but not to spectators—Spregelburd’s audience is forced to experience the tension resulting from multiple points of view and to work with the text in search of meaning.

In addition, Spregelburd plays with the idea of repetition and reading in his play by intertwining five different stories based on the same themes, settings, and structures. Ironically, the model is precisely the cornerstone of performance itself, for as Gladhart reminds us, “performance is intrinsically contingent and unstable, and citational in the widest sense—that is, citing not only the (a) text, but social norms, gender roles, cultural in-jokes, and historical narratives.”’’? Repetition is encoded in theatrical texts, as they are intended both for reading and for multiple performances.*° The qualities signaled above pull readers deeper into Spregelburd’s play, as they consciously or subconsciously use what they know (and what the characters do not know) to decipher some of the many codes as well as the inter- and intratextual connections. Readers are called to play the game set up by the playwright. In her study of the importance of games in Latin American theater written by women, Catherine Larson reminds us that the double meaning

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of the word play makes game-playing a particularly effective strategy in theater.*' Besides the playful structure of La estupidez—five stories with different characters whose lives sometimes intersect— the work centers on game-playing. Why else would Spregelburd set

his stage in Las Vegas, the symbolic game-playing center of the world?

Larson uses Roger Callois’s theory of play to suggest that there are four attitudes that correspond to play: competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo.*? Both structurally and thematically, La estupidez represents all four of these. The five stories not only mimic, repeat, or spin off one another, but also seem to compete with each other for space on the very page or stage.** Characters compete for attention and money with others in their own story or in the other stories, often unknowingly. Chance, as well, plays a role in their individual and collective development, as characters pick up the wrong cassette or briefcase full of money in one story, leaving a different one behind to make its mark on another story. The structure of the play sets this in motion, but chance is also a major theme of the Las Vegas setting: some characters are just luckier than others. Simulation is also definitely evoked; structurally, all five stories are set up the same way and parallel each other. Characters imitate each other’s behavior and are more or less conscious of this, depending on the scene. Finally, there is no doubt of the structural and thematic vertigo that Spegelburd intentionally creates. Dove describes this vertigo as a “to-and-fro motion characteristic of play [that] requires broader treatment, because it is the quintessence of transformation and mediation of the play mode in the hermeneutic structure.” ** This “to-and-fro motion” is essential to Spregelburd’s game. La estupidez pulls readers back and forth between the five individual stories and the framework of the entire play, and thus

calls them back to the tension between the parts and the whole evoked in Bosch’s medieval painting. But how do Spregelburd’s repeated stories both manipulate the contemporary reader and transform the structure and the content of Bosch’s text into a twenty-first-century play? Dove discusses the difference between transformation and mediation in art and argues

that “transformation, in the Gadamerian sense, goes far beyond mere alteration; it is the change by which human play becomes art. Mediation equates more precisely with the idea of the selective con-

version into patterns that are purely aesthetic . . . mediation is a selective process effecting the carry-over of certain qualities but not others into the new state of being.” *> Whereas mediation selects certain structures from one form and repeats them in the new form,

154 GAIL A. BULMAN transformation takes the whole model—its themes, structures, and aesthetic function—and transforms it into the new format. In La estupidez, Spregelburd transforms Bosch’s painting by reproducing and modernizing the essence of the artwork. He reworks the themes (the sins of one’s time), the structure (the repetition of contempo-

rary images of the sins) and the aesthetic function (its doublevoiced pull on readers), thus transforming the whole of a medieval painting into a postmodern play. This double-voiced pull urges readers both to engage with the theme of contemporary greed and to appreciate the play’s artistic value. The power and value of art forms is simultaneously part of the play’s structure and a predominant theme. In a long monologue,

for example, Finnegan questions whether a computer-generated Gioconda would be more perfect than the original painting, since the former could add technical features to improve upon the original. The merchants also discuss the value of art; Emma and Richard know they must sell the fake painting before anyone notices that it has faded beyond recognition. Similarly, the tapes that contain the Sicilian mafia men’s music look the same as that of Finnegan’s Lorenz equation, but their con-

tents are drastically different. When the tapes inadvertently get mixed up, their messages cannot be correctly interpreted by the new receptors. This creates not only problems of interpretation but also economic crises for the characters. Moreover, Spregelburd uses the tapes as another way to challenge the reader’s interpretation of his text. The Lorenz equation is so important that, while Ivy is listening to it on her Walkman, readers “hear” nothing else. In a simultaneous scene, however, readers, and perhaps the police and Ivy, can see Emma go through a type of pantomime in her search for the missing check (scene 18). The stage directions tell us that, in this scene, “vemos nuevamente lo que ya hemos visto, pero desde otro angulo” (we see again what we’ve already seen, but from a different angle).°° The view of the whole spectacle not only embodies a quest for the meaning of the themes and structure of La estupidez or even of Spregelburd’s Heptalogia, but also includes the search for the meaning of art and of the life that it imitates. In addition, Spregelburd utilizes montage, as in the cinema, to further complicate the reception of the play. According to Christian Metz, montage is the “supreme ordering” that “lays claim to a persuasive power.” One of the most important properties of montage is fragmentation. Metz argues that “one must fragment, isolate into close-ups, then reassemble everything.”°*’ Accordingly, in La estupidez, each story is fragmented, split up into different scenes alter-

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nated with and interrupted by other stories, juxtaposed and placed in a certain order by the playwright himself. Sometimes scenes are presented simultaneously; sometimes they are incomplete. Through montage, he manipulates each scene’s and the entire play’s meaning, and, more importantly, he manipulates his reader by directing attention away from the individual scenes, away from the personal stories, and toward the collective experience of interpretation in a global context. We “live in a world of meaning.” As Metz reminds us, “Determined signification would be inconceivable if we did not live in a world of meaning; it is conceivable only as a distinct organizational

act by which meaning is reorganized.” Spregelburd plays with order, juxtaposition, and fragmentation to pull readers into this search for meaning. Nonetheless, as Metz points out, the game is to query just “how far can the taste for signification go?”*? Spregelburd foregrounds this query by continuously transferring meaning and transforming the boundaries of interpretation. While Spregelburd imbeds an order and thus meaning into his text through mon-

tage, by highlighting that ordering (or disordering), he precludes the possibility of any one set meaning, thereby obliging readers to conduct their own query.

Spregelburd questions the limits of art and pulls his readers in multiple directions, as Bosch did before him. In this way, he not only translates the deadly medieval sins into the corresponding twenty-first-century vices of capitalism and globalization, but also transfers the style of a fifteenth-century painting to twenty-firstcentury Argentine theater of disintegration, a theater which, according to Pellettieri, puts the weight of interpretation on the spectators’ shoulders.*°

La estupidez demonstrates how the theatrical text can play with readers and their interpretation of the text(s) and their respective contexts. Readers familiar with artistic and cultural codes and how they function are more likely able to follow this play and its complex structure. As in the cinema, where “the inherent intelligibility of a dissolve or a double exposure cannot clarify the plot of a film unless the spectator has already seen other films in which dissolves and double exposures were used intelligibly,”*! La estupidez depends on the reader’s knowledge of and experience with art codes and cultural signs to engage them in its different levels of interpretation. With La estupidez, Spregelburd offers a play whose structure re-

inforces the messages it seeks to convey. The play’s style fore-

erounds the themes of greed and stupidity, opening up the

156 GAIL A. BULMAN specifically Argentine as well as the global context within which it was created to show how we are all obsessed with money and financial gain in a capitalist world. In a speech following the awarding of the Tirso de Molina Prize to La estupidez, José Luis Alonso de Santos noted that “reading the play, it feels like we are holding a remote control in front of the television of the world, and that we can change the dialogues and sets without lingering on anyone, with a sense of globalism that places that magic mirror before us, accompanied by an echo of shattered equilibrium.’’** Ironically, Spregelburd’s “television of the world,” like all theater of disintegration, as Pellettieri has indicated, does not signify anything, unless the spectator assigns meaning. In La estupidez, the medieval sin metamorphoses into the play’s central theme of excessive greed in contemporary contexts. Simi-

larly, Spregelburd transgresses artistic boundaries in his play by fusing the revolutionary medieval style of Bosch’s painting with postmodern theatrical techniques. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “It is the felicity of art to show how a thing begins to signify not by reference to ideas that are already formed or acquired, but by the tempo-

ral and spatial arrangement of elements.’*> Like other forms of performance art, theater is composed of both verbal and visual languages, and the reader must constantly negotiate the tension be-

tween the two. With La estupidez, Spregelburd maximizes this tension by playing with his own text and with all those who would try to interpret it. He lays bare the complex and polyphonic structures of art, politics, and culture, calling upon his readers to search for the meaning of those structures and to react to them as they will. Readers can laugh or cry, but they must see and work within the

text to understand its very meanings. In this way, Spregelburd transfers meaning from one medium to another, from one world to another, creating a game in which the text dominates, controlling its own image from within.

NOTES

1. Spregelburd was born in Buenos Aires in 1970. His plays have been published and/or performed in many countries and languages around the world. His first works, including Destino de dos cosas o tres (Destiny of two things or three), Cucha de almas (Doghouse of souls), Remanente de invierno (Remnant of Winter), La tiniebla (The darkness), and Entretanto las grandes urbes (Meanwhile the big cities), along with other popular plays (Raspando la cruz {Scraping the cross] and Cuadro de asfixia [Scene of asphyxiation]) have received numerous awards such as the First National Award for Dramaturgy for Destino de dos cosas o tres

TRANSFERRING TERMS, TRANSLATING SIN 157 (1992), the First Municipal Prize for Dramaturgy of the City of Buenos Aires for Cucha de almas (1997), the Argentores Award for Remanente de invierno (1996), and the GETEA Award for La modestia (Modesty, 1999), 2. In 2006-7, Spregelburd’s theatrical company, El Patron Vazquez, was rehearsing the sixth play, La paranoia. According to the playwright, “it is a very complex, but very amusing work. It takes place 3000 years from now, in a very poorly conceived future, very funny in the theater—which is an environment that is so resistant to science fiction.” Interview with author, June 9, 2006. The final Heptalogia play, still unscripted, will work with what Spregelburd calls “the artificial languages” and the context of the Spanish Civil War. 3. Jorge Dubatti, “Prologo,” Teatro argentino (Buenos Aires: Libros de Tierra Firme, 2000), 9. Except where noted, all translations from Spanish are my own. I express my gratitude to my colleague, Catherine Nock, for reviewing these translations. 4, E-mail correspondence with author, July 2003. Commissioned by El Deutsches Schauspielhaus (Germany 2000), La estupidez has received many awards: Tirso de Molina Award, 2002, World Theater Award for dramaturgy, direction and music (2003), GETEA Award for best actress (2003) and Spectator’s Award for dramaturgy and direction (2003). Reception of its many international performances has been extraordinary. A Chilean review affirms, “For multiple reasons, this is one of those stagings that should endure in one’s memory.” “Un montaje atipico en nuestros dias,” La Tercera: Cultura, Comentario de Teatro, January 4, 2006, 1. A Spanish critic calls it “monumental,” “brilliant” and “excessive,” and affirms, “La estupidez is a resounding work of love gained; I had not seen anything so rich, so powerful, so stimulating in a long time.” Marcos Ordofiez, “Ooh, Las Vegas,” El Pais, November 19, 2005, http://www.elpais.es/articulo/elpbabart_15/ Tes/. Javier Ibacache applauds it as “an authentic tour de force.” “Montaje argentino bate record de duracion en Valparaiso: 3 horas y 40 minutos,” La Segunda Digital, January 2, 2006, http://www.lasegunda.com/edicionimpresa/espectaculo/ detalle/index.asp? idnoticia = 023012200530150580182/. Audiences in Buenos Aires (2001, 2003, 2004), Rio de Janeiro (2003), London (2004, 2005), Colombia (2004), Mexico (2004), Berlin (2004), Spain (2004), and Chile (2006) have been moved to standing ovations at the end of the three-hour-and-twenty-minute production. The first published editions of the play appeared in 2004. 5. E-mail correspondence with author, January 10, 2006. 6. Some scholars describe Bosch’s painting as a “moral allegory” in which the “condition and fate of humanity are presented in a series of circular images.” Walter S. Gibson, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 33. However, Wilhelm Fraenger suggests that in 1496, a foreign, Jewish-Christian man, Jacob van Almaengien, converted to Catholicism and joined the Brotherhood of Our Lady with Bosch. Fraenger maintains that van Almaengien’s heretical viewpoint greatly influenced Bosch and his art and affirms that every Bosch work is “double-voiced” and “can be read either as Christian-Catholic and traditionally devout or as Jewish-Christian and heretical.” Fraenger believes that the Seven Deadly Sins functioned as an instruction guide for meditators. “By staring at the mirror reflection of his right eye in auto hypnotic concentration, the meditator strove to move beyond his ego-self and contemplate the world-self or sunlike godself.” Wilhelm Fraenger, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983), 270-71. 7. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1-2.

158 GAIL A. BULMAN 8. Eduardo Del Estal, “La tabla de los pecados, del Bosco,” in Heptalogia de Hieronymus Bosch I, by Rafael Spregelburd (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2000), 15. For a detailed analysis of the first three plays in the Heptalogia and their relationship to Bosch’s painting, see Gail Bulman, “Texts Without Exit: Rewriting Argentina’s Labyrinth,” in Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 153-93. 9. Gibson, Hieronymus Bosch, 33. 10. Ibid., 37. 11. Ibid. 12. Hutcheon, Politics, 8. 13. Del Estal, “La tabla,” 18. 14. Rafael Spregelburd, Heptalogia de Hieronymus Bosch 1, 2, 3: La inapetencia, La extravagancia, La modestia (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2000), 9. 15. Osvaldo Pellettieri, El teatro del afio 2000 (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2000), 19,

16. Hutcheon, Politics, 7. 17. Juan Villegas, Para la interpretacion del teatro como construccion visual (Irvine, CA: Ediciones de Gestos, 2000), 88. 18. Hutcheon, Politics, 1—2. 19. Ibid., 15-16. 20. For Hutcheon, parody is “repetition with a difference.” Sometimes this difference is marked through the “subtle use of irony . . . but this irony can be playful” and not necessarily “belittling.” Hutcheon affirms, “The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree of engagement of the reader in the intertextual ‘bouncing’ between complicity and distance” (ibid., 32).

21. Pellettieri, El teatro, 20. 22. Lourdes Heredia, “Argentina en su encrucijada,” BBC Mundo.com, December 31, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_1735000/

1735367.stm 23. “La compafiia argentina ‘Patron Vazquez’ interpreta en Badajoz La estupidez,” Premios Max en las artes escénicas, August 11, 2004, http://www .premiosmax.net/premax/actualidad/teatro/noticias/ampliacion.jsp?codigo = N oya (this site is currently inactive).

24. In his review of the 2006 Chilean staging, Javier Ibacache describes the actors’ vertiginous performances: “To do this they use wigs, rapid costume changes and physical characterizations that seem to conform to the acting style imposed by the director, a style that approaches psychological realism” (Ibacache, “Montaje argentino,” 2).

25. Cynthia S. Hamilton, Western and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction in America (lowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 1. 26. According to Spregelburd, Edward Lorenz discovered the butterfly effect, the idea that a climatic event that occurs in one part of the world will affect life in another part of the world. He worked with climate change as well as with chaos theory. Interview with author, June 9, 2006. 27. Amalia Gladhart, The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Con-

temporary Latin American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 75.

28. Rafael Spregelburd, La estupidez. El pdnico: Heptalogia de Hieronymus Bosch (Buenos Aires: Atuel, 2004), 22; Stupidity, trans. Crispin Whittell (London:

TRANSFERRING TERMS, TRANSLATING SIN 159 Oberon Books, 2004), 10. All references to Spregelburd’s play are to these versions.

29. Gladhart, Leper in Blue, 14. 30. Ibid., 221.

31. Citing Nora Eidelberg, Larson notes, “Germanic languages employ the same word to designate both (a theater play and play as in a game): Spiel in German, spelletje in Dutch, and play in English.” Games and Play in the Theater of Spanish American Women (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 165. 32. Ibid. 33. Many pages of the published version have two columns of dialogue that jux-

tapose different groups of characters’ stories; these words and plots compete against each other, as the reader does not know what to read first. 34. George N. Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 27. 35. Ibid. 36. Spregelburd, La estupidez, 144; Stupidity, 97. 37. Christian Metz, Film Language: The Semiotics of Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 33. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Ibid. 40. Pellettier1, El teatro, 20. 41. Metz, Film Language, 41. 42. “El argentino Rafael Spregelburd recibe el Premio Tirso de Molina” (includes quotations from Alonso de Santos’s speech), Diario de Cddiz: DeConcur sos.com, Oct. 29, 2005, http://www.deconcursos.com/web/hemeroteca.php?id = 4069 &page = 1& CADENA = Spregelburd. 43. Quoted in Metz, Film Language, 43.

Paquita la del Barrio and Translocal Theatricality: Performing Counter(post)modernity Gaston Alzate FRANCISCA VIVEROS BARRANDAS, ALSO KNOWN AS PAQUITA LA DEL

Barrio, is a popular Mexican singer who insults and reprimands men from her position onstage. For three decades Paquita has built

a style based on pride and on her courage in confronting men. Songs such as “Tres veces te engafié” (Three times I cheated on you), “Arrastrate” (Crawl!), “Borrate” (Get lost!), for example, are already part of the Mexican traditional repertoire. Likewise, expres-

sions such as “basura” (garbage), “inutil” (good-for-nothing), ‘“susano” (worm), “barato” (cheap), “ordinario” (gross), and “escoria humana” (human scum) are expressions frequently used by women to refer to the Mexican macho due to Paquita’s influence on popular culture and the media.!

This essay examines the lyrics and stage presence of Mexican singer Paquita la del Barrio as an example of contemporary translocal theatricality that questions patriarchal Mexican culture. Paquita is an international artist, well known not only in Latin America and

Spain, but also among US Latinos. However, her unpretentious stage presence, coupled with her strong male-bashing lyrics, has al-

ways maintained a clearly defined character related to ranchera music (a rural music genre originally from Northern Mexico) and her small-town origins in Veracruz.* The term translocal refers to the articulation of various cultural spaces that cannot be defined in terms of oppositions such as center/periphery (e.g., Latin America vs. the US, urban vs. rural) or tradition/modernity (e.g., folk/traditional music vs. commercial music). Paquita’s theatrical persona is a working-class neighborhood woman (from the barrio) who has been abandoned and now must assume the responsibility to stand on her own. I view her lyrics, stage presence, and connection with her audience as an expression of resistance to male domination in 160

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY 161

the context of traditional gender roles in Mexican culture. I also see her performance as a symbolic disruption of the melodramatic representation of love-struck women and men predominant in the Mex-

ican neoliberal entertainment market, or what I refer to as her

“counter-modernity.” Paquita la del Barrio’s strong symbolic appeal to her audience is the expression of a cultural need to question oppressive gender structures in both popular culture (particularly ranchera music and traditional theater genres) and the Americanized media of Latin America. GLOBALIZATION AND THE ENTERTAINMENT MARKET

In contemporary Latin America, globalization plays a strong role

in the revalorization of local narratives. Jesis Martin Barbero explains this phenomenon as the devaluation of foundational events that in the past defined Latin American nations and identities.* Accordingly, I will demonstrate that Paquita’s songs and cabaret show are a manifestation of the crisis implicit in the symbolic construction of new subjectivities.

Paquita’s cultural production is a telling example of the global translocal diffusion of Latin American culture. The increasing Hispanic population in the US and the globalization of the media play an important role in this articulation. Her popularity in the US (particularly in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida) and in Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, among others) allows us to view her not only as a Mexican cultural product, but also as part of the new polylocalization of the Latin American loci

of enunciation.* As an example of polylocalization, Mexican music—from ranchera to rock—is produced and performed on both sides of the US/Mexican border. Significantly, contemporary Mexican audiences do not consider Mexican American music to be any less authentic. According to Garcia Canclini, this displacement is not a recent phenomenon but rather has a long history in Latin American music. It is part of the way in which the reorganization of music, television, and film markets restructures Latin American lifestyles by “fragmenting and recomposing shared imaginaries.”° Garcia Canclini provides further examples of this phenomenon, such as the reappropriation of the iconography and music of Carlos Gardel in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, and the cultural journey of Agustin Lara’s Mexican boleros to Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Undoubtedly, Paquita is an example of a process in which the world has been “increasingly Latin Americanized’’® through the

162 GASTON ALZATE exportation of Latin American cultural artifacts such as music and

soap operas, not only to the US but to Europe and Asia as well. This is the postmodern cultural context in which Paquita performs.

PAQUITA’S PLACE

The cabaret known as La Casa de Paquita la del Barrio is, as Paquita explains, a “restaurant with a stage” for approximately 180 people. After twenty years, the restaurant has been remodeled and enlarged, but it is still located at the same address: 202 Zarco Street, in the working-class neighborhood of Guerrero, a neighborhood that welcomed Paquita when she first arrived from Veracruz with her sister. It is surprising but gratifying that in spite of her many successes, including awards and appearances on Mexican and US Hispanic soap operas and other television programs, Paquita’s commercial strategy (she has produced more than twenty-three CDs and nineteen cassettes) is still to market herself as a neighborhood cabaret singer. She continues to live on the second and third floors of the same building in which she started her cabaret show. Paquita has not allowed her popularity and success to change her approach to ranchera music. Thus, her production 1s still closely linked to her origins, even if her public now ranges from the faithful fans at her cabaret to diverse audiences throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Similar to Cantinflas, a popular Mexican actor who developed a character based on a spontaneous idea, a personal circumstance led Paquita to the idea of challenging masculine prepotency from the stage. Cantinflas’s trademark style of overwhelming the audience with long, incomprehensible, and meaningless monologues began during a carpa’ show when he forgot his lines and started to speak incoherently in front of the audience.® Similarly, Paquita established her unique style one night when a man with whom she was in love came into her cabaret precisely when she was singing. It just so happened that the lyrics of the song were related to the difficult relationship she was having with him. In response to his indiffer-

ence to both her and to the evident relation of the lyrics to their relationship, Paquita added a question between the stanzas of the song: “;Me estas oyendo, inutil?” (Are you listening to me, you good-for-nothing?). Over time, this question would become the leitmotif of her entire cultural production. Indeed, one might say that

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY 163

she has built her style, as well as her fame, on this single, candid expression. STAGE AND AUDIENCE

Decorated with purple and pink colors and mirrored walls, Paquita’s cabaret is an obvious attempt to create a space different from daily life, and not just what she terms a “restaurant with a stage.” On weekends the cabaret is crowded with an audience composed of diverse groups: women in their forties, who are usually very proud not to be in masculine company; heterosexual and gay or lesbian couples; and groups of secretaries, executives, and American or European tourists. Some families bring grandparents as well as babies and children. The first show starts at seven in the evening and costs about seven dollars, which includes one drink. Most of the audience eat during the show. After one or two opening performances, the stage lights announce the appearance of Paquita, who, without any introduction whatsoever, immediately begins singing song after

song. Her lack of stylish pretension is accurately described by

David William Foster:

Although Paquita dresses like the torch singers of yesterday, she combs her hair back severely and holds it in place with gel, and she makes no attempt to hide what she is: an overweight woman in her late fifties who has no particularly charming physical traits. Moreover, her artistic presence 1s characterized by a detached and timid inwardness that apparently makes it difficult for her to connect in open extroversion with her

audience. She sings in almost a graceless fashion, handling her body and the mike clumsily, muttering every so often at the musicians of her band who occupy the tiny stage with her, beneath primitive and unforgiving spots. She pauses to wipe the sweat from her brow with the cocktail napkins the waiters pass up to her with the written requests for her to sing specific songs from her audience, only to then crumple them up and throw them on the ground when not distractedly continuing to hold them in her hand.?

Although it is evident that Paquita’s style is not spectacular but rather clearly anticommercial, she has succeeded in conquering the hearts of Mexicans. While her lyrics tend to have an implicitly feminist agenda, one often hears colloquial references to her songs that do not necessarily address their feminist meaning. Indeed, more than a few politicians, artists, and writers have paraphrased Paqui-

164 GASTON ALZATE ta’s lyrics to reproduce the bellicose spirit of her songs, but not necessarily the feminist context. PAQUITA’S PERSONA

Paquita is a shy, lower-class woman who has no desire to be a Mexican diva. In fact, her dry and laconic attitude takes her interviewers by surprise. Paquita does not smile for the camera and most

of the time answers with a simple Yes or No, as if she were not interested in winning anyone’s favor. There is no indulgence, no concession to the public. She refuses to interact with the audience between songs and does not incorporate jokes into her show, despite the fact that contemporary Mexican cabaret assumes humor as one of its most important performance dynamics, as in the case of

Astrid Hadad, Jesusa Rodriguez, Tito Vasconcelos, and Francis. Nor does Paquita rely on strong theatrical training, as these other artists do. In my book, Teatro de cabaret: Imaginarios disidentes, I study her in comparison with the cabaret artists just mentioned, most of whom are on the margins of the Mexican mainstream entertainment market.'° Presently, I view Paquita against the background of Mexican mass media and Mexican traditions such as popular the-

ater manifestations and ranchera music. In fact, Paquita’s unique stage persona and original lyrics provide arguments for viewing her shows as a theatrical performance similar to, but at the same time diverging from, popular genres such as the aforementioned carpa.

In traditional Mexican carpa, the sketcheros (performers) developed countless plays on words that overwhelmed the audience with

hilarious improvisations and slang terms with double and triple meaning, the so-called albur. Paquita’s cabaret constitutes an inversion of this comical theatrical dynamic. Her cabaret is closer to a ranchero show, which usually centers more on the music than on the jokes. Paquita’s style comes from a deep and internal disavowal of words that are meaningless to her, such as those typically used by men in an argument. Furthermore, her show is not intentionally

funny. The audience at her cabaret behaves in a very respectful manner towards her, and it is common for men in the audience to give her flowers while she is singing. People sing along with her in all seriousness, and while the stories in her lyrics may seem humorous when listened to with intellectual detachment, it is clear that her popularity rests on the empathy that her stories produce in her audience. While Paquita views the area of verbal communication as an irre-

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY 165

futably masculine territory, she considers it a territory unworthy of her attention. Consequently, she remains absolutely mute when not singing; she does not introduce her songs nor does she converse with the audience between songs. Ironically, some might conclude that Paquita accepts the popular and conventional behavior that dictates women’s silence. Nonetheless, while the show includes four male musicians, they also remain speechless throughout Paquita’s cabaret. In this context, in which men have no opportunity to reply

to her accusations, lines such as “Are you listening to me, you good-for-nothing?” acquire force and at the same time succinctly capture her message. INSULT AS A CULTURAL NEED

In Paquita’s cabaret, the Mexican albur is displaced by a dramatic space in which Paquita feels more secure, the space of the insult, where she is safe to offend, to scorn, and to express feminine rage and indignation. Contrary to the traditional albur, which demands considerable verbal agility, an insult is direct, natural, and unrefined. As she explains, “AI] men cheat, but nobody has been

so honest with them. I say what Mexican women are unable to say.” !! A good example of this forceful symbolic space is the song “Arrastrate,” wherein Paquita represents men in an unusual state of physical and moral degradation and talks directly to them without albures or other forms of ambiguity: Arrastrate a mis rodillas Te quiero ver llorando sangre Vas a pagar lo que me hiciste Lo que lloré por tu traicion aquella tarde La venganza vendra de mi Y ahora vas a pagar por todo lo que me hiciste Como perro suplicaras Pidiéndome compasion y no la tendré de ti Te aplastaré como un gusano Y ya después te enterraré en el pasado.

[Crawl to my knees / I want to see you cry blood / You’ll pay for what you’ve done to me / How I cried because of your treason that afternoon .../ Revenge will be mine / And now you'll pay for all you’ ve done to me / You'll beg like a dog / Asking me for compassion and I won’t have it for you / Pll squash you like a worm / And then later I'll bury you in the past. ]

166 GASTON ALZATE These lyrics exemplify the raw type of antimasculine narrative typical of her songs. Paquita focuses on one aspect that is very char-

acteristic of the carpa, which is the degradation of the adversary/ antagonist. Sometimes for political reasons and sometimes because the sketches were created to have a counterpoint dynamic between two theatrical characters, the carpa permitted sketcheros to insult one another. The fact that carpa tents were set up far from downtown Mexico City in marginal neighborhoods allowed the sketches to be represented with little 1f any censorship.'* Paquita uses tradi-

tional offensive strategies but with only one opponent: men. In other words, she appropriates the carpa style in a unique way, borrowing from tradition the insult that has become the key to her cab-

aret, while discarding the albur. Paquita’s age, her excessive weight, her raw style, and the absence of any extra elements in her presentation are all significant. This is not a diva, but an ordinarylooking Mexican woman located at the center of a male-bashing performance. In this regard, her onstage presence is more represen-

tative of the feelings of common people. Paquita takes ordinary

Mexican words and inserts them in a cabaret that resists masculine hegemony. Thus, Paquita’s cabaret is at once highly original and deeply rooted in Mexican tradition. SYMBOLIC RESISTANCE THROUGH ROLE REVERSAL

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha states that knowledge of referential certainty—the set of assumptions any culture develops and then takes for granted—is mainly performed in the moment of enunciation. For Bhabha this historical certainty and location of culture is more about temporality than about historicity. As such, “fit is] a form of living that is... more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than ‘the subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism.” !°

Reading Paquita’s cultural production as a form of theatrical enunciation (location) of Mexican culture, one can say that the male authority figure is clearly challenged and symbolically disobeyed in her cabaret. In this antimasculine microspace of resistance, Paquita clearly defies the colonial yet still prevalent social contract in which women normally have to wait to get men’s attention. Paquita provokes men with statements such as, “Invitame a pecar” (Invite me

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY 167

to sin). Her songs also make unpredictable demands or challenges in an angry tone such as, “Arrastrate ahora que hay lodo” (Crawl, now that there is mud), or when she accepts the rules of patriarchy, but with a deep dose of sarcasm, such as in, “Si otra mujer te paga, {por qué no puedo yo hacer lo mismo?” (If another woman pays you, why can’t I do the same’). Paquita situates herself in the heretical disjunctive between being a woman who blames and insults men and, at the same time, one who makes indecent proposals. This is heretical in the sense that these two roles are not considered appropriate for respectable women, a good example being the pure and innocent female leading roles in most Mexican soap operas. Those women portrayed as sexually promiscuous are generally punished at the end of the story.'* Melodrama, a genre clearly related to Paquita’s song content, has always been part of Mexican mainstream culture, and women suffering and resisting from within are somehow inherent to the form. What is different about Paquita is that she neither assumes the role of the macho woman that aims at completely dominating men (e.g., the roles played by actress Maria Félix), nor does she resist an unjust situation by hiding her true feelings like so many other Mex1can heroines. It must be said, however, that despite the intricate interplay between submission and resistance, subversion is imbedded in integration, as it is evident that men and the role they play in society are central to her art. Paquita’s cabaret is a reversed social representation that epitomizes the female desire to discredit masculine sexual supremacy and cultural omnipotence. In Paquita’s production the audience does not seek social equality or dialogue with the masculine world, but rather seeks revenge for the dismay and frustration they have experienced in a patriarchal culture. Paquita overpowers men. There is no doubt or ambiguity; the audience is consciously manipulated into entering a realm in which man is reduced to minimal expression. The following lyrics are self-explanatory: Rata inmunda animal rastrero escoria de la vida adefesio mal hecho Infra humano espectro del infierno maldita sabandiya cuanto dafio me has hecho

168 GASTON ALZATE Alimafia culebra ponzofiosa deshecho de la vida te odio y te desprecio.

[Disgusting rat / Vile animal / Scum of the earth / Dysfunctional absurdity / Sub-human entity / Hellish ghost / Damned animal / How you have harmed me! / Vermin / Poisonous snake / Life’s garbage / I hate you and scorn you. |]

As with any popular narrative whose ending is well known to the audience, everyone 1s aware of the fact that Paquita’s representation of men will ultimately portray them as crushed worms. In contem-

porary terms, Paquita’s cabaret functions as a mythical arena in which, as in Greek tragedy or Aztec rituals and sacrifices, Mexicans find an indispensable pathos that allows them to experience a ca-

thartic ritual and thereby continue their existence. For example, many Mexican women suffer the colonial and postcolonial public phenomenon of la casa chica (the other home), a conventional institution whereby the husband possesses the social right to have another home that includes another woman and, often, other children.

Paquita herself suffered the humiliating experience of the casa chica. Her first marriage ended after seven years when Paquita dis-

covered that she and her sons were in fact her “husband’s” casa chica. Subsequent to this discovery, she left Veracruz in 1970 and traveled to Mexico City to start a career as a singer. Thus, it is no surprise that the women dramatized by Paquita have been abandoned, generally for another woman. Significantly, Paquita’s songs represent women who not only courageously face their problems, but also claim to treat men in the same way the latter have treated them. In the context of Latin American popular music, in which most women’s songs are either the representation of an extreme passion for men or examples of helpless, heartbroken females, Paquita’s case is remarkable. BODY AS DRAMATIC TEXT

Paquita’s body is the site of her text. She changes the focus of the female body on stage, which in patriarchal societies is the ubiquitous site of sexuality. The sexuality that Paquita’s body proposes is, from the sophisticated viewpoint of Mexico City nightclubs and in-vogue MTV singers, an “unattractive” one. This neoliberal mar-

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY 169

ket dynamic entails a voyeuristic gaze on the female body. Although this cultural practice occurs between both male and female audience members, it is obvious that Paquita’s lack of adherence to patriarchal customs particularly affects the attitude of her male spectators. In response, Paquita has said, “My music reflects a large part of my life; I mean, that my music says everything about me, and about the life of many women... and even, maybe about men’s lives.” !° Through her songs she not only sublimates her own personal injuries, but also links her personal experience to broader parameters that include men. The tables in Paquita’s cabaret are filled

primarily by women (administrative assistants, housewives, “yuppy” executives, retail workers), while other tables include not only males, but male fans who know her lyrics by heart and sing along with her. The public, both male and female, is interested in Paquita’s lyrics as a cultural representation of feelings that mainstream culture does not express.'® One could interpret Paquita’s popularity as a consequence of the excessive male desires that are projected upon young, fashionable female performers. Polarity is essential to patriarchal gender construction since each gender is constructed as the opposite of the other. This concept of Otherness underlies contrasting aspects of feminine and masculine, such as “hysterical” and “angry,” which contain gender-related expectations. Thus, most popular female performers embody the image of the woman who always responds, in the narrative of the songs, in an uncontrolled or “irrational” way to men. On the one hand, this response entails an emphasis on their need to be subjugated by men,

as in the song “Nifia buena” (Good girl) by Mariana Seoane. On the other, there is a reaffirmation of the female’s power to manipulate men by virtue of her seductive nature, which is nothing more than another kind of submission to men’s desires, an aspect shared

by the aforementioned singers and many others such as Paulina Rubio and Alejandra Guzman. Paquita fills a cultural void in the sense that she embodies a shy, clumsy, ill-mannered persona rather than the glamorous, narcissistic one projected by most popular female performers. At the same time, lyrics invite the male audience to identify with the female sen-

timents expressed in her cabaret and make them their own. The male audience negotiates her symbolic representations of female feelings, despite the fact that these representations were not created

for men but rather designed to resist them. The result is that, for many different reasons and in many different ways, her male as well as her female public understands her lyrics as authentic love metaphors. This may be due to the fact that quite often real-life love

170 GASTON ALZATE is not the romantic ideal portrayed in Hollywood films, soap operas, and the Americanized Mexican media. Consequently, it is not surprising that men often give her flowers at the end of the show when all she does is insult them. While giving flowers is a stereotypical thing for the macho to do when seeking forgiveness, these men are not simply playing up to or along with her; her show is a mythical theater in which the macho is symbolically released for a moment from the overcontrolling character he is expected to play in real life. Furthermore, to the extent that Paquita is a strong woman, her male audience can also identify with the pathos—an authentic symbolic representation of suffering and misery—in her songs. In sum, love

metaphors offer a cathartic and liberating experience for men as well as women.

HEARTBROKEN REVENGE

Paquita’s persona is also the site of heartbroken revenge: an eye

for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In a culture in which women are lyrically represented solely in terms of their relationship with men, Paquita’s performances disrupt the principles of phallocentrism. In Latin American culture, where almost all female singers portray

women who cry over the disappearance of their men, Paquita’s show is a singular declaration of female protest. In “Esa es la puerta” (There is the door), Paquita portrays a woman who exists outside the patriarchal Mexican male’s gaze. This woman enjoys drinking, but without losing control. A homeowner, she has decided to celebrate her birthday with male friends. This symbolic inversion

of the traditional model is accomplished through a strong female character, who tells her lover “please don’t slam the door on your way out.” Thus, the man is ultimately the “hysterical” victim of love gone wrong. As part of the contemporary system of representation, of which the US media are the main provider, mainstream culture is characterized by a fictional paradigm of body and humanity into which some of us fit, while others fit very poorly. Alfonso de Toro challenges this paradigm by using the body as a theoretical and social category of analysis in theater: “The body acts where language as a means of communication fails. The body is identity’s last refuge. It is the site where desire, sexuality and power become concrete.”’!” This conception foregrounds the visual physicality of Paquita’s performance, her lack of interaction with the audience, and her unique onstage presence within the context of Mexican culture. In Mexico,

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dominant ideologies pertaining to the body relate to racial and social paradigms that date back to colonial times. In spite of miscegenation, it is obvious even today that the richer strata of society tend to be more fair-skinned as compared to the masses, who generally have strong indigenous features. In the same vein, dress is an 1mportant identity marker. In Mexico, the closer one follows US fash-

ion, the higher one is located on the Mexican social scale. In this sense, bodies can be said to write our stories. Therefore, Paquita’s appearance as a mature, unpretentious, and overweight Mexican woman clearly places her closer to the experiences of common people in Mexico and many other countries, and at the same time questions the materiality of dominant models of female body representations in the media. In Paquita’s shows, music and the repre-

sentation of the body connect in the sense that both imply a language beyond the realm of daily communication and interaction. Paquita’s body and music are not just the “last refuge of identity,” but a site of power for questioning other identity models. PAQUITA’S COUNTER(POST )MODERNITY

For Paquita’s audience, it is not the fulfillment of patriarchal de-

sire that keeps them captivated and entertained, but rather the emancipation of the official female body from the position of anOther. This is why men and women alike are captured by Paquita’s charismatic candor. Her candid performance builds a network of symbols and conventions through which spectators live a passionate drama that allows them to reconstruct themselves as subjects. A subject, in the theatrical terms of Sue-Ellen Case, has a point of view and also has control over the network of symbols.'® As opposed to theatrical objects, a subject exists at the intersection of cultural codes and practices and can remodel a system of signs. In this sense, Paquita’s stage persona affords an alternate truth to Mexican women and men. This relates to Walter Benjamin’s claim regarding the mystical ability of art to reveal truth.!? According to Benjamin, art restores life for the viewer through its aura. This gift, this truth that Paquita gives to the audience, crosses boundaries so that the viewer is pulled into, or contracted into, her worldview. Paquita’s cabaret allows men to question the constraints that macho-masculinity imposes on them and their relationships with women. Within Mexican popular song, women rarely escape the role of merchandise because they are objects of the economic system of masculine desire. If postmodernism as a category is understood as breaking

172 GASTON ALZATE with binarisms, Paquita is not postmodern because she clearly maintains her role as a woman who takes charge of her emotions and her destiny in opposition to men. In her dramatization, man 1s

the one who cannot escape his role as merchandise subjected to feminine rage. In this sense, Paquita is not escaping from the system but inverting its terms. She provides a space for observing how it really works, for showing how unjust the situation of mature married women is, and for expressing rage towards generic male behav-

ior. In “Cheque en blanco” (Blank check) Paquita’s lyrics apply irony to the usual rhetoric and topics of the ranchera, particularly when comparing love and money. Pero qué mal te juzgueé. Si te gusta la basura.

Pero mira qué locura Pero para ti esta bien. Pero qué mal calculé Yo te crei tan decente. Si te gusta lo corriente Por barato, yo qué sé. Amor, Si eres hombre de negocios Todo lo quieres con socios Ahora si ya te entendi

Ah, me decepcionaste tanto Que al querer un cheque en blanco A tu nombre y para ti Es por la cantidad que quieras En donde dice desprecio Ese debe ser tu precio Y va firmado por mi.

[I really misjudged you / I hadn’t realized you like trash / But it goes well with you / I miscalculated / Because I believed you were decent / But you like what is tacky / Because it is probably cheaper. / I don’t really know why /.../ My dear, / You are like a businessman / You like to have partners for everything / I finally got it. / You really let me down / So if you want a blank check / It will be for as much as you want / It will be paid in scorn / This will be your price / And I will sign it myself. |

In this song Paquita plays with vocabulary corresponding to the masculine world of business. She positions herself, however, at the

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY 173

center of this world and displaces men from their role of agency. Irony allows her to symbolically question the patriarchal model of a love relationship, and therefore, to place herself at a critical dis-

tance. In this way, she creates a parody of what men think of women, but also criticizes those women who make themselves available for money. In short, she does not criticize men as men or women as women, but the ways in which the relationship between them is conceived. This critique is then directed toward a patriarchal/commercial love model in which people treat one another like merchandise. Contemporary Mexican singers such as Thalia, Paulina Rubio, and Belinda, along with groups like RBD and Kabah, impress the audience with music and lyrics that represent women or men in a

narcissistic, neoliberal, first-world context but that do not make sense in the general context of Latin American ordinary life, whatever that may be. While it is true that many popular female artists have embraced the ranchera style of music (such as the aforementioned Paulina Rubio and Thalia), their stage presence usually relies upon first-world beauty and fashion standards. For example, both Rubio and Thalia are young, blonde, and thin, and wear the same fashionable, expensive, and sexy clothes one may see in a Christina Aguilera or Mariah Carey video. Furthermore, the lyrics to their ranchera songs are rather dull in the way they address men when compared to Paquita’s rage and irony. In their ranchera songs they either take the role of the seductive, sexy, young woman who wants “a macho-man at heart” (Thalia’s “Amor a la mexicana” [Love Mexican-style]) or the beautiful, rich, and rebellious teenager who goes Out to a disco to have tequila with her girlfriends in order to take revenge against a former lover (Paulina’s “Dame otro tequila” [Give me another tequila]). There is no originality in their attitude, and neither of them opens a new way for mature and/or workingclass women, who are a very large segment of the Mexican population, to express themselves like Paquita does through traditional music. It could even be said that their lack of creative cultural energies and their failure to address genuine feelings and deeply rooted cultural experiences is directly proportional to the overwhelming presence of technology in their shows and videos. In Mexico, a country with a strong musical tradition, the cancion ranchera, even with its often-implicit colonial machismo, remains clearly present in mainstream culture. In spite of the popularity of these pop culture performers, there is still an audience and market for young ranchero singers such as Pedro Fernandez, Pablo Montero, Lucero, or Alejandro Fernandez. Accordingly, there are purely

174 GASTON ALZATE market-oriented singers such as Thalia and Rubio, who once in a while sing in the ranchera tradition, though they already have an established international pop style and market. The people managing these artists take advantage of the fact that the ranchera tradition is deeply embedded in Mexican culture. Pop lyrics are not enough to narrate contemporary subjectivities and maintain a market. However, in such a strongly nationalist country, and among the many Mexicans in the US, Paquita is special because she connects with legitimate forces of an urban culture that, in spite of the globalization of US mass media, maintains a connection to experiences located outside these hegemonic systems of representation. QUESTIONING MASCULINE SENTIMENTAL HEGEMONY WITHIN RANCHERA MUSIC

Although Paquita’s cabaret initially emerged in opposition to the dominant order, her cultural production has moved to a place very close to Mexican mainstream culture. For this reason, as part of this process of legitimizing, her production has also been absorbed by the hegemonic. The uniqueness of Paquita’s production is that this assimilation to the dominant has been established without losing her bellicosity. Paquita’s production plays a cultural role in giving voice to particular counterpostmodern energies by exposing overtly and blatantly the general structure of machismo. Her lyrical perspective derives from the Mexican construction of heterosexual feelings and love, a construction that reinforces female roles of submission and suffering. This is significant because she achieves the displacement and deterritorialization of male feelings as the center of the love drama from which all feelings (feminine, gay, lesbian, transsexual, or transgender) are regulated. In her performance, she expresses an open challenge to masculine sentimental hegemony. For instance, while a notorious trait of Mexican machismo is the refusal to express or admit to feelings, there are codified ways in ranchera music for men to deal with love and pain. Drinking at a cantina (a bar just for men) to forget a lost or unrequited love is the most typical scene. Although Paquita takes over that role from the perspective of a mature woman who also suffers for love, she refuses to be a passive sufferer. She goes out at night, drinks, and insults men publicly. By examining the history of Latin American popular song, we can understand both where Paquita fits in and what she has contributed. We can find alternative constructions of the sentimental in

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Mexican society, especially within lesbian and gay cultures, which basically appropriated heterosexual sentimental production to express their own feelings. In these cultural productions, queer singers deal with patriarchal sentimental hegemony by changing the gender of some articles or adjectives, or by playing with the ambiguity of some passages that can be interpreted as love songs between two women or two men. There have been Mexican female singers such as Lucha Reyes, Chavela Vargas, and Lola Beltran, who sang in the ranchera tradition in their fight for a female representational space. They have

created what Astrid Hadad calls “el canto bravio” (the song of brave women). Their strategy for dealing with Mexican masculine culture has been very different from Paquita’s; they express their feelings in very strong, intimate, and tormented voices. Paquita’s

song does not express grief. Instead, she situates herself on the same level as men. Her voice says, “You made me suffer, now I am going to make you suffer, you good-for-nothing.” Another element that conforms to her cabaret’s female-centered theatricality 1s the fact that Paquita’s songs are usually written by men. She hires a composer to write her lyrics, though she provides

her own themes and directions. There are also people who send their own songs to her when they feel that the lyrics might be part of this antimasculine agenda. About this process, Paquita says, “I know composers start thinking about the music I perform and because of that they produce the kind of songs I sing. I guess, sometimes they even investigate my personal life.”*° More than a popular singer, Paquita is a cultural movement that makes composers adapt to her particular worldview. In this sense, Paquita’s lyrics

and cabaret embody a unique form of symbolic resistance to the melodramatic representation of love predominant in the neoliberal entertainment market, as well as to the representation of the female subject. This is particularly significant because she departs from the

underrepresented experiences of mature, working-class women who take charge of their own lives after being abandoned by their lovers.

INTERNATIONAL/NATIONAL RECEPTION

Finally, it is important to recognize the ways in which Paquita’s performance has been perceived in Mexico. This will help us to understand the position of a marginal cabaret show that has switched to the mainstream due to certain sociohistoric transformations, but

176 GASTON ALZATE without losing its defining traits. Although her proposal was initially made for a barrio cabaret audience, after thirty years of artistic productions it has officially entered the mainstream entertainment market. Due to her originality and ample popularity over

the ten years prior to her TV appearances, it is possible that the

Mexican media had no other choice. This is not uncommon in Mex-

ico. For example, it took over twenty years for the famous rock group El Tri to have a show on commercial television, mainly due to their criticism of corruption in the Mexican media. Televisa, TV Azteca (Mexico), and Univision (US) control the aesthetics of all dominant cultural productions, so it is difficult for an artist who does not conform to their parameters to gain acceptance. Paquita’s recognition transcended Mexico when famous film director Pedro Almodévar invited her to Spain in 1980. This relation-

ship was the beginning of Paquita’s legitimatization within the broader cultural movement of the eighties and nineties, from which

new codes and aesthetics emerged. Common aspects of Latin American and Spanish popular culture form the main aesthetic base of Pedro Almodovar’s films. He incorporates, for example, the atmosphere of Spanish soap operas and the art and music of popular

Latin American culture as part of a system of values upon which ordinary people in Spain and Latin America build their hopes and dreams. In fact, in many of his productions, Almodovar subverts such popular melodramatic narratives by questioning heterosexual love models and privileging the female characters’ perspective. Thus, it is easy to understand why Paquita’s show seemed so appealing to him. At the end of the 1980s, Almodovar’s cinematographic productions introduced references to Spanish and Latin American camp, queer and kitsch culture, which in turn influenced the Latin American perception and understanding of Paquita’s cabaret. Happily, these emergent components, which had struggled for a long time against the hegemonic culture, find their path to legitimacy by pushing their way through mainstream Mexican contem-

porary culture. For this reason, the analysis of Paquita’s

performance from within the field of cultural studies is significant. Such an analysis not only explains the causes of her marginality, but also permits greater understanding of the interactions between Paquita’s cabaret and hegemonic cultural media. CONCLUSION

Paquita’s popularity both inside and outside her country is a sign of the crisis of representation and the recognition of critical issues

PAQUITA LA DEL BARRIO AND TRANSLOCAL THEATRICALITY = 177

in contemporary popular culture, particularly those pertaining to the symbolic understanding of heterosexual gender roles. Her cultural production may be understood as a translocal theatricality that questions patriarchal culture insofar as this culture is based on the predominance of masculine discourse (however, it must be reaf-

firmed that Paquita does not question heterosexuality per se). Therefore, Paquita embodies a double fracture in the verbalization

of such a discourse in Mexico, both at the level of traditions (ranchera, albur, carpa) and at that of contemporary mass media.

This fracture involves the articulation of various cultural spaces that cannot be defined in terms of oppositions such as center/periphery or tradition/modernity. In fact, as explained above, her production

is an explicit rejection of certain colonial and neocolonial maledominated structures, from la casa chica to techno pop models of femininity. As a result, the authority of the colonial Mexican masculine culture is symbolically questioned, if not dismantled. Her popularity owes to an extraordinary ability to relate her personal love experiences through a unique symbolic disruption of the dominant representations of melodramatic love in popular culture. Based on Mexican local and lower-class narratives, Paquita’s cabaret constitutes a form of counter(post)modernity, including the previously

mentioned fact that she does not break with binarism in gender roles. One could argue that this kind of counter(post)modernity reinforces the idea of Latin America as a place for postmodern neoexoticism. According to Mabel Morafia, neoexoticism refers to the idea that Latin America has never recovered from the magical realism syndrome of the sixties, in which Latin Americans depicted themselves with an exotic, exportable image capable of being sold to Western culture—including the Swedish academy.”! Nevertheless, it clearly has not been easy for the neoliberal market to homogenize the authentically heterogeneous symbolic energies that Paquita’s production entails. Her production emerges in the midst of US economic and cultural hegemony as a clear example of the

Latin American need for models of cultural resistance that give voice to people’s own experiences and life stories. NOTES

1. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Although originally from Northern Mexico, ranchera music—a rural genre closely associated with the Mexican cowboy (or charro) culture—became a symbol of national identity in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. Maria-

chi bands, probably the most internationally recognized symbol of Mexican

178 GASTON ALZATE culture, often play this type of music. Possibly as a result of the cultural politics that followed the Mexican Revolution (1910—20), most heroes in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema (the forties and fifties) were Mexican cowboys (charros) and

very good singers as well, such as the notorious Pedro Infante. Thus, cinema greatly contributed to the popularity of the ranchera genre in Mexico and throughout Latin America.

3. Jesis Martin Barbero, “Globalizacion y multiculturalidad: notas para una agenda de investigacion,” in Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina, ed. Mabel Morafia (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000), 17-29. 4. Néstor Garcia Canclini, “Anthropology: Eight Approaches to Latin Americanism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2002): 265-78. 5. Ibid., 275. 6. Jon Beasley-Murray, “Introduction: Toward a New Latin Americanism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2002): 261-64.

7. Similar to a traveling circus, carpa is a marginal theater genre that dates from the beginning of the twentieth century. Carpa (tent) shows traveled from town to town and entertained the public, not with “freaks” and animals, but with stand-up comics, singers, female dancers, and musical theater. 8. Carlos Monsivais, Mexican Postcards, trans. John Kroniauskas (London: Verso, 1997), 92.

9. David William Foster, “Paquita la del barrio: Singing Feminine Rage,” CiberLetras 2 (2000), http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/vO 1n02/Foster.htm.

10. Gaston Alzate, Teatro de cabaret: Imaginarios disidentes (Irvine, CA: Gestos, 2002). For further information on this subject, see Roselyn Costantino, “Mujeres inconvenientes: memoria, politica y performance en Mexico,” in La escena imposible ante el globo mundial, ed. Laura Borras Castanyer (Madrid: Fundacidn Autor, 2003), 83-93.

11. “Paquita la del Barrio no canta contra los hombres, sdlo los regafia,” Azteca21, January 30, 2003, http://www.azteca2 1.com/noticias/antes/especta3001 03—01.htm.

12. Socorro Merlin, Vida y milagros de las carpas (Mexico City: INBA/CITRU, 1995), 65. 13. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139.

14. Recent examples are “Inocente de ti” (You are so innocent), “Amor real” (Real love), “La esposa virgen” (The virgin wife), and “Contra viento y marea” (Against all odds). Strong leading female roles are scarce, as the women usually end up either becoming submissive to their men (e.g., “Apuesta por un amor” [A bet on love]) or punished due to their lack of morals (e.g., “Rubi” ). A few productions like “Salomé” and “Tres mujeres” (Three women) have explored a more balanced type of female leading role, but the norm still tends to be the pure and innocent young woman. 15. Mario Villanueva, “A Paquita ‘La del Barrio’ no le gusta pisar el Auditorio Nacional,” La Cronica de Hoy, September 5, 2000, http://webcom.com.mx/cron ica/2000/sep/05/welcome.html. 16. Foster, “Paquita la del barrio.” 17. Alfonso De Toro, “Semiosis teatral postmoderna: intento de un modelo,” Gestos 5, no. 9 (1990): 36. 18. Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1988), 13. 19. Walter Benjamin, ///uminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 65. 20. “Paquita la del barrio con el cuarto vaso,” ;Qué pues!, July 30, 1999, http:// www.imagenzac.com.mx/1999/07/30/QuePues | .htm. 21. Mabel Morafia, “The Boom of the Subaltern,” Revista de Critica Cultural 15 (1997): 48-53.

Standing in Cultural Representation: Latino Stand-Up and The Original Latin Kings of Comedy Guillermo Irizarry IN “NOTES ON DECONSTRUCTING ‘THE POPULAR,” STUART HALL

declares that “popular culture is one of the sites where [the] strug-

gle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged... . It is the arena of consent and resistance.”! As per his definition, popular

culture is in conflict with the culture of dominant classes and responds in a negotiated fashion to the needs of subaltern classes with

regard to its “production, circulation, distribution/consumption, [and] reproduction.’ Furthermore, he warns that “there is no oneto-one relationship between a class and a particular cultural form or practice.”° With Hall’s proposal as a point of departure, this inquiry deals with popular culture to critically situate contradictory meaning and value of cultural products in the contested territory of the

social, and to uncover the hidden contradictions in the circuits of production and consumption. Elaborating on Hall’s framework, Michael Denning proposes that the manner in which we signify popular culture must be nuanced to

understand how it has become intimately linked to consumer society and states that “there is... very little cultural production outside the commodity form.”* Denning maintains that commodification does not eradicate the disruptive force of subaltern culture, but rather locates the production and consumption of cultural commodities in a “terrain structured by the culture industries, the state cultural apparatuses, and the symbolic forms and practices of the subaltern classes.”> Despite a hegemonizing intentionality on the commodity per se, broad participation of subaltern agents at different moments fosters resistance and contestation enacted within the same cultural circuits. As I will later discuss, this contestation plays out in the form of unproductive labor (what Paolo Virno calls “1improductivity”). In the case of stand-up, which is our point of entry 179

180 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY into this interrogation of contemporary cultural production, it produces a form of idle talk, which obstructs the subsumption of subaltern positionalities.° This essay reflects upon US Latino cultural production since the 1980s, its rampant commodification, and its disruptive possibilities. Latinos as a class formation should be located within the sphere of the popular for the following reasons:’ (1) Latinos are marked off by the state as different from white ethnicity; 2) we are administered by symbolic laboring within the nation as an internally coherent ethnic community; and (3) we have fashioned ourselves as a social bloc with our own political and discursive cohesion despite intracommunity tensions.® In reflecting upon contemporary Latino cultural production, we must recognize that we are in the thick of a Latino cultural boom. Like never before, Latino megastars are proliferating in literature, music, film, and television. There is broader political representation in judicial, legislative, and executive circuits, in electoral politics, in national and statewide policy debates; and there is a concurrent population growth that is expected to intensify in coming years.’ I propose that current Latino popular culture reveals “the central line of contradiction,”!® which expresses itself in daily practices, electoral politics, judicial debates, outward expressions of dissent, the state’s repressive actions, and the negotiation of meaning associated with the US ethno-racial hierarchy. This study spotlights stand-up comedy, a genre that serves as a

particular point of entry to bring to light how subaltern cultural products negotiate their subsumption by hegemonic culture. Possessing lower canonical value than other performance forms, stand-

up is frequently associated with seedy or inconsequential artistic

venues and is the territory of crass, sexist, racist, and debased humor. Interestingly, this theatrical form has been the site of artistic expression for numerous ethnic and racial minorities in the US, as well as a site for contesting social relations and for laboring cultural difference. Stand-up becomes similar to what Albert McLean suggests of early twentieth-century American vaudeville: “a ritual of a

New Folk ... one means by which Americans came to terms with a crisis in culture .. . in almost primitive—or neoprimitive—modes of expression.” '! In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the vaudevillian theater became the space to negotiate the inclusion of new immigrant cultures in the US and to process a voluminous demographic shift from the country to the city. At the same time, American vaudeville was enormous business, as McLean contends, and it allowed for the tense collaboration of capital and labor, and of dominant and subaltern ideologies, in a communal fashion.

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 181

The history of stand-up evinces similar labors.!? In the repressive

post-World War II society, comedians such as Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and the Smothers Brothers turned into the guardians of alternative thinking in smoky backrooms and basements.'* In a postpatriotic comedic mode, they dared to criticize dominant political projects, racial oppression, sexual mores, and gender relations. Their marginal voices were rescued from obscurity when they were brought into hegemonic circuits by television, particularly through the Ed Sullivan Show. The significance of this underground come-

dic revolution created a national commotion in the short-lived 1960s television program The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, in

which “the brothers, the parent network CBS, and viewers attempted to map the boundaries of acceptable political and cultural

representations.” !* In a similar fashion, female comedians like Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, Roseanne Barr, Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Margaret Cho, and Whoopi Goldberg have been in dif-

ferent social transformations “true provocateurs, who strip down society to its bare bones and point up its inequities.” !> Meanwhile, African American stand-up has had stupendous irruptive force in mass culture, especially since its broad introduction in television shows such as Def Comedy Jam, Comic View, Uptown Comedy Club, and Comic Justice. African American stand-up “minor discourse” has found entry into mainstream society.'® It has moved from Richard Prior’s astringent routines criticizing racial relations, to massive distribution of unapologetic “black talk” in mass media, to more domesticated and whitewashed performances by moderate performers that portray “a middle class utopian imagination of racial pluralism.” '’ As various critics have asserted, stand-up is “inevitably linked to power dynamics,”!® for it has an inalienable role in “cultural affirmation and subversion.” !? Stand-up does not promote direct confrontation of hegemony, but, like the jesters of medieval courts, it can disparage the powerful because comedians are considered 1nnocuous.”° There is an intriguing displacement of this genre in the sense that it gravitates from marginal to hegemonic circuits of production and consumption, from low to high exchange values, becoming tremendously commercial and lucrative, from obscure bars to mainstream theaters to commercial television, while the comedians themselves become mainstream cultural icons. In Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, John Limon theorizes that stand-up—as a site of symbolic laboring in a commodified, post-World War II United States—erects and mobi-

182 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY lizes abjection instead of a monolithic, centralized notion of subjectivity. He proposes that it “is a way of standing up the inevitability of return” and expresses “the alienable that keeps not being alienated.’’*! Stand-up comedians, who in certain contexts claim to represent a community, neurotically debase themselves and perform their work, sell their act as a commodity, and seem to aggrandize their aura to the point of achieving the status of public intellectuals. Their work concurrently stages a hegemonic fantasy (for they reenact the marginality that the social hierarchy allows for their community) and the disruptive force of subaltern ideologies (for they playfully put forth a stern critique of hegemonic values and validate marginal cultural practices and beliefs). I argue that stand-up situates: (1) a symbolic laboring of minor

ethnic groups; (2) an exchange that implies a degree of loss between what is put forth and what is used (both the represented sub-

jects and the knowledge itself), and (3) a site of profound

ambivalence that locates a space of epistemological negativity, a surplus of disruptive force that can not become translated into hegemony or labored into social productivity.” Similarly, I propose that this kind of ambivalence characterizes this particular theatrical performance as a mass consumption of idle talk, an idea that will be discussed 1n the closing part of this essay. As hegemonic culture endeavors to labor difference by domesticating the disruptive force of subalternity, it supports the distribution of cultural commodities that reify the purportedly inclusive ethos of the multicultural nation. Such products become a favored vehicle to disseminate hegemonic values, as members of the ethnic group are portrayed as producers.

Contradictory decodings arise, because hegemonic and subaltern positionalities are at odds, while intentionalities within the circuits of production and consumption diverge. A significant loss is caused by the variance between what the producer puts forth (1.e., real ex-

change value and social use value in the form of knowledge and ideological—hegemonizing—significance) and what the public (which runs the gamut of positionalities) makes of it in the sphere of consumption. If there is a loss in the exchange process, there too

is a surplus of disruptive force ensconced in the innocuous commodity and its innocent mainstream circuit of distribution and consumption. The Original Latin Kings of Comedy premiered on Showtime on September 15, 2003, opening a month-long celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month.”? The show included a group of famed male Latino comedians: Cheech Marin, Joey Medina, Paul Rodriguez, Alex Reymundo, and George Lopez.** True to male stand-up aesthetics, the

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 183

comics denigrate women, make fun of diverse ethnic groups, deal in scatological references and corporeal jokes, and neurotically defile the self of the comedian and his community. The show presents a filmed version of a highly successful comedy tour entitled “Yo quiero comedy jam,” which was taped with a live audience in the symbolically laden border town of El Paso, Texas. The location for taping exhibits a desire to publicly rework the symbolic value of Latinos in the US. El Paso, as setting for this mass media version of the program, emphasizes the geographic and symbolic fringe status of Latino culture and locates a site of confrontation between national and linguistic epistemologies (Mexico/US, Spanish/English). Interestingly, the border symbolizes a zone of transgression and crossing, as well as a site of prophylactic action by the state’s ideological and repressive apparatus (i.e., it is set up as a material limit and symbolic site of the protection against foreign influence or contagion; it also reifies physically the symbolic repression of otherness or counterhegemonic values and positions). The title of Showtime’s broadcast recalls Spike Lee’s successful Original Kings of Comedy show, which headlined four famous African American comedians and documented an extended comedy tour through the United States.*? Aside from attempting to ride the coattails of Lee’s success (and contest the latter’s claim to royalty), The Original Latin Kings of Comedy takes advantage of a type of cultural commodity that reifies the collective renegotiation of cultural difference. The title also brings to mind the controversial orga-

nization of the Latin Kings, which some consider a criminal organization whereas others see it as an ethnic pride and advocacy eroup.*° This reference denotes a double discourse; the title associates Latinos with marginality and even criminal behavior (the hu-

morous routines reiterate this association), while attempting to expunge the validity of these deleterious stereotypes by making light of these social agents in order to allow for the integration of Latinos into the national imaginary. Straddling the fence between native informant and public intellectual, the comedians purportedly provide ethnographic information, all the while asserting the essential Latino difference from hegemonic culture, repeatedly marked off as white, Anglo, or Caucasian. From its opening gesture, the program addresses traditional (folk/country) Mexican, urban Chicano, and hegemonic fantasies and stereotypes regarding Latinos. The program opens with a romantic ballad about an Anglo man who falls “in love with a Mexican girl” in El Paso.*’ Simultaneously, the camera captures images of daily life in the border city—aerial shots of gritty, working-class

184 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY neighborhoods, children playing in the streets, commercial strips with bilingual signs, and a mural remembering victims of domestic abuse. When the song ends with the line “one little kiss and Felina good-bye,” the camera focuses on a young woman looking at a Border Patrol vehicle through a fence from the Mexican side of the border. The erotic fantasy at play between Mexican and US Anglo culture, suggested by the song, 1s frustrated by the prophylactic designs of the state and hegemonic culture. The second half of the introduction opens with the song “Low Rider,” which celebrates the cars emblematic of urban Chicano culture. In synchrony, an array of converted antique vehicles with young Chicano passengers appear cruising on broad avenues and driving past a heroic mural celebrating the union of all Latin American ancestries. This section insinuates a tension between the folkloric, more serene vision of traditional Mexican culture and a more contemporary, more muscular and transgressive urban identity. The scenes also contain a nuanced exoticization of Latino identity as a domestic Other. The ambivalent aesthetic and epistemological intentionalities make room within the cultural performance for multifarious readings of the program. In the same vein, Francisco Cuevas’s set design reproduces the aestheticized portrayal of ethnographic information by creating an anthropological “field” of sorts. In folkloric, kitsch style, the performance space fashions the inner court of an aged pseudo-Spanish-colonial apartment complex, painted in an array of pastel reds and oranges, with colorful, though peeling, stucco walls, distressed

and grimy wooden doors, and an odd combination of items: wrought iron tables and window bars, a wood pallet, an old TV set, Christmas lights, and assorted plants. While the decorative styles clash, the set allows for wide-ranging identifications with the cul-

tural scene: from traditional, to contemporary urban, to nouveau Latino (especially in the color scheme). Marin, who MCs the event, underscores the ethnological dimension of the stage as field by declaring in his opening monologue: “I don’t care if you are Mexican,

Puerto Rican or Cuban, you all came from a neighborhood like this.”” As informant/intellectual, he validates the ethnological knowledge contained in the material portrayal of cultural space and simultaneously sanctions a homogenizing thrust in laboring Latino diversity within the nation, thereby embracing dominant epistemologies regarding internal ethno-racial difference. At an epidermic level, the performers seem to align themselves with dominant values when they assert time after time their pride in being American and the fundamental difference with other coun-

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 185

tries. In his routine, Joey Medina (who tactically admits his Puerto Rican ancestry) announces: “El Paso, Texas: the capital of Juarez,

México,” and immediately declares: “I love México.” He celebrates the outrageously cheap products that US dollars garner in this country, stating that “you can drink for like five bucks all fuck-

ing night,” and later inquires, “Where else can you get ten tacos for a dollar?” The comedian, however, lampoons the quality of Mexican food—insinuating that tacos are sometimes made with dog meat—and its judicial system—stating that his Nike tennis shoes were taken as “bail.” Medina also makes light of Mexican vigilance at the border: “You ever notice when you drive across, you got Mexican Immigration checking us out? [I’m thinking: ‘What are they afraid we’re sneaking in? Technology?’” His piece duplicates the binary logic of nationhood, the supreme epistemological value of geographic boundaries, and the clear separation of cultural identities and national subjectivities. Likewise, it establishes a hierarchical relation between national subjects and endorses evolutionary metanarratives related to stages of technological and

economic development. The piece also creates a cleft between Mexican and US Latino subjectivity. On the other hand, his decla-

ration regarding El Paso’s importance for Juarez questions the soundness of dichotomous notions of subjectivity, culture, and poli-

tics. Consumptive practices in border cities and towns, central to his routine, index a fluid relation (economic, social, and political) between border towns and people, and on a broader scale, the US and Mexico. The Original Latin Kings portrays Latino sameness, at the same

time as it asserts unqualified difference from dominant culture. George Lopez repeats the phrase different people to explicate the fundamental epistemological reality of his community. Latinas and Latinos are not only marked off as being different ethnically but

also tagged as members of the lower classes. This shared class status appears in the description of social practices (such as crashing a funeral gathering to ransack the culinary offerings), in the material culture described (e.g., water hoses without nozzles, old cutoff pants instead of bathing suits, and underwear and a blanket as a super-hero costume), and in the privileged locale of collective ethnic performance: the barrio. This ostensibly neutral, anthropologi-

cal reflection has the virtue of naturalizing social hierarchies by establishing a strong association between ethnicity and class, a notion that endorses the naturalizing thrust of ethno-racial discourse as it relates to class. At the same time, Lopez fosters broad solidaristic identification with subaltern groups as he suggests that spe-

186 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY cific class needs—of Latinos with a different social status—should not obstruct the creation of a class formation or a strategic political configuration based on an entanglement of interests. Paul Rodriguez’s piece, the closing act of the show, replicates the ethnographic impulse of his associates, and shares numerous autobiographical and familial anecdotes to illustrate broader cultural phenomena and beliefs. Metonym and self-ethnography become primary modes of representation to deliver knowledge. Rodriguez

discusses how his mother would acquire five-cent chicks, raise them, and kill them in order to feed a family of twelve. He relates how resources from the bird were exhausted: “My mother would pluck out all the feathers, stuff them into pillows. Take the beaks and make guitar picks. . . . Make rosary beads out of the neck bones.” Rodriguez makes fun of his family’s size saying that, as per his mother, they had twelve children because they “didn’t know all of [them] were going to survive.” He additionally proposes that

‘Mexican parents have a lot of kids because that’s their form of social security.”” A sundry of cultural practices are discussed in humorous fashion, making light of funerary rituals, certain delicacies of Mexican cuisine, and changes in sexual behaviors.

The routines of Lopez and Rodriguez, in particular, evince an economy of personal information, suggesting that private knowledge acquires an exchange value and purportedly a social use value (it carries true ethnographic information for the benefit of intercultural understanding).*® At the same time, they reproduce stereotypical notions of Latinos and advance integration of Latino difference within the national imaginary via the commodification of private ethnological data. Though difference from hegemonic culture is acknowledged, comedians reiterate their affiliation to a national pro-

gram and maintain their membership in the US community as

“Americans.” Rodriguez talks about his trip to France with an aging uncle who

has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He ridicules various

French cultural emblems and discusses how his confused uncle discharged his bowels in a five-star-hotel bidet. Scatology and nation-

alism work in synchrony to portray a symbolic, post-9/11, antiFrench assertion of difference from other nationalities, and to avow

the good-patriot ethics of Latinos. The internal differential logic that constructs distinct ethnic and racial subjects in the US does not

cancel the external differential logic that establishes distinct and separate national identities. Instead, the internal differential logic supports the external one, by making agents of a global hegemonic program—a world social order organized by separate national and

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 187

political communities—out of the objects of a national hegemonic project for social ordering.*? To be clear, those who are Othered (and disciplined) by a hegemonic national discourse (in this case,

Latinos), repeat this logic by embracing the categories that are thrust upon them, ascribing them to those who are marked as different (foreigners, other minorities, etc.) by the nation and defending the hegemonic values that exploit them as social entities within the nation. The comedians in this performance operate as public intellectuals who have a mediating function between their ethnic community and the nation. Like the stand-up philosopher Comicus in Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I, they personify characters that address

the sovereign power—the Emperor of the Roman Empire in Brooks’s movie—to facilitate sociohistorical transformations. These Latino comedians partially embody the role of legislative intellectuals who negotiate the social-use value of collectives, behaviors, and ideologies within the nation.*° As an illustrative bit, in the

transition between routines, Marin asks the audience about their preferred label for ethnic identification. After putting forth Hispanic, Latino, and Chicano—the latter of which the El Paso audience predictably favored enthusiastically—he affirms that before all, they were Mexican American. The Chicano comedian croons a casual song on the mores and habits of Mexican Americans, validating the label Mexican American and celebrating certain behaviors and values: Mexican-Americans don’t like to get up early in the morning but they have to, so they do it real slow. And Mexican-Americans love education, so they go to night school and they take Spanish and get a B. And Mexican-Americans don’t like to just get into gang fights, they like flowers and music and White girls named Debbie too. And Mexican-Americans are named Chata and Chema and Chuy and have a son-in-law named Jeff.

His intervention could be understood as an administrative action of various implications, considering the double layering of the audience in the theater and in front of the television set. The comedian educates the Latino public regarding their status within the nation, while he defends a particular pedagogic mode for a likely wider, more mainstream audience. Simultaneously, this scene becomes a collective performance of identity in the theater, for a mainstream TV audience, in all probability largely non-Latino.

188 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY Code-switching and interlingualism appear as significant elements in the encoding of various routines. It would be unreasonable to examine the terrain of US contemporary culture without accounting for language’s social-use value and its established national significance. All of the performances in The Latin Kings are infused

with interlingualism even when the performers limit the use of Spanish to a few lexical items, such as intensifiers or local color elements. Spanish, at one level, reifies the paradigmatic value of cultural difference. It 1s also employed as a transgressive mechanism to create a zone of exclusivity for Spanish speakers. More than the other performers, LOpez uses it as an instrument of cultural aggression and, at that, as a collective ritual to aver a zone of irretrievable heterogeneity within the multicultural nation.*! Lopez opens his monologue in Spanish and after greeting his audience realizes that he is speaking in this tongue. He fidgets with the microphone and declares that the instrument has been wrongly set. Through this gimmick he is able to switch several times from one language to the other and have fun with the mistranslation from Spanish to English: “I realize that there are problems within our

communities, and I know that one day . . . (audience laughter) through patience and understanding we can bridge the gaps... (plays with the microphone) Y si no cabrones que me mamen la verga pinches gtieros cabrones. . . . (plays with the microphone) And we can allow the healing to begin.” Theoretical considerations on the uses of translation aside, this exchange points toward a cultural horizon that addresses negativity in the process of recreating a national imaginary. Code-switching and Spanish in these pieces reinforce hegemonic views on ethnic pluralism and buttress dichot-

omous thinking: Latinos are fundamentally different from domi-

nant subjects because they speak a foreign tongue; Spanish organizes them “around the stigmata of otherness” ;*? original linsuistic production may be translated directly and thus the monolingual ethics of dominant culture remain unmoved; and translation insinuates that Latinos will eventually be brought into the hegemonic fold. Nevertheless, for a bilingual spectator (in this context, a Latino is the ideal interlocutor) Lopez’s bit highlights the hermeneutics of deceit in this performance: what is translated for a monolingual English audience (ideally members of dominant classes) has a different ideological value. Lopez’s strategic insult in this case points towards a remainder in the process of hegemonization. This brings us back to the dynamics of production and consumption, central to our argument. As noted by various critics of standup, this genre comprises an economic exchange. In its purest form,

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 189

it is a marginal cultural product that has negligible social or commercial value. When it is packaged for consumption in major regional theaters and includes notable comedians, marginality and abjection become commodified, oddly subsumed into the market logic of hegemonic culture. If in their primary states abjection and marginality are performed in lower venues of culture, for a subaltern audience, and as a communal and ritualistic negation of hegemony, in its mass-distribution form abjection could be seen as the fetish of hegemonic consumption. One can only hypothesize an Anglo, monolingual, hegemonic viewer who watches The Original Latin Kings on Showtime with the purpose of consuming the subaltern comedian’s performance of abjection and simultaneously taking in the collective ethnic spectacle of a Latino audience laughing at their own abjection. This aspect of the theatrical event is captured by the reaction shots so important for taped and packaged stand-up comedy. Yet, one must assume a plethora of positionalities in the context of consumption, which in effect allows a high exchange value for this commodity and points at a questionable social-use value from a dominant perspective. The performance that is being sold in hegemonic, mass-media circuits does not unequivocally reproduce dominant values. I maintain that the transgressive quality of this symbolic exchange emerges from its ambivalence.

On a folkloric note, cambiar chinas por botellas is a Puerto Rican saying that refers to an exchange involving trickery: exchanging oranges for bottles. Another popular saying, gato por liebre, describes buying cat meat, thinking you purchased rabbit. The point is to express that the exchange that takes place in the production and consumption of this cultural commodity bears a degree of trickery that must be conjured up and explained as a form of transversal politics. If we are to understand the problematics of producing and consuming humorous ethnic performances, we must take into account the strategic positioning of comedians who target the fantasies of a dominant Other pertaining to the collective subject position of ethnic communities. Stand-up comedians can be acerbic

and critical of dominant culture to the point of appearing truly transgressive or blatantly offensive to hegemonic producers and audiences. Stand-up preserves a modicum of insubordinate ideology, and the process of circulating it in hegemonic circuits does not void its subversive value. Additionally, by allowing strategic essentialization, or even brazen fetishization of Latino culture, the comedians set up a site of capture that 1s devoid of epistemological value: they sell a commodity that may not be translated into the nation’s multi-

cultural logic. The show seemingly puts on the stage/market a

190 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY wealth of cultural knowledge, including intimate information regarding ethnic practices and beliefs, but in effect it stands in an epistemological void. If we theorize the sale of cultural commodities that strategically put forth an ethnic spectacle holding little or no social-use value— but considerable exchange value—we readily recognize a surplus

of labor vis-a-vis a lack of social-use value. I argue that what the comedians produce is unproductive; or rather that they produce improductivity. As Slavoj Zizek discusses in The Fragile Absolute, the

current logic of capitalism “is the link between the capitalist dynamics of surplus-value and the libidinal dynamics of surplusenjoyment.” * In this regard, we consume “the pure semblance of a property that is in effect merely an envelope of a void.’** The object that is being consumed in stand-up is not the permanently elusive, real subject, but its “excremental trash.”°° In Lacanian terms, it is the objet petit a, the projection of the other’s fantasy. The ob-

ject of representation becomes the envelope of the void that the Other recognizes as the subject of its own fantasy, the ideological place allocated for the Latino subject. The hegemonic Other will consume the commodity that represents its own fantasy. The favored transaction between hegemony and subalternity is the empty

object (for the same reason that Diet Coke becomes a precious commodity), because it stands in, and in this case, stands up for the subject. The search for “the real thing” becomes the desire of surplus-value and surplus-pleasure, not epistemological truth. From the perspective of producing stand-up comedy, its abjection, its surplus-value and surplus-pleasure, we may only conjecture the ambivalence of ethnic comedians who engage in the creation of

this simulacrum of self. Self 1s not what becomes commodified overtly, directly, but what is hidden from a hegemonic order that wishes to subsume subalternity into a productive order. By producing improductivity, the point of capture of the subaltern object becomes pure performance, an object decoupled from its social use. The performance of nothingness, of improductivity, disavows the omnipresent logic of production in a post-Fordist globe.*° As Paolo Virno discusses in A Grammar of the Multitude, contemporary no-

tions of labor and productivity have expanded to subsume all human activity. Virtuosity locates the site of interference of this total subsumption given that it 1s “an activity without an end product.”°’ Our particular type of performance has a double reality as material product (a taped program and audiovisual packaged commodity) and as a real-time performance with an audience. This am-

bivalent reality reiterates the multilayered consumption of the

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 191

performance and, moreover, it reifies the duplicitous nature of this comedic act. I suggest that this endeavor is a speech act devoid of valuable content and that the comedians engage in idle talk, a particular type of post-Fordist virtuosity that “directly concerns labor, and social production.’’** As Virno states, “Thirty years ago, in many factories there were signs posted that commanded: ‘Silence, men at work!’ ... One began ‘chatting’ only upon leaving the factory.” °° At stake for Virno is the post-Fordist subsumption of informal talk, off-the-clock communications, to the logic of labor and social production. For the philosopher of work, “idle talk damages [this] referential paradigm. . . . [It] resembles background noise: insignificant in and of itself.”*° In theorizing stand-up as idle talk, we express the centrality of negative epistemologies, of an abject

stand-in for a subject, and recognize that, at one level, stand-up jams the logic of a multicultural nation that wishes to symbolically labor ethno-racial diversity and knowledge. The performance of marginality sets up a deceptive point of capture into the productive logic of the nation. All the while, the consumption of surplus-value and surplus-pleasure is maximized in an ambivalent negotiation of production and consumption that allows the semblance of domestication for a hegemonic order. In contrast, subaltern communities, real-time comedians and audiences engage in idle, unproductive communication that transgresses the administrative impulse of the nation. As such, their performance becomes the terrain of cultural negotiation. In this essay I have considered the “central line of contradiction” and the renegotiation of the US ethno-racial hierarchy, seen in the current Latino demographic and cultural boom. By theorizing the divergent decodings of the massified stand-up show, The Original Latin Kings of Comedy, I aimed to theorize the ambivalent nature of value (exchange versus social-use) in contemporary Latino popular cultural production and illuminate the divergence of intentionalities contained in the production and consumption circuits that disseminate these products. I have suggested that surplus labor and value are contained in these products and that this remainder points to a site of negativity within the process of hegemonizing Latino subal-

ternity in the contemporary United States. In short, stand-up evinces what Virno calls “virtuosity” and, as such, introduces 1mproductivity into a system intent on subsuming everything into a productive social order. This analysis proffers a model for reading other stand-up acts (especially those by ethnic and racial subjects) as well as a critical approach to the hegemonizing thrust of cultural

192 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY circuits and the disruptive quality contained in massified cultural products.

NOTES

1. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1981), 239.

2. Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 91. 3. Hall, “Notes,” 231. 4. Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of the Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 104. 5. Ibid., 98. 6. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 7. Aside from Antonio Gramsci’s model for cultural analysis, applied in Selec-

tions from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), Jackson Lears provides a synthetic and lucid explication of the concept of class formation, avoiding a more mechanical framework for the study of class and culture. “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567-93. 8. Juan Flores and George Yidice, “Living Borders/Buscando América: Language of Latino Self-Formation,” in Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity, ed. Juan Flores (Houston: Arte Publico, 1993), 199-224, considers the epistemological lubricity of latinoness, but avows its capacity to assert a position of alternative power as the members of this community strategically deploy an administrative, need-based logic to counter the state’s ordering power. Similar re-

flections on the slippery quality of latinidad as epistemological subject or communal identity have been carried out by Félix Padilla, Latino Ethnic Consciousness: The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels,

Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), and José David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), among others. Spivak’s proposal of “strategic essentialism”’ informs their approach; even though there is a recognized specious value in this formation, subaltern communities take advantage of what dominant groups believe of them or deploy a spurious version of their own history to push forward a political agenda. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271-313.

9. Noteworthy studies on the field of Latino cultural representation include Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), and more recently Frances Negr6n-Muntaner, Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004). These and various other scholarly works note the adaptability of “new” cultures within the US mainstream, but also the influence Latinos have had in remaking the nation’s cultural imaginary. 10. Hall, “Notes,” 231.

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 193 11. Albert K McLean, Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 3. 12. Stand-up, to be sure, should be broadly considered a genre related to American vaudeville in its locative gestures—from marginal to mainstream and commercial theatrical venues—its patterns of commercial evolution, and its aesthetic and structural elements—dependence on jokes, physical and bodily humor, nonlinear and plotless format, etc. I must also recognize the connections to Latino vaudeville,

the tradition of the carpas from which comedians like Cantinflas and Capulina arise, and the broadly conceived genre of stand-up that has been practiced by many Latino communities in the twentieth century. 13. Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 12-14. 14. Aniko Bodroghkozy, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the Youth Rebellion,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 202. As Bodroghkozy asserts: “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was enormously significant in the cultural context of the late 1960s because it shows concretely how popular culture became a battlefield . . . at a historical moment when almost every institution and facet of the social order was a potential site of conflict. The show developed into a crisis of authority in entertainment television at the very moment that crises of authority were threatening other institutions of social, political, and cultural power.” 15. Suzanne Lavin, Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. 16. Norma Schulman, “The House That Black Built: Television Stand-up Comedy as Minor Discourse,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22 (1994): 108. 17. Herman Gray, “Television, Black Americans, and the American Dream,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 378. 18. Joanne R. Gilbert, Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender, and Cultural Critique (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 19. 19. Lawrence E. Mintz, “Stand-up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” in American Humor, ed. Arthur P. Dudden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 88. 20. Don L. EF. Nilsen, “The Evolution of Stand-up Comedy: From the Middle Ages to Post Modernism,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 21, no. 1—2 (2000): 35.

21. John Limon, Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 5. 22. Spivak’s definition of subalternity comes to mind as “the absolute limit of

the place where history is narrativized into logic.” “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16. 23. This program has been replayed on numerous occasions on the same station and was soon released for massive distribution. It is one of several Latino stand-up shows electronically circulated and later released in DVD or VHS format. Paul Rodriguez, John Leguizamo, and George Lopez have been featured on cable television (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and the Comedy Channel). As such, The Original Latin Kings of Comedy is an example of a broader phenomenon. 24. Marin, Rodriguez, and Lopez stand out as the three stars of the group. Marin became famous as one of the stars in a series of “Cheech and Chong” movies and has appeared in numerous commercial and independent films. Rodriguez (born in

194 GUILLERMO IRIZARRY Sinaloa, México) has acted in, directed, written, or produced over thirty-seven films and has been featured in various TV programs and game shows. He was voted “one of the most influential Hispanics in America” (http://www.paulrodri guez.com/about.htm). Lopez is, at present, the only Latino to have his own primetime television program in mainstream, commercial television (The George Lopez Show).

25. Spike Lee and others, The Original Kings of Comedy (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2001), DVD.

26. Jon Alpert’s 2003 documentary (aired by HBO) on the evolution of the group under the leadership of “King Tome” (Antonio Fernandez) is of note as it looks at the politicization of a criminal gang and its involvement in projects aimed at community betterment. Jon Alpert, Latin Kings: A Street Gang Story (New York: Downtown Community Television, 2003), DVD. 27. Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” gunslinger ballad stayed on the country music charts for six months in 1959. In the introduction to the show, the violent struggle to achieve Felina’s love is expunged; the chosen lyrics focus on the softer side of romance.

28. Oscar H. Gandy theorizes the exchange value of personal information and whether there may be “some identifiable relationship between price, and some measure of the value in the information.” “Toward a Political Economy of Personal Information,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, no. 1 (1993): 72.

Our own inquiry is concerned with the theoretical ratio between the exchange value of the cultural commodity and its social-use value (what benefit it has for a broader social field—the multicultural nation). 29. Giorgio Agamben states that “along with the disciplinary process by which State power makes man as a living being into its own specific object, another process 1s set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object

but as the subject of political power.” Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9.

30. Zygmunt Bauman discusses at length the figure of the legislative intellectual. Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995). A similar discussion by Arturo Torrecilla contemplates a displacement of this figure to circuits of knowledge devoid of concrete authority within the nation-state. La ansiedad de ser puertorriqueno: etnoespectaculo e hiperviolencia en la modernidad liquida (Rio Piedras, PA: Vértigo, 2004). In our view, this displacement brings intellectual agency into spheres of unproductive agency, such as stand-up performance.

31. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak indicates that subalternity situates a zone of irretrievable heterogeneity. In our discussion, this indicates a site of epistemological negativity, a cryptic encoding that evades the disciplinary translation into hegemony. 32. Etienne Balibar, “Is There a “Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 18. 33. Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 21-22. 34. Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid., 26. 36. For Virno, post-Fordism refers to the dominant quality of our current global mode of production (i.e., after the type of factory work that Ford made famous and

STANDING IN CULTURAL REPRESENTATION 195 that became the dominant model for capitalist production). Virno maintains that this is an apt description of labor in the globalized world. 37. Virno, Grammar, 52. 38. Ibid., 90. 39. Ibid., 90-91. AQ. Ibid., 90.

Performing Gender in

... Y aotra cosa Mariposa Becky Boling SUSANA TORRES MOLINA TAKES THE METAPHOR OF GENDER AS A

role that one performs to its theatrical limits in... Y a otra cosa mariposa (That’s All That, 1981).' Blurring the diegetic and nondiegetic, the female actors who perform the roles of men assume the mask of the masculine on stage before the audience. Even as this initial scene establishes theatricality (all the world’s a stage) and gender as prime themes of the play, once these female actors complete their metamorphosis into male characters, there is no overt, textual indication of their true gender under the mask of the male roles they have embodied. Nevertheless, this assumed masquerade ironically never erases the corporeal reality of the female actors, and even as Torres Molina uses an episodic structure to examine the education of portefio (Buenos Aires) men, the curiously absent female is a constant presence in the play. Given that the most innovative aspect of... Y a otra cosa mariposa 1s the staging itself, it is appropriate to consider how crossgender casting functions in this play—the body of the woman and the body of the man, both simultaneously masked and displayed on the stage—as well as the identities or roles that society imposes on these corporeal realities. The complications that arise from the nontraditional casting of Susana Torres Molina’s play afford a perspective on the multiple versions of gender at work in Argentine society in the last decades of the twentieth century. The play’s ambiguities continually destabilize gender identity by undermining the binary opposition of male/female and by underscoring the contingency of gender roles themselves. As Catherine Larson observes, “Torres Molina analyzes not only what men think about women, but what women think the male perspective really is. She therefore moves from the narrow approach of discussing sexuality from a single, gendered point of view to one that celebrates an overlapping, multivoiced discourse that is at once mutually influential and conflic196

PERFORMING GENDER IN .. . Y A OTRA COSA MARIPOSA 197

tive.”*... Ya otra cosa mariposa elucidates not only the concept of woman as constructed by the male imaginary, but also how this conceptualization in turn determines the masculine. In addition, the intentional break with the mimesis between the body of the actor and the role she plays is the dynamic force that drives the performance of gender and identity and disrupts attempts to resolve the resulting incongruities. Most critical works written on this play have correctly focused on gender. Jacqueline Bixler argues that the nontraditional casting of the play is essential to a parodic reading of male behavior: “It is within the frame that they [the females] defend themselves by en-

acting a travesty of male behavior and deconstructing piece by piece the time-honored institutions of male society.”* Yolanda Flores does not contest such a reading but prefers to examine the play

in light of a homosexual discourse: “A homoerotic subtext is encoded in the structural frame of the play. The cross-dressing requisite 1s a key element that forges the disruption of the heterosexual social codes.’’* Laurietz Seda foregrounds a lesbian reading of the play and contends that Torres Molina portrays heterosexuality itself as an act of transvestism. According to Seda, gender is performed through a highly structured system of cues that signify heterosexuality.° Jean Graham-Jones offers us a political reading of the play in which gender functions metaphorically to critique a totalitarian ideology. Taking “as their referents national myths and the mythologizing process itself,” playwrights of the 1980s, including Susana Torres Molina, propose an analysis of those elements that created and sustained the dictatorship of the military junta.® Catherine Lar-

son underscores the self-conscious mimicry on the stage in her study of Torres Molina’s play. Not only in the frame but throughout

the play, the characters reveal themselves and the issues at stake through multiple scenes of game- and role-playing. In this way, the play establishes a multivoiced discourse and discloses stereotypical male behaviors and attitudes through the lens of a female-gendered

perspective.’ Amalia Gladhart’s contextualization of the play within a history of women on the stage and her analysis of the metaphor of performance provide a detailed and provocative reading. She foregrounds the identification of the characters as females who perform male characters within the diegesis of the play itself.® Although this is a possible reading, given the fact that the actors as-

sume their disguise on stage in the first moments of the play and discard these disguises at the end, the contract between the performers and the audience is the illusion that the characters themselves

198 BECKY BOLING are male. As Larson terms it, the play is Susana Torres Molina’s “ultimate coming-of-age play” for four male characters.” In my analysis, I am less concerned with the issue of women on stage per se than with the intentional break that occurs between the body of the actor and the role she plays. Given the significance of the body in theatrical performance, this initial rejection of the basic identification of the body of the actor with the body of the charac-

ter, together with the various twists and turns of masquerade and transvestism, functions as the dramatic catalyst for the play itself. It establishes a tension that is not resolved in favor of either gender, male or female, nor is it exclusively a dramatic metaphor for a heteronormative or heterosexual discourse. On the contrary, its elusive and therefore dramatic power comes from its resistance to closure. To understand the complex representation of gender in this play, we must focus on the body of the actor and the embodiments that proliferate in the performance text itself. In a special issue of Theatre Journal dedicated to theorizing the performer, Phillip B. Zarrilli asks, ““How can the contemporary actor’s body and experience in performance be theorized?” Building on theories from phenomenology, Zarrilli explains that “we organize ‘the world’ we encounter into significant gestalts, but ‘the body’ I call mine is not a body, or the body, but rather a process of embodying the several bodies one encounters in everyday experience as well as highly specialized modes of non-everyday or ‘extra-daily’ bodies of practices such as acting or training in psycho-physical disciplines to act.” In his analysis of the actor’s body in performance, Zarrilli concentrates on two extra-daily modes of embodiment: “an aesthetic ‘inner’ bodymind

discovered and shaped through long-term, extra-daily modes of practice, and an aesthetic ‘outer’ body constituted by the actions/ tasks of a performance score—that body offered for the abstractive gaze of the spectator.’’ He goes on to explain the duality inherent in all performance: “In performance, the actor enacts a specific performance score—that set of actions/tasks that constitute the aesthetic outer body for the abstractive gaze of the spectator—often

read and experienced as character in conventional drama. The actor’s body, therefore, is dually present for the objective gaze and/

or experience of an audience, and as a site of experience for the actor per se.””!°

In Zarrilli’s article, a metaphoric chain of identifications is assumed among the various embodiments at play in the actor’s body. A constant dialectic is set up within this gestalt. That is to say that there is an implication of similitude between the body of the actor and the aesthetic outer body presented on stage, although the degree

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of similitude can vary greatly.'! The actor is chosen for his or her ability to embody the character to be portrayed, and gender identification is the most basic of the mimetic qualities assumed between the actor and the character in standard drama. In Torres Molina’s play, there is a conscious disruption in this chain of similitude between the embodiment of the actress and the role of portefio macho she performs. !”

According to Nora Eidelberg and Maria Mercedes Jaramillo, the editors of Voces en escena (Voices on stage), in which the play has been published, “the males are represented by four women who do

not reveal their nature as women, from the beginning of the play when they dress as men, until the end, when they take off their male

clothing and dress again as women.”!? And although this is the premise at the heart of the play, the spectator is not meant to forget completely nor definitively the fact that the actors are women. To-

tres Molina stipulates in her stage directions for the play, “Esta obra tiene como Unica condiciOn para su representaciOon, que los cu-

atro protagonistas deben ser representados por actrices” (This play has as its only condition for staging that the four protagonists must be represented by actresses).'* However, this is not a simple inversion of the classic Shakespearean convention of casting boys in the

role of women. For one thing, such casting was the standard in Shakespeare’s epoch. For another, except in comedies such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It, the fact that boys played women was not foregrounded. The standard stage convention in contemporary drama—with some notable exceptions such as Cloud Nine by Carol Churchill—is that women play women and men play men. In Torres Molina’s case, it is clear that the performance begins with

the actresses in the process of dressing in identifiably masculine clothes on the stage itself. Once this transformation occurs, we are allowed to accept the illusion of four male characters who episodically play out stereotypical male scenarios until the end of the play, when once again the illusion of the male identity 1s abandoned on stage as the characters are sloughed off like a snake’s skin, and the actresses face the audience as women again. The fact is, this masking and unmasking 1s also part of the play itself: “La obra comienza cuando una luz tenue ilumina a las cuatro actrices” (The play begins when dim light illuminates the four actresses).!° The “semioti-

zation of theatrical phenomena” is already at work when these women appear on the stage under the spotlight.'© Thus the assertion

that the female actors do not reveal the fact that they are women tends to obscure an important and enduring aspect of the semiotic effect of the initial and final moments of the play. In fact, it detracts

200 BECKY BOLING from the core paradox that gives the piece its satiric edge and 1s central to its complexity.!’ Returning briefly to Zarrilli’s taxonomy of the various embodiments in performance, he admits in a note that his model does not address “the experiential bodies of actors with physical or sensory impairments, or how issues of gender or ethnicity impinge on the experiential body” yet suggests that these modes could be included in a future elaboration of the model he proposes.!® The absence of these questions in the model, however, suggests that including issues of gender and cross-dressing (transvestism), aS we witness in this play by Torres Molina, would require a shift in the gestalt described by Zarrilli. The aesthetic outer bodies that we experience on stage as Pajarito (Finch), Cerdin (Fatso), el Inglés (the Brit), and el Flaco (Skinny) exist in tension with the surface bodies of the ac-

tresses masked by the performance of masculinity. The first aesthetic outer body offered to the spectator is the female body in the act of cross-dressing.

In the five acts or scenes of the play, we see only the performances of the four male characters. However, the illusion of the absence of female characters is ironic given the palimpsest effect of the cross-casting and the unerasable corporeal reality of the actor’s

body on stage. Besides this aspect of the staging and casting, woman looms as the ultimate driving force of the play. Indeed, the fantasy of the female exists diegetically throughout; how they look, what they wear, why they wear what they wear, their power and their powerlessness all determine the direction and content of the protagonists’ projection of masculinity. The in-and-of-itself of male identity is called into question as Torres Molina describes a quixotic quest for the woman who will define and vouchsafe the masculine identity of these “men” who are “men” because of their obsession with the feminine. I say the feminine because Torres Molina also includes the repressed homosexual whose problematic interaction with masculinity, male identity, and male desire as defined by Foucault’s “regulatory ideal” (.e., as cumpulsorily normative) is also complexly woven into the dilemma of male-female relationships in the play. Performance in this performance of gender can be understood as “to put forth into form according to certain conventions.” However, in the case of ... Y a otra cosa mariposa, the transvestism of the actors/characters permits the all-female cast simultaneously to enact and to travesty male behavior.'!? That is to say, this performance of gender seeks to disrupt convention. Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui defines transvestism in his study, Transvestism, Masculinity, and

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Latin American Literature, as “the performance of gender, a performance of what historically and culturally gets labeled ‘femi-

ninity’ and ‘masculinity.’” As such, it constitutes “an act that penetrates and tampers with those who witness it. This introjection of the transvestite into personal, social, and cultural psyches introduces a series of problems about uncertainty and authenticity, imposition, interiority and exteriority. Transvestism is about the raw touching, gentle tampering, and, literally, fucking up of any fixed notion of genders. Transvestism is the figure that describes in its own embodiment and realization the difficulty of gender.” ?° Ironically, the very performance of masculinity in the play draws the spectators’ attention to its artifice. In the end, the transvestite subject allows the playwright to disrupt the stereotypical scenarios of male-female relationships. It forces the spectators to analyze these conventions and puts in question the very nature of masculinity itself.

The scenarios in which Torres Molina embeds her characters are chosen for the fact that they are narratives of sexuality, with the possible exception of the last one. And in these scenarios, the idea

of woman is always present. In “La prima” (The Cousin), the young boys jeer at passing women, look at Playboy magazines, and exchange tales of encounters with women, such as the story Pajarito

tells of seeing his cousin naked in her bath. Diegetically, various female characters do participate in the action in several scenes. For example, the presence of women passing through the park in “La prima” is established through the male characters’ reaction and narration. In “El metejon” (The Crush), a particularly good example of the “presence” of female characters within the action of the play, the issue is adolescent love. El Inglés is attracted to a young woman who frequents the same café as he does. However, his friends show up and decide to make her the butt of the joke: Cerdin. (Riendo y escupiendo todo el chocolate.) jMiren! . . . parada tiene la misma estatura que sentada.

Pajarito. {Es igual que el Topo Gigio! (Los cuatro rien a carcajadas. La risa del Inglés es forzada. Por la mirada de los muchachos, se ve que la chica pasa cerca de ellos, hacia la salida.) [Fatso. (Laughing and spitting the chocolate.) Look, she’s the same size standing as sitting. Finch. Just like Miss Fatso! (The Four of them laugh loudly. The Brit forces himself to laugh. By the look of the four boys, we can tell that the girl is passing them on her way to the exit.)|*!

202 BECKY BOLING Before his friends arrive, el Inglés reacts to the presence of the young woman as the adored object of his love. Of course, the character of the young woman is completely imaginary to the spectators. The audience understands she exists only through the reactions

of the male characters and what they say about her. Once the friends incorporate her into their own performance piece of sexual

predation and humiliation, the young woman is radically transformed into an object no more real than the images in the Playboy magazines the boys hoard. There are other moments in the play when the male characters themselves perform the feminine, but this is an actress imitating a boy imitating a woman, what Garber calls a “double cross-dressing.” * Is this then a return to the authentic? No, for it is the nature of performance itself that we are always watching an imitation, a representation. The actress does not even give us an authentic version of what it is to be a woman. The woman is already a projection

of the stereotypical adolescent male fantasy (as conceived by a woman, Torres Molina, and performed by a woman, the actress playing the role of Pajarito). Employing a parodic inversion, the young boys, retaining their masculine identity, play out a typical female scenario:

El Inglés. Umitando el relato del Flaco.) Pajarito, decime {se nota que tengo una pierna mas corta que la otra? (Mientras dice esto renguea ostentosamente. )

Pajarito. (Siguiendo el juego.) No, jpara nada! El Inglés. Y decime, ,cOmo te gusto mas? {De perfil? (Se coloca de

perfil.) {O de frente? (Cuando se pone de frente estd totalmente bizco.)

Pajarito. De frente, jtoda la vida! El Inglés. Vestido 0... {desnudito? Unicia un strip-tease.) El Flaco. Dale, gringo, que desnudito perdés. [The Brit. (Imitating what Skinny said.) Finch, tell me, do you think one leg is shorter than the other? (As he says this he exaggerates a limp.) Finch. (Playing the game.) No, not at all! The Brit. So, tell me, how do I look best? (He shows his profile.) You like my profile? Or better like this? (He turns front and his eyes are crossed. )

Finch. Yeah, just like that! The Brit. Dressed .. . or naked? (He begins a strip tease.) Skinny. Man, you’d lose naked. |”?

The gendered language clearly denotes that the male characters are

identifying themselves as male even as they play out a story el

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Flaco has just told them of his sister and her friend. The complex inversions of gender roles continually upset typical gender signs and foreground their artificiality. In this case the actresses portray boys who parody young girls. The distance between the actresses and the so-called female behavior performed allows us to adopt a critical perspective toward all performances of gender, whether these be masculine or feminine. The imaginary woman is alternately stimulation for the adolescent libido or butt of a joke. Just as in classic scenarios of pornography, the woman is synecdochically evoked. Pajarito is intrigued by the high heels a woman wears as she passes them in the park, likening this imaginary woman to an acrobat: “Miren como hace equilibrios ... No puede caminar con esos tacos finitos” (Hey, look how she’s trying to keep her balance. She can’t even walk in those high heels).?* There follows an inventory of accoutrements and props that young men associate with being a woman or one might say, the imitation of femininity, for they have and give us a heightened awareness of posturing, simulacra, the performance of femaleness, from seduction to farce. Young women fight with tight jeans, calling

on mothers to help them close their zippers. Older women vainly resist the advance of years and declining attractiveness with hair dye and wigs. At the heart of these fantasies 1s the sexual encounter

as a drama of seduction and subterfuge. The authenticity of the women is irrelevant, the success or failure of their imitation of the

ideal object of sexual desire is what is at risk for the adolescent male mind in this episode of the play. Later there are even more obvious examples of the imaginary nature of the female in the masculine fantasies Torres Molina examines. From Playboy, in the first

scene, to a life-size blow-up sex toy, women are projections of these men’s desires. They are what they need to be at the moment.

El Inglés sees no irony in accepting a young prostitute who is nearly the same age as his daughter in the scene “El bulin” (The Bachelor Pad). It’s all a matter of seeing the prostitute as a prostitute and not seeing her as sharing any qualities that he might associ-

ate with his daughter. The fact that women play these male characters only heightens the tension between the so-called real and the imaginary. In fact, the assumption or performance of the masculine is contingent on the performance of the feminine; the feminine is narrativized and performed at each pivotal moment in the education of the

male in Torres Molina’s play. The characters, el Inglés, el Flaco, Cerdin, and Pajarito, perform parodies of stereotypical females in a complex process of buttressing their own sense of power and their

204 BECKY BOLING own sense of the masculine. It is only by denigrating the feminine through parody, pornography, and violence that these men shape the masculine identity and maintain it throughout the various lifestages Torres Molina selects. As Judith Butler suggests in her Bodies that Matter, the sexed identity is not a given but the imaginary

result of a process of assuming a sex. “Assuming a sex,” in turn, requires an identification with the normative phantasm of sex and is linked to “the question of identification, and with the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications.”*° In Torres Molina’s play, the transvestite subject does not foreclose other identifications, for “women are simultaneously present in and absent from Mariposa.” *°

Why is masculinity portrayed by and through women in this play? It is because women internalize the masculine, as can be inferred from this play, in which women parody and denigrate women through the mask of the masculine. Jean Graham-Jones contends, correctly, that women play a role in perpetuating these behaviors.?’ Torres Molina herself directed the play in 1981, and in her production she insisted on the audience’s continued awareness that basically women in drag were performing the male roles. In an e-mail exchange I had with the playwright/director, Torres Molina had this explanation of the relationship between the actresses’ bodies and the characters they were embodying: The four actresses I selected were very feminine and when they took on their roles I didn’t want them to lose that condition, because it wasn’t at

all my intention to give a realistic imitation of men. So the actresses remained highly made up, with eye liner, lipstick, and clothing that conserved the masculine form but with textures that were characteristic of women’s attire, silks, satins, velvet, etc., and in colors that men would never use, turquoise, violets, fuchsias, greens. In this way tension was created, a dialogue with the woman, who was always present, arising from a precise aesthetic and bodies and dramatic discourses that clearly

embody the world of the macho. That tension of both genders being present generated an intentional distancing. The sign was clear: We are not men. We don’t want you to believe or to fool yourselves into thinking we are men. We represent them in this way just so that what appears in society and relationships as naturalized is made flagrant.”®

Disrobing on the stage at the end of the play foregrounds that “all of the machismo we have seen exhibited on stage is part of a selfconscious, theatrical game.” *? However, even within the play we might recognize the highly metatheatrical aspect of posturing that

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the men undergo to simulate a masculine behavior they have assumed consciously through the various stages of their training. That is, their behavior is not natural even within their own society. It is always forced, highly set-up and constructed, continually scripted,

and always on the verge of falling apart as in Pajarito’s “confession.”

So just as we can say the play is Torres Molina’s perception of what machismo 1s, we can say that she invents male characters whose relationship with their own sexuality and gender identity is highly constructed, conscious, and fragile. Machista behavior, as suggested by the dramatist, is a behavior that requires a high level of posturing and the invention of the woman as sexual object. Encounters with actual women who diverge from this woman as desired sexual object also jeopardize the success of the men in their ability to be card-carrying members of this club de hombres (men’s club). El Flaco, for example, has his love nest where he can enjoy orgies and other, illicit affairs, but these sexual fantasies are cur-

tailed by the fact that his neighbors constantly complain of the noise he makes when he has “guests.” His unbridled sexual powers take a figurative cold shower when he comes up against the complaints of his neighbors. Then, too, el Inglés acts the macho only to ask his friends to remind him to be home in time for the phone call his wife will make from the summer vacation home to check up on him. All these men see themselves as sexual predators, and yet one of them lives with his mother and another is a homosexual who allows his friends to continually look the other way and ignore his lifestyle and sexual orientation since these would be disruptive, to say the least, to their projected fantasy images of themselves as machos.

Given that these characters iconically represent a transvestite phenomenon (the body of the female actor who displays markers of femininity combined with their assumed male identity), we have an even more dynamic instance of what Zarrilli describes as the tension always present within the body of the actor: “None of the bod-

ies is settled or absolute, but always in a constant state of

ambiguity.” °° Garber’s contention is that most who study crossdressing look beyond it to return again and again to the two traditional genders; that is to say, tending to reduce and stabilize the gender identities into two static poles. Garber goes on to argue that transvestism represents a third element as “a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge.” This third element disrupts the “possibility of harmonious and stable bi-

206 BECKY BOLING nary symmetry.” It forces contextualization and initiates a chain of significations that is multiple and potentially infinite.*! Cross-dressing blurs the gender binary and 1s in-and-of-itself a situational iden-

tity. The cross-gender casting in the play continually evades identity and gender closure. In fact, this particular aspect of the staging, as Larson points out, is without a doubt the play’s primary innovation.*?

Beyond any critique of gender, there was another urgency in this

play when it was conceived and staged: the need to critique and eradicate machismo itself as a powerful aspect of the militarized climate of 1970s Argentina.*? When asked whether there was any connection in this play to the political events of “the dirty war,” Torres Molina responded: On a conscious level, no. But, as we know, everything is interrelated, and the play is a critique of machismo and the military world has always been a misogynist redoubt, where the use of violence and the abuse of power against the weak have been privileged. In that period, the whole decade of the 70s and the beginnings of the 80s, when the entire nation was governed by men in a perverse and dictatorial fashion, it’s not strange that 1t would occur to me to write this text, encoded by dark humor, about the predominance of brute force and the sinister prejudices related to and against women, 1n a society gagged, terrorized, and to a large extent in collusion with its indifference. When some courageous women finally succeeded in making themselves seen and heard, it wasn’t insignificant that they were quickly identified as ““madwomen.’’**

Graham-Jones categorizes the play as one that achieves a “critical self-distancing and critique of its own participation and complicity in the perpetuation of the authoritarian state.” °° Susana Torres Molina theatricalizes in... Y a otra cosa mariposa the ideological assumption of a sex through the histrionic use of transvestism on stage. The play of absence/presence is an essential aspect of the semiotization in the drama, and the cross-gendered casting of the female actor’s body to portray the imagined masculine requires that the audience understand the construction of gender based on sexual objectification and humiliation. The complex way in which the body of the actor works in these scenarios confronts us with the situation in which ideologies become internalized, a single instance of which would be Lulu, a prostitute who has been knifed and disfigured by one man and who allows herself to be exploited by one of the four male characters in the play. Only when Cerdin is told by his friends that Lulu has been victimized and, for this cause alone, is worthless, does he protest that he used

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to like Lulu. What was genuine affection is destroyed through a complex code of homosocial behavior. Another example is the way

Pajarito’s alternative sexuality must continually be erased by his friends so that he may participate in their club de machos, which, in turn, allows the social system they inhabit to remain intact.°° Finally, the particular mode of production chosen by Torres Molina in 1981 places women in the role of enacting the very abuses to which they as a class are subjected. Laurietz Seda suggests that “the staging of the transvestite destabilizes the traditional system of binary gender and implicitly adds and suggests lesbianism as an existing dimension within human sexuality.”°’ The cross-casting does allow for a lesbian reading, an example being the women play-

ing the boys looking at the photos of naked women in Playboy. Even so, the violence and humiliation at the core of these scenarios suggest that Torres Molina is not principally interested in describing a possible lesbian dynamic as a source of liberation. She is more concerned with the examination of the negative effects of the stereotypical construction of masculine sexuality. The final cry of Pa-

jarito “jSi las minas estan para eso!” (But that’s what chicks are for!), as the women abandon their male roles, underscores the 1mpossibility of male desire ever to find its true object (1.e., the women constructed via machismo).** The real-life bodies of the women on

stage signify the imaginary delusion of this other woman—the woman as object of desire, ridicule and violence—at the same time

that they represent the highly constructed and fragile bases on which such machista behavior is constructed. At the same time, masculine identity is also and always “imagined” through the actual woman who wrote the play and the female actors who stage it. As such, the image of the masculine is also contingent on the feminine. Torres Molina gives us a reversed stereotype in that while her characters are continually reconstructing femininity according to

their machista fears and desires, the play posits the nightmare version of machismo as experienced by real woman. Maleness and machismo themselves are converted into pseudopornographic depictions. Just as there is no absolute perfect woman who conforms to these portefio men’s desires, there is no male whose power and privilege would guarantee him a natural superiority over women.

The gendered identities that are performed in the play are unstable... . Y a otra cosa mariposa is not a drama in which women simply play men, for the semiosis on stage never allows us to separate completely the form and content of the sign. Hence the play maintains its performance and its reception always somewhere between, never completely settled. And yet this balancing act is a

208 BECKY BOLING direct result of the fact that within the dramatic and narrative discourses in the play we must deal with the bodies of real women. NOTES

1. Susana Torres Molina, ... Y a otra cosa mariposa, in Voces en escena: Antologia de dramaturgas latinoamericanas, ed. Nora Eidelberg and Maria Mercedes Jaramillo (Antioquia, Colombia: Universidad de Antioquia, 1991), 333-414. All translations of the play text, unless otherwise noted, are from Maria Claudia Andre’s translation, That’s All That, in Seven Plays by Argentine Playwright Susana Torres Molina (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2006), 73-119. 2. Catherine Larson, Games and Play in the Theater of Spanish American Women (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 69. 3. Jacqueline E. Bixler, “For Women Only? The Theater of Susana Torres Molina,” in Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories, ed. Catherine Larson and Margarita Vargas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 226.

4. Yolanda Flores, “(De)naturalizing Desire: Homoeroticism and Performance,” in The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater By Women of the Americas (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 50. 5. Laurietz Seda, “El habito no hace al monje: Travestismo, homosexualidad y lesbianismo en... y a otra cosa mariposa de Susan Torres Molina,” Latin American Theatre Review 30, no. 2 (1997): 108. 6. Jean Graham-Jones, “Myths, Masks, and Machismo: Un trabajo fabuloso by Ricardo Halac and Y a otra cosa mariposa by Susana Torres Molina,” Gestos 10, no. 20 (1995): 92. 7. Larson, Games, 69. 8. Amalia Gladhart, The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Con-

temporary Latin American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 9. Larson, Games, 69. 10. Phillip B. Zarrilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor’s Embodied Modes of Experience,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 653, 655, 655, 664. 11. The spectrum is broad. For example, one need only think of younger actors portraying older characters, or actors who assume disabilities they don’t have, such as being blind or crippled. However, gender seems to be one of those aspects understood as essential in most standard drama in spite of notable examples such as Sarah Bernhardt’s and Dame Judith Anderson’s portrayal of Hamlet. When crossgender casting is employed, it usually is for comic effect or to foreground the issue of sexual identity. 12. The gendered word actress is purposefully used in order to underscore Susana Torres Molina’s decision to foreground the problematics of gender identity and representation. 13. Nora Eidelberg and Maria Mercedes Jaramillo, eds., Voces en escena: Anto-

logia de dramaturgas latinoamericanas (Antioquia, Colombia: Universidad de Antioquia, 1991), 334. 14. Torres Molina,... Y a otra cosa, 334. My translation. 15. Ibid. My translation. 16. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980),

PERFORMING GENDER IN .. . ¥ A OTRA COSA MARIPOSA 209 8. Indeed, it may be incorrect even to call the women who dress and undress at the beginning and end of the play actors instead of characters. In this case we would take very seriously the assertion that whatever occurs on the stage, once framed as performance, is performance. If their performance is part of the play, then they are characters in the play just as much as Cerdin, el Flaco, el Inglés, and Pajarito are characters. There are, subsequently, four female as well as four male characters in the performance text. 17. Nora Eidelberg, “Susana Torres Molina, destacada teatrista argentina,” Alba de América 7 (1989): 392. In an interview with Eidelberg, the playwright ex-

plained that the play was written to denounce Argentine machismo. She also admits that the actresses did such a wonderful job of playing the male characters that “the audience forgot they were women,” but she also explained the necessity that the roles be played by women, arguing that “the work thereby acquires a more critical and more disturbing dimension.” If men had played the roles, the play would have been comic, but would have lost much of its edge. 18. Zarrilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model,” 653. 19. Bixler, “For Women Only?” 226. 20. Ben Sifuentes-Jauregui, Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 3, 2. Presented to the spectator, the effect of the cross-dressing conforms to Sifuentes-Jauregui’s schema: It “is about representing the Other,” and it is “about occupying the place of the Other” (3). However, Sifuentes-Jauregui also asserts that for the transvestite subject, transvestism 1s “about representing the Self... becoming the Self... [and] (re)creating the Self” (3). That is, “transvestite subjects do not necessarily imagine themselves becoming some other subject, but rather they may conceive of transvestism as an act of selfrealization” (4). Although the actresses focus our attention on the performance of gender, the transvestism they practice is not an expression of “self-realization.” This is dramatically apparent in the only scene in the play in which transvestism actually functions as self-revelation. In this mise-en-scéne, Pajarito, the repressed homosexual, taunted by his bachelor friends, enters the scene wearing eye makeup and lipstick at the moment when el Inglés suggests that he be seen going out with women in order to quell the rumors that he’s gay. 21. Torres Molina,... Ya otra cosa, 366; That’s All That, 91. 22. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). 23. Torres Molina,... Ya otra cosa, 349-50; That’s All That, 81. 24. Torres Molina,... Ya otra cosa, 338; That’s All That, 75. 25. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New

York: Routledge, 1993), 1, 3. Butler explains that “‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words, ‘sex’ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process” (1-2). 26. Bixler, “For Women Only?” 226. 27. Graham-Jones, “Myths, Masks, and Machismo,” 101. 28. Susana Torres Molina, e-mail message to author, February 16, 2005. 29. Larson, Games, 73. 30. Zarrilli, “Toward a Phenomenological Model,” 665. 31. Garber, Vested Interests, 11, 12. 32. Larson, Games, 69. 33. Jean Graham-Jones, Exorcising History: Argentine Theater Under Dictatorship (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 57.

210 BECKY BOLING 34. Torres Molina, e-mail message to author. 35. Graham-Jones, Exorcising History, 57. 36. Graham-Jones, “Myths, Masks, and Machismo,” 101. 37. Laurietz Seda, “El habito no hace al monje,” 105. 38. Torres Molina, ... Y a otra cosa, 414. My translation.

Dragging the Borders: Transnational Queer Identities and Citizenship in Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas William Garcia The Diva has been battered, trashed around, used and spat out like a queer or like an illegal alien, or combination thereof, and yet she has fought back with sweat, guts and tears and continues to occupy a space in our collective imagination. —Guillermo Reyes, Deporting the Divas'

As ARNALDO CRUZ-MALAVE AND MARTIN FE. MANALANSAN STATE,

“Queer sexualities and cultures have often been deployed negatively to allay anxieties about ‘authentic’ national belonging in our massively migratory contemporary world.” ? However, as these critics clarify, the queer does not always occupy “a site of disposses-

sion.”* Premiered in 1996 at the Celebration Theatre in Los

Angeles, Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas questions myriad

normative systems of categorization and sets forth a parable of queer agency propelled by the representation of the illegal alien in the US as a queer transnational subject.‘ In this two-act play, Chilean-born Latino playwright Guillermo Reyes resorts to cross-dressing and drag performances to create a dramatic text that reflects on issues of immigration and citizenship, cultural identity, gender and sexual demarcations, xenophobia, and homophobia, among others.° This study seeks to analyze how Reyes fuses queer desire and immigration politics in his postmodern comedy, and how we can relate the performative cross-dressing in Deporting the Divas to what

José Esteban Mufioz has coined as disidentification, which “is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority sub-

ject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.’’° It should be noted that the employment of the transvestite in De211

212 WILLIAM GARCIA porting the Divas is multifaceted. In the play, the drag functions as a theatrical device that allows the dramatist to manipulate and nuance comedic and parodic elements, and to establish an intertextual dialogue with other queer authors who have influenced his dramatic work, such as Manuel Puig, Charles Ludlum, and Charles Busch.’ It also injects ambiguity into notions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, citizenship, class, and cultural identity, proposing a critique of binary categories: man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, US citizen/illegal alien, white/Hispanic, Mexican American/Chicano.® Marjorie Garber establishes that “a transvestite figure, or a trans-

vestite mode, will always function as a sign of overdetermination—a mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another.”? The drag or cross-dressed actor, in a text where the main conflicts are linked to issues of identity and border crossings, becomes a textual/theatrical metaphor of various characters’ attempts to pass as legal citizens, heterosexual males, women and/or white, and the actors’ efforts to pass as (perform) different characters. The drag may also be interpreted as a metadramatic metaphor for the play itself since the text at times passes as a political farce, a roman-

tic comedy, a drag performance, a metatheatrical campy melodrama, and a parody. Lesley Ferris points out that “theatrical cross-

dressing has provided one way of playing with liminality and its multiple possibilities and extending that sense of the possible to the spectator/reader; a way of play, that while often reinforcing the social mores and status quo, carries with it the possibility for exposing

that liminal moment, that threshold of questioning, that slippery sense of a mutable self.” !° Indeed, Reyes’s Deporting the Divas turns cross-dressing into a resourceful dramatic weapon that transgresses and contests all kind of borders, inviting the audience to a

pluralistic reading of the transvestite body as it “crosses” the Stage.!!

This play by Reyes, which is part of a trilogy that includes Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown (1994) and Sirena, Queen

of the Tango (2001), has been staged professionally across the country to critical acclaim since its premiere in 1996.'* The dramatic action of Deporting the Divas takes place on the San DiegoTijuana border and centers on Michael (also referred to as Miguel Angel, Mikey or Mike, and Michele), a Mexican American INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) patrolman facing a multi-

layered identity crisis. Early on in the play, we find out that Michael’s wife, Teresita, has recently left him and taken the children to her parents in Arizona. He feels conflicted by his work and duties

at the INS, arresting and deporting illegal aliens, under the com-

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 213 mand of Dean McMurphy, an ultra macho Anglo boss with political

aspirations who soon will become his brother-in-law. Michael is unable to grasp the moral dilemma of being repelled by the policies of the INS agency and staying on the job because he needs an income. He is also riddled by contradictory thoughts and desires re-

garding his sexuality and cultural identity. The protagonist is plagued by wild fantasies involving drag queens and film noir femmes fatales, divas who feed his longings for a different life (sense of self) free of restrictions imposed by normative values and binary categories. Michael feels sexually attracted to and starts dat-

ing Sedicio, a gay man whom he meets at the City College in a “Beginning Spanish for Pochos” course and who happens to be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. As suggested by Dean, Mi-

chael enrolls in night school to distract himself from his marital problems and to learn Spanish: “You need it for the promotion, Mikey” (118). When commenting on Michael’s lack of linguistic proficiency in Spanish, David William Foster offers a gendered/ sexual reading of the protagonist’s troubled cultural identifications:

‘“Michael’s shame as a Chicano will shift to a different ground when the point of dramatic interest becomes his being a closeted gay, a confirmation of the way in which the closet serves to feminize the masculine, with the implied parallel that Anglicization, from the point of view of Hispanic hypermasculinity, as encoded in the Spanish language, is equally a form of feminization.” !? An analogous interpretation can be inferred from Dean’s heteronormative advice when Michael refuses to deport Sedicio and reveals his clandestine homosexual relationship: “Do your job, and remember you ve got kids. The family comes first. You’re a fuckin’ Latin, you oughta know that!” (149).

Nonetheless, it is necessary to acknowledge that Reyes’s play and queer characters seem to resist any type of seamless categorization and that a counteridentificatory approach to Michael’s hetero-

normativity (“His-panic”) breakdown may just reinforce the normative views on gender, sexuality, citizenship, and cultural identity that Reyes is trying to overturn through humor, parody, and

drag. As José Esteban Mufioz suggests, “Counteridentification often, through the very routinized workings of its denouncement of

dominant discourse, reinstates that same discourse.” !* Melissa Fitch reminds us that “Reyes intentionally creates characters who gender bend in order to disrupt both the heterosexual and homosexual gender/sexuality paradigms.” '!° Likewise, Amanda Scioscia recommends: “If you are going to see a Guillermo Reyes play, prepare to have your stereotypes shattered—and not just one at a time.’’'®

214 WILLIAM GARCIA The ideological resistance towards identificatory and counteridentificatory categorizations in Reyes’s dramatic creations is not always well received by audiences or theater critics, who may expect tidy resolutions or clear distinctions: “Like Reyes’ characters, his play has an identity crisis. It wants to be a persuasive political satire, but it’s actually a romantic comedy punctuated with subversive opinions. While Reyes is smart about leading us to laughs and raising important issues, he’s less proficient at making any kind of point about them.” '’ Instead of anchoring his characters in specific essentialist notions of identity, Reyes opts to explore their process of negotiation.'®

In order to accentuate (and mirror) the complexity of any reflec-

tion on issues of identity and its negotiation posed by the text, Reyes relies on drag and passing. Three of the four male actors required to stage the play perform several roles, many of which involve cross-dressing. Their challenge resides in performing hybrid identities that cross all type of boundaries. In a note about the casting of Deporting the Divas, Jorge Huerta remarks: “What you need

for this play are four extremely talented, versatile and copasetic actors. Actors who are willing and able to make quick changes in gender, attitude, body language, wigs and accessories. Especially accessories.’’'? The appearance of cross-dressed actors introduces the audience to the mined territory of liminality. Ferris states that “as spectators of transvestite theater we .. . are forced to concede to multiple meanings, to ambiguities of thought, feeling, categorization, to refuse closure.””° The dramatic progression of Michael’s inner and interpersonal conflicts is framed by the presence of actors playing characters in drag; both acts of the play start and end with the figure of the transvestite. Reyes’s divas, who inhabit the different levels of Michael’s reality, are transnational queer subjects that

escape categorization albeit at times they cannot escape deportation.

The playwright situates the origin of Michael’s arduous negotiation on/at the border, symbolically a site of dissension, resistance, and fluidity; literally, the character’s first appearance on stage 1s located on the border. The US-Mexico border is also the site of his Mexican ancestors’ legal crossing, a point he stresses to Sedicio in an apology for INS’ normative demarcations of legitimate citizenship. Reyes succeeds in representing the border as a liminal space where transnational queer subjects constantly reinvent themselves and renegotiate hybrid identities in order to seek diverse opportunities of queer agency. In their introduction to Queer Diasporas, Benigno Sanchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton state: “When a practitioner

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 215 of ‘homosexual acts,’ or a body that carries any of many queering marks moves between officially designated spaces—nation, region,

metropole, neighborhood, or even culture, gender, religion, disease—intricate realignments of identity, politics, and desire take place.”’*! From this perspective, we can better grasp the pivotal ex-

perience that constitutes the catalyst of the protagonist’s identity crises. Michael’s heeding of his boss’s recommendation (to learn Spanish) comes immediately after having erroneously raided a Mexican American gay wedding in the desert: “I just thought they were a buncha illegals” (122). Michael is amazed at the sight of two grooms (one Mexican American, the other Mexican, with a student visa) dancing together in a barn: Sedicio. You were left traumatized by a gay wedding? Michael. No, it just left me wondering, I guess. Sedicio. Wondering what?

Michael. Let’s just say, I had to get out of the house and enroll in a Spanish class. (122)

Throughout the play, the multiple retellings and dramatization of Michael’s eye-opening and quasi-mystical experience at the gay wedding—the encounter, or collision, with the queer subject—

stress the relevance of this moment in the character’s life. In his last conversation with Sedicio, Michael is able to utter the significance of this episode: “It bothered me, that’s all. It shocked me. For one brief moment, I saw myself as one of the grooms. All right?” (157). Michael’s encounter with the queer Other is a seminal site of collision, an instance of what Mufioz has called “moment[s] of negotia-

tion when hybrid, racially predicated, and deviantly gendered identities arrived at representation.”’* The protagonist’s life-altering experience destabilizes not only his certainties about normative sexual demarcations but also those relating to cultural identity and citizenship. His confidence to perform his duties as an INS officer is also shattered when he is mocked by colleagues and reprimanded by his boss. Throughout the play, Michael keeps returning to the barn in the desert, the site of the gay wedding, looking for answers. Moreover, it is precisely at the barn where he encounters Miss Fresno (a character performed by the same actor playing Sedicio), the undocumented gay Guatemalan cross-dresser of German descent passing for an Anglo woman and competing for the title of Miss California. Her mother, before dying of pesticide poisoning, advised her: “You look like a white woman, mija, use it” (116). She wants Michael’s help: she wants to be deported rather than facing

216 WILLIAM GARCIA the risk of being outed as an undocumented immigrant at the Miss

California pageant. At the coronation in Fresno, “some peach picker/activist” shouted “Miss Fresno is an illegal alien!” (116). Michael refuses to believe Miss Fresno’s plea, and she retorts ‘(Deeper voice.) Look, pendejo, I’m hiding a lot more than my legal status, ok?” (116). Still, Michael decides not to deport the damsel in distress and comforts her by reasserting the validity of passing: “I say, if they see you as Miss Fresno, why disappoint them? If they see me as Michael, average, beer-guzzling guy with the remote in my hand, mortgage, kids, basketball hoop in the driveway, let them have him” (117).*? Miss Fresno is just the first of several divas who enter and exit Michael’s life and, in the process, assist him in negotiating a new sense of self, teaching him how to discover and express his inner diva. Some are over-the-top divas, like Sirena Angustias, “not just a camp impersonation of womanhood, she is womanhood,” we are told in the stage directions (129). Not all the divas in the play appear in full drag, for example Sedicio

(who passes for white and/or a US citizen) and Silvano, the gay HIV-positive illegal immigrant from El Salvador (white and member of a rich family) who attends ACT UP rallies and prefers “La Traviata” as his diva swan song. Like all the other divas in the play who defy socially prescribed notions of identity, Silvano shakes Michael’s normative worldviews: “You thought I was just one of these Indian-looking peasants you’re used to deporting, didn’t you’? You didn’t count on me speaking English and Spanish better than you, or French or Esperanto, or residing in the most expensive, ex-

clusive AIDS hospital in all of San Diego County” (146). This character further problematizes (and enhances) the representation of hybrid, transnational queer subjects in Deporting the Divas by emphasizing the intersection of class, sexuality, nationality, citizenship, and disease. Sedicio is a key diva in Michael’s process of negotiation; he 1s a “fiery advocate of immigrant rights” (120) who, doing honor to his name, never hesitates to defy authority or to transgress national and heteronormative demarcations: “I think gays and lesbians should take over the military and impose a reign of obligatory same-gender sex” (126). He is “undocumented and proud” (125), and “attracted to Latino men who speak lousy Spanish” (122). He confides to Michael that he is what we may describe as a conscientious smuggler: “Occasionally people with AIDS ask me to go down to Tijuana and buy them medication not approved by the FDA” (142). In short, Sedicio is the queer mojado guerrilla to the Minuteman Project’s neonativist agenda of “[reminding] Americans that our nation was

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 217 founded as a nation governed by the ‘rule of law,’ not by the whims of mobs of ILLEGAL aliens who endlessly stream across US bor-

ders.”** At the start of his interaction with Michael, Sedicio displays his antiestablishment stand in a rebellious metatheatrical scene: Sedicio. Are you a top or a bottom? Michael. What? (To audience.) What the hell was he talking about? Sedicio. One of my surveys: Do you take it or do you give it? (Jo audience.) He’d either punch me or take me. Michael. (to audience.) He couldn’t have been this gay. Sedicio. (to audience.) He couldn’t have been this straight. Michael. (breaking reality.) Now wait a second, this is my story, I am the narrator here! Sedicio. This first person narrative can be very patriarchal and oppressive!

Michael. What is that supposed to mean’? Sedicio. Share your narrative, Michael. (121)

Like Miss Fresno, Sedicio too refers to Michael as “border man” (120), thus opening the door to varied potential readings of the protagonist. Besides working on the border as an INS patrolman, Michael’s existence fluctuates within several demarcations. Foster explains: ““Sedicio’s identification of Michael as a ‘border man’ foreshadows, in a manner that is uncomfortable to those who prefer precise meanings, the way in which Deporting the Divas is going to be slipping constantly from the anchor of fixed meanings.””°

Sedicio is quite insightful about Michael’s inner turmoil: “I wasn’t passing judgment, I was just observing: Mexican-American

border patrolman who doesn’t speak Spanish and is also in the closet. You’ve got a lot of ‘issues’ and I like that in a man” (122). Perhaps Sedicio senses the possibility for change in Michael, or maybe he is just “an idealist,” as his roommate Leonel says (145). But after several months of dating, Sedicio cannot accept Michael’s indecisions and political views, nor his reluctance to commit to a gay relationship: “Maybe I don’t mind passing for something I’m not. Yes, most of us learn how to hide it, learn English correctly,

get the right false id’s, try to “look white.” But I don’t need to lecture you on the art of hiding, Miguel Angel, you’re the expert. So where do you stand on all of this, Michael? Whose side are you on?” (156). Realizing that Michael is not ready to come out as a gay man or as a defender of immigrant rights, Sedicio “exits in a grand, fabulous manner like any other of the Divas” (157). One of the most memorable divas in Reyes’s play is Sirena An-

218 WILLIAM GARCIA gustias, the sultry Argentinian tango-dancing transvestite and Puig devotee who fills Michael’s daydreaming fantasies. She is the diva that best embodies for Michael the possibility of a mutable sense of self. In his reveries with Sirena, Michael becomes the Sergeant, a repressed queer detective from the Santa Monica Police Depart-

ment: “Sirena ... deep down, I understood she was a travesty of womanhood, but my body responded to the illusion” (129). This sketch within the play, framed as Michael’s description of his fantasies to Sedicio, is a hilarious parody set in the underworld of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood film noir and detective novels (Dashiel Hammett and, especially, Raymond Chandler). The Sergeant seeks a serial killer of gay males and follows the trail to the assassin’s lover, Sirena. The detective is aware that Sirena committed fraud to obtain her papers: “Come on, Sirena, you married the owner of the nightclub and showed up at the INS as a citizen’s wife to straighten out your legal status” (130). She is completely ignorant of the criminal activities of her murderous lover, whom she believes to be a German tourist. The killer is a member of DEFANG: Sergeant. Yes, the notorious militia that kidnaps gay men and tries to turn them straight with 24-hour videos of exotic animals mating and reproducing in National Geographic documentaries. Sirena. Such cruelty! Sergeant. And he’s no German, he’s a Puerto Rican. Sirena. Mainland or native? Sargeant. Don’t matter. (130)

After “a pretty mean tango” dance, Michael’s alter-ego detective warns Sirena to maintain the gender illusion: “I’m a boy from the barrio, East L.A., we don’t do sexual ambivalence there” (133). She

agrees to aid the Sergeant by setting up a trap for the Defanguer, whose goal (“defanguing” gay males) may be seen as neutralizing or annihilating abject queer subjects (vampires).*° At the climactic moment, the encounter of Sirena with her lover at the pier, Sedicio disrupts the illusion to rant about Michael’s fascination with the transvestite, a self-parodic detail that Reyes intro-

duces to poke fun at Sedicio’s homonormative mix of political activism and theoretical psychobabble. But Sirena, like any good diva, snaps back at Sedicio: “Excuse me, a-hem, your politics are truly admirable, my dear, and in many ways correct, BUT YOU’ RE FUCKING UP MY ACT, KID! Michael, get back into my fantasy

at once!” (134). The Defanguer threatens to kill Sirena if the Sergeant does not agree to his queer-exterminating agenda, but he will

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 219 not negotiate with the criminal: “I’m straight as any man, but I won’t do this to my queer brothers and sisters—sensitivity training has paid off!” (135). Sirena saves the day and herself, and the murderer is devoured by the sharks. The tango fantasy, Reyes’s subtitle for this playlet, can be read, following Mufioz, as a disidentificatory

narrative: the characters in Michael’s fantasy—like those in Reyes’s Deporting the Divas—“ inhabit] phobic images with a parodic and cutting difference.”’’ The sexually repressed detective

(ike Michael, an agent of the state) falls for, desires, and joins forces with an illegally naturalized cross-dressed diva who 1s having an affair with a serial killer of queer subjects. Sirena is able to deceive the INS by passing as a woman, but then is fooled by the

passing of a murderous self-hating queer lover. The characters’ passing (not only Sirena’s) explode the normative categorizations that rule Michael’s social universe. Michael’s disidentificatory fan-

tasy, especially his desire for (and alliance with) the transvestite figure, decodes dominant national discourses of heteronormativity and citizenship, and then reappropriates this code to make visible a subject position that has been marginalized by the cultural mainstream.*®

Another diva that strongly affects Michael’s process of negotiation is the Teacher, the terrorist of cultural politics whose on-stage transformation as Carmen Miranda at the start of act 2 uncovers the federal conspiracy that “[denies] us the rich cultural heritage embodied in the gay immigrant!” (138). He provides a cultural cri-

tique of Carmen Miranda as the missing link “between the gay male and the female DIVA” (138), a parodic metacritical take on the play’s own poetics of camp for the transnational queer subject.”

This drag performance is a metatheatrical sabotage of the show;

later, the Teacher says to Michael and Sedicio, “Some of you missed my lecture, “Carmen Miranda for Beginners.’ My picture’s in the San Diego Union. I’m being carried away by security guards

for interrupting a performance of “Deporting the Divas,’ see?” (150). But the most radical drag performed by the Teacher (and the actor playing the part) does not involve sartorial signs and accessories but rather the blurring of his transnational identity, which transmogrifies in each one of his appearances: a mainland Puerto Rican/ Nuyorican offering various kinds of workshops, like “Embracing your Inner Foreigner,” to “supplement [his] income” as a Spanish

teacher (114-15); a Catalonian (from Barcelona) who gets upset when Sedicio calls him a “real Spaniard” (120); and, as he confesses to Sedicio in his last intervention, after denying the previously mentioned identities, “an illegal alien trapped in a citizen’s

220 WILLIAM GARCIA body” (152). Is he a white Latino or an Anglo US citizen “embracing [his] inner” undocumented (officially excluded) subjectivity? The director of any given production may decide this when casting the play, but the possibilities are many. Is he proclaiming or reappropriating a transnational queer citizenship (as embodied by his Carmen Miranda), as one may infer from his campy subversive impersonation that parodies mainstream—mostly white and middleclass—gay male cultures? Both the Teacher’s fluid subjectivity, not unlike the one we perceive in other border divas, and his parodic transnational consumption of the Brazilian icon highlight the intervention of queer cultures in processes of globalization, where they function as what Sanchez-Eppler and Patton have called “a mediating figure between the nation and the diaspora, home and state, the local and the global.” °° It may be seen as revealing that the Teacher’s metaperformance of cultural terrorism leads to the flashback scene of Michael’s botched raid on the illegal gay wedding in the borderland, where Michael starts to discern that he is a queer illegal alien trapped in a citizen’s body. In Deporting the Divas, the interweaving of immigration politics

with transnational queer identities is a disidentificatory mechanism—like the drag or passing—that problematizes the border as a site of hybridization, intersectionality, and fluidity. This dragging

(queering) of the border is established clearly in the following scene between Michael and his boss at the INS:

Dean. A raid on a gay wedding in the middle of the desert? People are saying we’re homophobic. Michael. Well, aren’t we? Dean. Xenophobic maybe, but that’s our job! Besides, I’m trying to find the right moment to declare my candidacy, alright? Do you mind? Michael. Your candidacy’?

Dean. For Mayor, Mike. If I can run a border, I can run a city—hey, that’s my slogan right there. I bring stability and moral guidance. (113-14)

Fitch writes that “as a dramatist living in the Southwest, he [Reyes]

creates plays that are flavored by the peculiarities, increased tensions, and volatility of border life and death.”?! Although the current national debate on immigration is enough to understand why Reyes treats the politics of immigration with asserted urgency, we may also contextualize the play in the aftermath of the passing of Proposition 187 in the State of California.*? Reacting to the new law, Stanley Mailman remarks: “The year of 1994 ended with immigrants a much maligned species. No longer is the welcome mat

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 221 out for ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. . . .’ [inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty] . . . That statute is a dramatic effort to drive out undocumented aliens and to deter their entry by cutting them off from medical and other public services and depriving their children of an education.” ** Reyes offers a his-

torical context for the play in its introduction, a self-referential monologue performed by Marge McCarthy, who refers to Joseph McCarthy as her cousin. She is running against Dean (Michael’s INS boss) in the mayoral race. The character, according to the stage directions, “is a real woman played by a man, not a drag queen, a ‘Church Lady’ type” (111). Huerta asserts the importance of this character, who serves “to set the comic tone of the evening and to

begin the gender-bending that this play demands.”** Marge’s monologue is a caustic, sociopolitical satire that unveils the hypocrisy of xenophobic and homophobic mainstream discourses in US politics; at the same time, it disarms with its comedy a potentially adverse reaction from the spectators: So welcome to tonight’s divertissement entitled, “Deporting the Divas”

by Mr.—oh, heaven help me—(Mispronouncing.) Gooey-llar-moe Rees. The name may sound foreign and illegal, but the author is, I understand, a US citizen. We’ll take him at his word... . Tricky of me, I know, but I hope you do stay regardless of the homosexual propaganda you'll see here tonight. . . . Anyway, I figured the gay issue would be

no problem. .. . I think, however, frankly, you ladies would be a lot more intimidated tonight by the immigrant issue. Having a gay son these days 1s not as tragic as having an immigrant in the family. It’s bad

enough that some of you haven’t spoken to me since I voted against Proposition 187 and I’m not a liberal, God help me, but I tell you this much, ladies, nobody’s about to deport my hired help! (111)

Marge’s opening lays out the political and social background against which the character of Michael, the INS officer, 1s presented. Like Dean, Marge McCarthy defends heteronormative and neonativist demarcations: “I’m just the butt of all jokes because I believe that America is for Americans only” (143). Although concerned about the potential deportation of her “hired help,’ Marge keeps a list of people guilty of migratory and moral infractions within her community (Ladies of the Club, Dean, Michael, Miss Fresno, Leonel). While on a shopping spree to Tijuana, she runs into Michael and Sedicio, who are enjoying a date on the other (wild) side of the border. To Michael’s chagrin she addresses his family situation: “If I may say so, the future of this country depends on couples like you and Teresita getting back together again. It’s

222 WILLIAM GARCIA good for the kids” (143). Dean’s and Marge’s normative political agendas to protect family and nation are contested by the play’s disidentificatory strategies: humor, parody, and drag. These characters are played by the same actor who performs the role of Leonel (Sedi-

cio’s roommate), an undocumented Costa Rican drag queen who impersonates Marge at a local contest. Given the metatheatrical na-

ture of the play, the fluidity in its representational mode, and the campy and shockingly racy slant of Marge’s monologue, one wonders if what is being represented in the first scene is Leonel’s drag performance of Marge, in spite of the realistic style implied by the stage directions. Reyes does not close the play with an ideologically comfortable finale. The protagonist has not fully resolved his dilemmas, and actually may be inclined to fall back into mainstream heteronormative roles, or at least to lead a closeted existence. Pressed by his wife, now expecting their third child, his boss, Dean, and Marge, Michael decides to go back to his family (“stability and moral guidance”).

He proposes to Sedicio to be his closeted lover, but Sedicio declines. In the final scene, “Michael puts on his badge and INS jacket as he delivers final monologue” (157). He relates that he continues his (sexual?) escapades into the city, and that his boss has married his sister: ““We’re one big INS family now” (157). Michael recounts how he woke up one night and decided to go back to the

barn where he raided the gay wedding: “I am alone a few steps from the border, and I just sit there with the clear desert sky above me and I wait” (157). Then Michael bursts into a divalike musical finale surrounded by the other three actors in drag: “The Divas will be there for him as he works this all out in his vivid, hopeful imagination” (158). Michael’s fantasy of his coming out is an imaginary dress rehearsal in the ongoing process of negotiation, a peeping into a future moment of realization when he will be able to follow Sedicio’s advice to “embrace the ‘open border’” (134). The divas of the title do get deported: Miss Fresno is outed at the pageant; Marge McCarthy threatens Leonel with legal action and deportation after finding out about his drag act, and he decides to

return to his country; Silvano is deported before taxpayers get billed for his AIDS treatment; and Sirena departs from Michael’s fantasies. They may be “grand” and “fabulous” (158), but they always end up clicking their heels back to the land of urgent, critical

realities. Nowadays, more than ten years after the premiere of Reyes’s play, the US national political landscape appears even more inhospitable and unwelcoming for queer and transnational subjects, legal citizens and undocumented immigrants alike, espe-

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 223 cially if they are people of color. Mainstream political forces seek the exclusion from citizenship for subjects—the queer, the illegal alien, the person of color, the dispossessed, the diseased—who do not, cannot, or will not conform to or assimilate into their restrictive and homogenizing neonativist narratives of the nation. Conservative pundits decry that same-sex weddings erode the moral fabric of the nation, while politicians debate the viability of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Vigilante groups guard the USMexico border to prevent the crossing of illegal immigrants who, as Sedicio facetiously remarks, “will destroy Western Civilization” (126). However, Reyes’s subversive representation of the hybrid, transnational drag in Deporting the Divas—as exemplified in the end by Michael’s imaginary but “hopeful” enactment of his diva self in INS garb—undermines the apocalyptic, fear-mongering voices announcing political, economic, and social mayhem: “Future generations will inherit a tangle of rancorous, unassimilated, squabbling cultures with no common bond to hold them together, and a certain guarantee of the death of this nation as a harmonious ‘melting pot.’’’*° Cross-dressing and all the possibilities for passing—as woman, US citizen, white, or heterosexual—problematize the border as a fluid space where utopian agendas of normalcy and exclusion are contested. The divas illuminate a stage that renders visible the full range of possibilities opened up by queer lives and politics. They invite the spectators to abolish all binary categorizations and normative demarcations and to drag the borders to the realm of dissension and social plurality. The figure of the transvestite in Deporting the Divas, performed as a disidentificatory sur-

vival strategy, consolidates the hope for queer agency and citizenship and heralds the negotiation of identities by transnational queer subjects.

NOTES

1. Guillermo Reyes, Deporting the Divas, in Gestos 14, no. 22 (1999): 138. Quote taken from the Teacher’s monologue, “Carmen Miranda for Beginners,” at the start of the second act. Subsequent quotations of Reyes’s Deporting the Divas are from this edition and will be cited in the text. 2. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F Manalansan, “Dissident Sexualities/AIternative Globalisms,” in Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, ed. A. Cruz-Malavé and M. EF Manalansan IV (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 2. 3. Ibid. 4. The premiere of Deporting the Divas was directed by Jorge Huerta. For fur-

224 WILLIAM GARCIA ther details, see Huerta’s Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 173-78. 5. Reyes currently (2007) heads the playwriting program at Arizona State University’s School of Theatre & Film and is the artistic director of Teatro Bravo in Phoenix (http://www.teatrobravo.org/). For further biographical information, see Huerta’s Chicano Drama (148-49) and the detailed profile by Amanda Scioscia, “Man on the Verge,” Phoenix New Times, July 20, 2000, http://www.phoenix newtimes.com/Issues/ 2000—07—20/news/feature.html. Scioscia discusses Reyes’ background: “He grew up at the intersection of many cultural planes. He’s a Chilean-born U.S. citizen, though he admits that’s a long introduction. Latino is fine, provided people know what that means.” 6. José Esteban Mufioz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4. Unless noted otherwise, I use the terms drag, cross-dressing, and transvestism to refer to the performative act of wearing the clothes or displaying sartorial codes associated with the opposite gender in heteronormative societies. The specific cross-dressing instances during the play will be discussed or mentioned later in the essay. For an in-depth discussion of the various terms associated with cross-dressing and the theatrical use of drag, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), and Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000).

7. Charlene Baldridge, “Jumping the Gender Gap: Deporting the Divas’ Amusing Confusion,” San Diego City Beat, April 2, 2003, http://www.sdcitybeat .com/article .php?id =723&atype=. 8. On the transvestite’s capacity to challenge binary oppositions, see Garber, Vested Interests, 16. 9. Ibid.

10. Lesley Ferris, “Introduction: Current Crossing,” in Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris (London: Routledge, 1993), 9. See also Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121-40, for an in-depth discussion of the “ambivalent” nature of drag, which “may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms. At best, it seems, drag is a site of a certain ambivalence, one which reflects the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (125). 11. For the concept of “crossing” the stage, see Ferris, introduction, 9. 12. The play, with subsequent revisions, had two other productions in 1996. The first was at the Borderlands Theatre in Tucson, Arizona (dir. Chris Wilken). The second one was a coproduction of the Teatro de la Esperanza and Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco (dir. Jorge Huerta). The play has also been staged in Portland, Oregon (Miracle Theatre Group, 1999), Phoenix (2000), New York (2000), and San Diego (2003). Reviews of some of these productions are available on the Internet. The main character of Sirena, Queen of the Tango, the Argentinian drag queen and nightclub singer, is the femme fatale that haunts the fantasy world of the protagonist in Deporting the Divas. 13. David William Foster, “Guillermo Reyes’ Deporting the Divas,” Gestos 14, no. 22 (1999): 106. 14. Mufioz, Disidentifications, 97. 15. Melissa A. Fitch, “Gender Bending in Latino Theater: Johny The Hispanic Zone, and Deporting the Divas by Guillermo Reyes,” in Latino/a Popular Culture,

DRAGGING THE BORDERS 225 ed. Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 163. Huerta likewise points out that “multiple realities, settings and contradictions abound as Reyes explores and explodes heteronormativity and homonormativity” (Chicano Drama, 178). 16. Scioscia, “Man on the Verge.” 17. Robert L. Pela, “Diff’rent Strokes,” Phoenix New Times, May 11, 2000, http://, www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2000—05-—1 1/culture/stages.html. In Scioscia’s “Man on the Verge,” Reyes seems to address Pela’s critique (both texts were published in the Phoenix New Times). 18. See Melissa Fitch Lockhart, “Living between Worlds: An Interview with Guillermo Reyes,” Latin American Theatre Review 31, no. 1 (1997): 118. 19. Jorge Huerta, “Some Thoughts on Casting Deporting the Divas,” Gestos 14, no. 22 (1999): 159. 20. Ferris, introduction, 8. 21. Benigno Sanchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton, “Introduction: With a Passport Out of Eden,” in Queer Diasporas, ed. B. Sanchez-Eppler and C. Patton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 3. 22. Mufioz, Disidentifications, 6. 23. Note that Michael’s description of his passing as a heteronormative family man is filled with many references to consumption (“beer-guzzling,” “remote,” “mortgage,” “basketball hoop in the driveway”). See Joseba Gabilondo, “Like Blood for Chocolate, Like Queens for Vampires,” in Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations, 236—63. Gabilondo remarks that “because of its global location, queer Latino consumption points directly to the economic and social repercussions of being left ‘outside’ consumption” (253). 24. Minuteman Project, Inc., “About Us,” The Minuteman Project Website, http:// www.minutemanproject.com. See Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse,

“Locked and Loaded,” The Nation, August 28, 2006; and Daphne Eviatar, “Nightly Nativism,” The Nation, August 28, 2006, for a political analysis of, respectively, the Minuteman Project and the new nativist discourse in the main-

stream media. 25. Foster, “Guillermo Reyes,” 107. 26. For a discussion of the global vampire as queer subject, abject consumption on the border, and Latino queer production, see Gabilondo, “Like Blood.” 27. Mufioz, Disidentifications, 107. 28. On this subversive appropriation of mainstream national discourses by queer subjects, see Mufioz, Disidentifications, 31. 29. The epigraph of this essay is taken from this section of the Teacher’s monologue. A similar discourse appears at the end of Reyes’ Men on the Verge of a His-

panic Breakdown (1994), which also deals with queer and cultural politics and immigration: “So you see, I survive whether or not you help me, whether you like or not, and whether I’m legal or not. I am an immigrant. I am the future of this great country of ours. They call me Federico, the gay little immigrant that could. I’m here to stay .. . get used to it!” Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown, in Staging Gay Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Gay Theatre, ed. John M. Clum (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 424. See Fitch Lockhart’s seminal work on

Reyes’s queer theater for an analysis of this play in “Queer Representations in Latino Theatre,” Latin American Theatre Review 31, no. 2 (1998): 67-78. For a cultural analysis of Carmen Miranda as a drag of transnational culture, gender, and race, see Julian Dibbell’s “Notes on Carmen Miranda: A Few Things We Have Yet To Learn From History’s Most Incandescent Cross-Dresser,” The Village Voice, October 29, 1991, 43—45, http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/carmen.html.

226 WILLIAM GARCIA 30. Sanchez-Eppler and Patton, introduction, 3. 31. Fitch, “Gender Bending,” 164. 32. Reyes lived in California upon arriving from Chile in 1971 at the age of

nine (Scioscia, “Man on the Verge”). He remained in the state until the early 1990s, when he completed his graduate degree in playwriting at UCSD (Huerta, Chicano Drama, 148—49). He now resides in Arizona. 33. Stanley Mailman, “California’s Proposition 187 and Its Lessons,” New York Law Journal, January 3, 1995, 3. http://ssbb.com/article!.html. 34. Huerta, “Some Thoughts,” 160. 35. The Minuteman Project Web site.

Trans/Acting Bodies: Guillermo Gomez-Pefia’s Search for a Singular Plural Community Laurietz Seda Artists make great traffickers, great smugglers of ideas. We may be clumsy political organizers, but we are good cultural

brokers. —Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, “Culture-Trafficking for the 21st Century”

IN HIS RECENT BOOK FUGAS INCOMUNISTAS, JUAN DUCHESNE WINTER

explains how the desire to ground thinking about identity and com-

munity in a centralized notion of the subject is inoperative.' His point of departure is Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the noncommunitarian community or the community of being-in-common, which de-

scribes “the desire to interrupt the community whose foundation rests On some immanent principle—myths about identity, originary essences or roots, genealogies, historical metanarratives—to make way for the community of singularities.”’? Duchesne Winter also indicates that this community of being-in-common “seeks to interrupt

transcendence: historical destinies, development projects, salva-

tions, divine alliances” and that, as a result, this model “is not defined by a type of subject that represents it or by a type of individual. Therefore, it is not a community of subjects, nor is it a community of individuals or of citizens. Its “basic unit,’ so to speak, is not the unit, but rather the singular plural itself, in which every singularity is a being-with the sum of all singularities.”* In other words, the community that Nancy advocates and that is echoed in Duchesne Winter’s essay is not defined by the singularity of one subject, but rather by the sum of individuals and the sum of their particularities with respect to a desire for openness and receptiveness, for the acceptance and recognition of otherness. Following the line of thought opened up by Duchesne Winter,

this essay proposes that performance artist/writer Guillermo 227

228 LAURIETZ SEDA Gomez-Pefia trans/acts bodies in search of a community that defines itself through the singular plural. I define trans/acting as the conscious use of performance and negotiation as strategies to reinvent and redefine the art and politics of living in-between cultures, ethnicities, nations, professions, and genders, among others. As I state in the introduction to this book, trans/acting means going beyond binary oppositions, beyond acting and performance. When one trans/acts, one rejects absolute definitions and categories, adding, removing, and/or mixing elements to create fluid identities and

systems. A trans/actor is a member of a marginalized group who has developed performative survival strategies for the different con-

texts in which he or she must operate. A trans/actor constantly problematizes, questions, and subverts static categories while refusing to provide new models, as doing so would imply adherence to the very paradigms he or she criticizes. Taking as my example the piece Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, | argue that in this performance script GOmez-Pefia enacts the deconstruction, reinvention, and redefinition of national, ethnic, and gender identities.* With this trans/action, GOmez-Pefia responds to the need to reinvent identities that reject the rise of neonationalist and fundamentalist discourses that has occurred in the

United States since September 11, 2001.° The present version of Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator is a work-in-progress, as are all of the author’s pieces. It was designed specifically to be presented as the opening night keynote performance at the Sixth Latin American Theatre Today Conference/Festival (LATT ’05) held at the University of Connecticut, April 6—9, 2005.° The concept of a work-in-progress accords with GOmez-Pefia’s professional ethos since it implies the impossibility of closure while suggesting a continuous search for new ways to express those interstitial spaces that the artist advocates. Born in Mexico in 1955, residing in the United States since 1978,

and constantly crossing physical as well as symbolic and professional borders, Guillermo Gomez-Pejfia is one of the most creative, subversive, and daring trans/actors to date. He has worked as a performance artist, writer, and cultural critic.’ His essays, poems, radio programs, cybernetic experiments, performances, and installations embody theories regarding the instability of identities and borders.® Humor, parody, multilingual puns, ritual, makeup, sound, video, el-

ements from different theater traditions, visual arts, and objects laden with symbolism come together in his performance art to confront the audience with the stereotypes created and/or maintained

by the hegemonic culture’s fear of the Other. When asked to de-

TRANS/ACTING BODIES 229 scribe himself, GOomez-Pefia explicitly states: “I am a nomadic Mexican artist/writer in the process of Chicanization, which means I am slowly heading North. My journey not only goes from South to North, but from Spanish to Spanglish, and then to English; from ritual art to high technology; from literature to performance art, and from a static sense of identity to a repertoire of multiple identities. Once | get ‘there,’ wherever it is, 1 am forever condemned to return, and then to obsessively reenact my journey. In a sense, I am a border Sisyphus.’”? As an eternal border crosser, he is always rein-

venting his persona, trans/acting elements from a wide range of different peoples, countries, and cultures and thus experimenting not only with new possible identities but also with art and language itself. GOmez-Pefia emphasizes that identities are hybrid, fluid, po-

rous, and performative in order to question, subvert, and deconstruct the idea of a homogenous culture based on fixed, constraining identities. Gomez-Pefia’s hybrid personas can be considered, in Duchesne Winter’s terms, as a singularity composed of the sum of other sin-

gularities. His performance art should not be understood as a utopian place where anything is possible, but rather as a provocative non-place where whoever dares to enter should be prepared to encounter his/her own demons, desires, and fears of the Other. He argues that his job “may be to open up a temporary utopian/dystopian space, a ‘demilitarized zone’ in which meaningful ‘radical’ behavior and progressive thought are allowed to take place, even if only for the duration of the performance.” !° In the scene from Mextermi-

nator vs. The Global Predator entitled “Special Day for Humankind,” he declares: War is over. President Bush has finally decided to pull all military personnel and equipment out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Would anyone like to come on stage and dance with me? War is over my dear contemporaries, at least for the duration of this performance.

The performance site (not necessarily a theater, since GOmez-Pefia

prefers to stage his shows in nontraditional settings) becomes a contentious and transgressive space. It functions like that non-place proposed by Marc Augé in his book Non-Places, in the sense that “if a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or

230 LAURIETZ SEDA historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”!! Thus, the conceptual space in which Gomez-Pefia’s performance takes place, be it a theater, a museum, a Street, or a factory, lets audience members confront and question their own traditional ways of articulating national, ethnic, and gender identities. His performance art should be understood as a subversive act that creates “a conceptual ‘territory’ where contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox are not only

tolerated but encouraged,” and as a space for raising questions,

even ones that are uncomfortable and have no definitive answer.”” Another technique that GOmez-Pefia uses to make the audience face its own reliance on restrictive categories is indiscreet interrogation: How many of you consider yourselves pure blooded “whites””? What about “people of color”? Any “illegal immigrants” in the audience? People who once were illegal perhaps? . . . besides me?

In his tableaux vivants Gomez-Pefia invites audience members to feed, dress or undress, touch, smell, apply makeup to and even replace performers. By subverting the traditional role of the spectator, Gomez-Pefia seeks to “eradicate myths of purity and dissolve borders surrounding culture, ethnicity, gender, language and métier,” employing art to challenge people to think about and question how they define themselves and others. Through art he invites audience members themselves to become border crossers.'* While Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator requires a minimalist stage (only a table covered with props, a music stand, and a microphone), the performance artist calls attention to his multiple hybrid personas through the conscious juxtaposition of costumes and props to create an exaggerated collage of cultural, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes. In the performance presented at the University of Connecticut, GOmez-Pefia takes the stage dressed in drag, with a female mariachi outfit, cowboy boots, a skeleton glove, a headdress, a Native American breastplate, and a cane. This costume and the opening scene, which begins with Gomez-Pefia ritually spraying deodorant to the four winds and then under his left arm, immediately announce the desacralizing and transgressive nature of the performance. During the course of the performance, he changes props and incarnates multiple personas such as the Existentialist Mojado, the Archeotypal Greaser, the Mad Mex, the Ayatollah Whatever, and the Phony Shaman, through which he transgresses

the limits set by contemporary politics and static definitions of

TRANS/ACTING BODIES 231 identity. With his physical and symbolic transformations, GOmezPefia demonstrates that identity is a performative construct created through behaviors and discursive acts. Thus, identity is a trans/action in which we have the opportunity “to pick and choose and pas-

tiche and sample from our multiple selves to construct a better human being” who is constantly experimenting with and reinventing his/her identity.'* Again, the work of this performance artist can be understood within the context of Duchesne Winter’s theories of the singular plural community or being-in-common, for “beingin-common has nothing to do with communion or fusion in a body,

in a unique and final identity that would escape exposure; on the contrary, being-in-common means no longer possessing in any way,

in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantive identity, but rather sharing in that (narcissistic) lack of identity.” '!° The constant process of reinventing identities advocated by GOmez-Pefia transeresses the theories and practices that sponsor homogeneity, monolingualism, racism, sexism, homophobia, binarisms, dogmas, and fundamentalisms. It is important to note that GOmez-Pefia is fully

aware that power relations are contextual. For this reason, his art

directs its attention not only outward, but also toward Latin/o American communities themselves. For example, when working in Mexico he presents himself as a Chicano, and in the United States he presents himself as American (with the entire range of meanings implicit in that term), while in Europe he presents himself as a “diasporic artist.” '© He constantly asserts through his art that we “are not straitjacketed by identity,” that we are all hybrid entities and that “all terms referring to identity politics are imperfect.” !’ He emphasizes the impossibility of grasping the complexities of all types of identities. An excellent example is found in another version of Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, wherein a section entitled “New Hybrid Tribes” states that “this new society is characterized by mass migrations and bizarre interracial relations. As a result,

new hybrid identities are emerging. All Mexican citizens have turned into Chicanos or Mexkimos, and all Canadians have become Chicanadians. ... When a Chicarricua marries a Hasidic Jew their

child is called Hasidic vato loco. And when a displaced Belgian

marries a Chicano, the offspring is called Belga-chica, which loosely translates as ‘little winnie.’” !® Here, GOmez-Pefia trans/acts

words while demonstrating with humor the difficulty of finding an adequate name for transnational identities. He makes us aware that we are all a product of more than one culture. Moreover, by adding a sexual connotation to the concept of identity, GOmez-Pefia sub-

232 LAURIETZ SEDA verts and makes fun of extreme nationalists’ defense of monoculturalism.

While it can be argued that GOmez-Pefia’s performance scripts seek to represent the interstitial spaces of hybridity, in Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator the artist also problematizes post-9/1 1

politics, ethnic profiling, censorship, racism, and fear of immigrants. Through the use of various techniques (an ultramodern look, plays on words, songs, rituals, the use of various languages, allusions to popular culture, the use of social, ethnic, and political signs

familiar to the audience, among others), the performer provokes laughter while referring to polemical issues of contemporary US government policy. Some of these aspects are introduced immediately in the piece’s first monologue. Here, GOmez-Pefia criticizes and at the same time makes fun of the new national security laws established following the attacks of September 11, 2001. He sustains that it is increasingly difficult to travel with his “robo-baroque paraphernalia” and his “ethno-technobilia” because he is subject to

frequent searches by airport security staff who confiscate his props.'!? GOmez-Pefia also criticizes the fact that, with the apparent approval of the US Department of Homeland Security, anyone who appears to be an Arab, including Latinos, is considered a potential terrorist and therefore subject to discrimination. The scene entitled “EI Ayatollah Whatever” confronts the audience with the attitudes of extreme fear and suspicion of the Other that have taken hold of the hegemonic imaginary since 9/11: Estimado publico aterrado Due to profound cultural misunderstanding America’s favorite sport Tonight, I am the most suspicious Other around.

I am, I can be, I could be America’s most wanted inner demon the T-word, Tee, la te de terror embodied by a big brown, muscular Vato Loco cause you know, we know, Arabs and Latins are as hard to distinguish from one another as a Hutu from a Tutsi.

This monologue reveals mainstream society’s feelings of anxiety toward the Other. GOmez-Pefia criticizes the way in which brown people are viewed as a threat to national security. Such a view, he suggests, 1s based on the US mainstream’s failure to recognize ra-

TRANS/ACTING BODIES 233 cial and cultural distinctions, along with its tendency to demonize and vilify those who exhibit signs of difference or whose culture is not the hegemonic one. He also trans/acts names (“Oh Sammy Bien Latin / Sultan de los Tali-Vatos”’) to make fun of the fears embedded in post-9/11 society, thereby adding a moment of comic relief to the exposition of his strong political views. It is important to consider the multiple levels of meaning contained in the title Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator since this title implicitly demonstrates another way in which Gomez-Pefia trans/acts bodies and words. In the 1990s GoOmez-Pefia and his group, La Pocha Nostra, began working on an idea entitled The Mexterminator Project, out of which developed a complex hybrid identity: a robo-Mexican who embodies the fears of a formerly first-world society (on its way to third-worldification) and comes to replace the formidable Soviet enemy, making his debut on the silver screen and the Super Nintendo 2: it’s the Mexterminator, alias Mad Mex, border crosser, undocumented worker, scourge of the Border Patrol, friend to drug traffickers and guerillas, rapist of blonde women, kidnapper of innocent

children, polluter of /ingua francas and, to top it all off, guebradita singer, karate master and sorcerer. Half-man, half-machine, the Cool One of the border Olympus is armed to the teeth. Among his weapons are an AK-47 that shoots lasers, five chrome-plated machetes, metal nunchucks, and a bunch of grenades. In his ammo belt, instead of bullets, he carries jalapefios. Thus, he operates with chili power. .. . His sinister mission 1s nothing less than to reconquer the Southwest of Gringoland; neither Stallone, nor Schwarzenegger, nor Pete Wilson can stop him. This fuckin’ Mexican is indestructible!?°

This complex identity was partially created by Internet users who were encouraged to visit the webpage of GOmez-Pefia and La Pocha

Nostra and to send images, sounds, and texts about how they believe Mexicans, Chicanos, and native peoples should look, behave, and perform. Gomez-Pefia and his collaborators used the comments, suggestions, and opinions submitted by Internet users to create the different hybrid personas presented in the dioramas. The end result of GOmez-Pefia’s collaboration with visitors to his website and gallery installations was a performance emulating a futuristic trading post and freak show.?! This robo-Mexican represents an exaggerated version of US culture’s stereotypes, fears, and desires with respect to Latin American immigrants. With this blatantly subversive image, GOmez-Pefia car-

ries out what he calls an exercise in “reverse anthropology.” The

234 LAURIETZ SEDA concept of this “artificial savage” is intended to make the audience recognize and confront its own fears. For this reason, the Mexterminator is presented as an inverted mirror in which those present will observe the “distorted reflections of their own psychological, erotic and cultural chimeras.” ”? The creation of the word Mexterminator and the radical behavior of the eponymous robo-baroque being is a prime example of how Gomez-Pefia trans/acts bodies. In the performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, the images immediately call atten-

tion to the science fiction movies Terminator (1984), featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger in what would become his signature role, and Predator (1987), also starring the Austrian-born actor.*? After the year 2003, when Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California (following the recall of Democratic governor Gray Davis), the word acquired yet another connotation.”** Due to Schwarzenegger’s anti-Latino politics and comments (he appointed to his cabinet former governor Pete Wilson, who was the main proponent of Proposition 187, an initiative that would deny public services to

undocumented immigrants), he has been called the “Mexterminator.’’?> Indeed, Los Angeles-based cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz published a cartoon in 2003 showing Schwarzenegger in Termina-

tor gear, armed and saying “Hasta la vista Latinos” as they run scared.”° Nonetheless, years before anyone could imagine that Schwarzenegger would become governor of California, GOmezPefia coined the name Mexterminator and began crafting one of his best-known hybrid and ever-shifting personas.?’

Gomez-Pefia uses his coined name and hybrid Mexterminator persona now more than ever. Most importantly, the title plays the

Mexterminator against the Global Predator, while alluding to Schwarzenegger with both terms. Through the title’s evocation of science fiction and the figure of the Austrian-born actor, GOmezPefia tries to show by way of parody that politics in the United States works like a Hollywood movie in which “the script is always the same, give or take a bit: A barbaric and unscrupulous enemy threatens the destiny of innocent American civilians or cities. “Free-

dom’ and ‘democracy’ are at stake. A single individual, a true American Hero, with the help of a handful of civic-minded accomplices, ends up exterminating all the ‘bad guys’ and restoring the American dream. Problem solved. Civilization and progress continue to unfold, until the next episode or movie.” 78 The allusion to film embedded in the title Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator can be further extended to the politics of President George W. Bush.

Gomez-Pefia implies this connection when he says, “This time,

TRANS/ACTING BODIES 235 President Bush 1s Buffalo Bill, David Crocket, Batman and Robocop all in one, but with an extremely original performance persona, a sort of theologically driven cowboy. ... He has descended from the Hollywood Hills and the Texan prairie to rid the entire world of a generic ‘evil’ in a most bizarre spaghetti western.” *? Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Bush administration has set about demonizing Otherness and any person who disagrees with its partisan policies, thereby giving rise to a proliferation of nationalist fundamentalisms. Nonetheless, when we recall such famous Bushisms as “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we,” we must ask ourselves who our real enemy is.°*°

As Gomez-Pefia states, “Under the pretense of ‘national unity’ and ‘national security,’ a frightening culture of intolerance, patriotism, paranoia, isolationism has permeated our private and public lives.” >! Thus, we need to rethink the role of literature and performance in this era of neonationalisms and fundamentalisms triggered by fear of the Other. And so we return to Duchesne Winter’s theory of the singular plural community, defined as the sum of individuals

and their particularities, leaving aside essentialisms. In sum, the performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, in conjunction with the entire body of work produced by GOmez-Pefia and

his group, La Pocha Nostra, can be understood as that non-place (in Augé’s terms) that seeks to generate a community of being-incommon that will exceed absolute definitions of ethnicity, national-

ity, and sexuality, all of which serves as a response to the rising wave of fundamentalism brought on by the fear of Otherness. NOTES

1. Juan Duchesne Winter, Fugas incomunistas: Ensayos (San Juan: Vértigo, 2005).

2. Ibid., 61. 3. Ibid. 4. Different versions of the texts included in Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator have appeared in the following books by Guillermo Gomez-Pefia: Warrior for Gringostroika (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1993); The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996); Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back (New York: Routledge, 2000); El Mexterminator: Antropologia inversa de un performancero postmexicano (Mexico City: Océano, 2002); and Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005). These texts are substantially different from one another. The script published in this book does not

236 LAURIETZ SEDA claim to be a final version, since the writer/artist maintains his texts in a constant process of revision, adding or eliminating sections and adapting them to the place where each performance will be presented. For information on GOmez-Pefia’s current projects, visit http://www.pochanostra.com. 5. G6mez-Pefia also criticizes the nationalist discourses of other countries in his performances and books. For example, in Ethno-Techno he explains that “Chicanos taught me a different way of thinking about myself as an artist and as a citizen. Through them, I discovered that my art could be developed as a means to explore and reinvent my multiple and ever-shifting identities (something that had been unthinkable in Mexico)” (8). 6. For the 2005 Latin American Theatre Today Conference/Festival, GomezPefia and his collaborator Michelle Ceballos also specifically designed a performance/installation entitled “Mexotica 2005.” For more information on LATT ’0S, visit http://languages.uconn.edu/ conferences/spconference/eng/html/index2.html. 7. GOmez-Pefia is also the artistic director of the San Francisco-based company La Pocha Nostra (see http://www.pochanostra.com), a contributing author for The Drama Review, and a commentator for All Things Considered on National Public Radio. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a MacArthur Fellowship (1991), the New York Bessie Award (1989), and Prix de la Parole (1989). His performance work has been featured internationally. 8. During the 1990s Gomez-Pefia began experimenting with a colonial form, the diorama, creating tableaux vivants, “living dioramas” that parody and subvert the traditional exhibits of museums of anthropology and natural history, freak shows, porn display windows, and border curio shops. His goal is that the audience, mainly its European and Anglo-Saxon component, reflect on “its own racism toward the so-called ‘subaltern cultures.’”’ Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, “Dioramas v1vientes y agonizantes (el performance como una estrategia de ‘antropologia inversa’),” Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, http://hemi.nyu.edu/ archive/text/ pena.html. 9. GoOmez-Pefia, The New World Border, 1. 10. Gémez-Pefia, Ethno-Techno, 24. 11. Mare Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 77-78. 12. Gomez-Pefia, Ethno-Techno, 22. 13. Ibid., 78. 14. Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, “Culture-Trafficking for the 21st Century: Meet the Cross-cultural, Postcolonial Performer Who Takes on Everyone from George W. to J-Lo,” ColorLines Magazine: Race, Action, Culture 6, no. 2 (2003): 41. 15. Duchesne Winter, Fugas incomunistas, 4. 16. Gémez-Pefia, Ethno-Techno, 255. 17. Ibid., 25; GOmez-Pefia, “Culture-Trafficking,” 41. 18. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, “Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator” (unpublished manuscript, 2005).

19. For more information, see GOmez-Pefia, “Touring in Times of War,” in Ethno-Techno, 157-58. 20. Gomez-Pefia, El Mexterminator, 104. 21. The original webpages of the Mexterminator Project (http://www.telefoni ca.es/fat/ egomez.html and _ http://www.neutralground.sk.ca/artistprojects/mex term/project.html)—the sites of GOmez-Pefia’s collaboration with Internet users in the 1990s—are currently inactive. 22. Gomez-Pefia, El Mexterminator, 99.

TRANS/ACTING BODIES 237 23. The year 2004 saw the premiere of a movie entitled Alien vs. Predator, based on the characters from the Alien and Predator film series. The movie is also based on the comic book series Alien vs. Predator, published by Dark Horse Comics. The sequel Alien vs. Predator: Requiem was released in December 2007. Schwarzenegger does not appear in either of these films. 24. One could find even more levels of meaning in the title Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, such as the metacommentaries suggested in the script itself—“The stage is our battlefield / ‘Mexterminator vs the Global Predator’ ”—or the numerous connotations of the term Global Predator within the context of processes of globalization. 25. Schwarzenegger’s stated support for immigration reform, including a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, is tempered by a patronizing attitude toward Latinos. He has praised the Minutemen, a citizen militia group that patrols the Arizona-Mexico border looking for illegal immigrants. Ironically, one of the leaders of this group, Al Garza, is a Mexican American who opposes the legalization of undocumented workers. Schwarzenegger has criticized Latinos for failing to join American society and recently shocked the audience gathered for the convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists by blaming Spanish-language television for undocumented immigrants’ failure to learn English. Louis Sahagun, “Gov. Aims for Healing, Hits a Snag with Latino Journalists,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2007. Schwarzenegger has also been called the “Governator” in reference to his status as an “artificial” candidate fabricated by the Republican party. In a humorous cartoon about the 2003 California referendum to recall Governor Davis, the caption reads: “In the Year of Darkness, 2003, the rulers of the Republican party devised the ultimate plan. They would reshape the future by changing the past election. The plan required a candidate who felt no pity. No pain. No fear. Something unstoppable. They created “The Governator.’” See http://politicalhumor.about.com/ library/images/blpic-arnoldgovernator.htm.

26. For an image of the cartoon, visit http://www.cafepress.com/lacucara

cha.7191935. 27. Even when Gomez-Pefia uses and occasionally reuses the same name for one of his hybrid personas, this does not imply an exact repetition. His hybrid personas are unrepeatable. He changes, adds, and removes props or pieces of the costume, giving new life to the persona and emphasizing the impossibility of absolute identities. 28. Gomez-Pefia, Ethno-Techno, 165. 29. Ibid. 30. George W. Bush (speech, Washington, D.C., August 4, 2004). See http:// politicalhumor .about.com/library/blbushdumbquotes2.htm. 31. GoOmez-Pefia, Ethno-Techno, 14.

Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator Guillermo Gomez-Pefia INTRODUCTION TO MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR

In the past year, I’ve been writing, rewriting, and testing in front of informal audiences of colleagues a series of spoken word performance texts. Some of these texts I found by digging through forgotten archives of my computer’s memory. I brought them back to

life through obsessive rewritings. Others are transcripts of ad lib texts that spontaneously came to being during my solo performances. A few I wrote this year in direct response to political or pop cultural phenomena, exploring their effects on my views on art, activism, identity, sexuality, and language. What these texts have in common is a tone—a kind of ironic and melancholic tone—and a unique form of vernacular philosophical inquiry that I feel are at the core of performance art and performance literature. Together they function as reflections on our millennial condition, as artists and cultural practitioners living in the US, a country that is undergoing an unprecedented cultural and political Crisis.

Some underlying questions are as follows: Why do we continue doing what we are doing (in my case, writing and making art) against the backdrop of war, censorship, cultural paranoia, and spiritual despair? What are the new roles that artists must undertake? Where are the new borders between the accepted and the forbidden? Is art still a pertinent form of inquiry and contestation? Is my audience really with me? Who are “we” and who are “they”? Can I collaborate with my audience in the making of the performance? From whence do we draw the energy to continue? What about yo? My own vulnerability; the predicaments of my domestic self? As a performance artist my job 1s precisely to ask questions, lots of questions, in original ways. Like most of my performance literature, these hybrid texts suffer

from an acute identity crisis. Are they spoken word poetry, performance monologues, pop philosophy, art theory, postcolonial 238

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 239

thought, or Chicano stand-up comedy? I truly don’t know. It is actually better that I don’t know. Like most of my literature, they are “open texts,” works in permanent progress, which means that their publication merely preserves them in one phase of their ongoing development. Together, I see them as both a multipurpose literary bank and a script in permanent progress; the script of my current life. But they are also documents of sorts for crossing the border into the new century.

The form of these texts on the page is merely a performative strategy. Though they are poetic prose pieces, I have structured them like poems or monologues, in short sentences per line. This way, it is easier for me to read them aloud and to play with language rhythms and textures.

My Pocha Nostra colleagues are constantly asking me why I choose to return to my solo spoken word material. First and foremost because my audiences asked me to do so. As I have toured with my beloved troupe over the last five years, everywhere we go audiences tell me that they want to hear my voice again. They want to know my current opinions about art and politics. They insist on hearing my voice, alone on stage, without excess performance paraphernalia. They ask and I must acquiesce. Furthermore, I feel that the complexities and subtleties imbedded in the content and form of these pieces couldn’t possibly be conveyed through my troupe work, which tends to be more experiential, consensual, and collaborative.

Guillermo Gomez-Pefia July 2007

Props: Rubber heart, deodorant, megaphone, colonial fan, headdress, bandana, cigarette, sun glasses, high heels, cowboy boots, Stetson, etc. Staging elements: One music stand, one table behind me with props on top. If possible another mike hanging. Cowboy boots to the right of the music stand. Notes:

—Intro ceremony much longer and staged. —In general more syncopated rhythm and more pauses. —Accents much more clean & rehearsed —Embody more the text —Look more at people’s eyes —The use of props more purposeful & clean

240 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA INTRO MUSIC (DIORAMA #2) OR ETHNO-TECHNO #1 VIDEO WHILE PEOPLE ARE COMING IN Intro. (I WALK AROUND LECTERN, THEN I SQUAT THEN I DO SPRAY DEODORANT BLESSING CEREMONY)

Dear audience: Tonight from my multiple repertoires of hybrid personas, I have chosen to come as the embodied psyche of an existentialist mojado & it’s quite a challenge my dear friends

for ve been stripped by airport security of all my robo-baroque paraphernalia my ethno-technobilia ye-ye which means, no more hand-made low-rider prosthetics no mariachi robotic body-wear no cheesy fog machines no hanging dead chickens, nothing not even a voice-effect processor to help me get rid of my accent just one costume, & a bit of make-up to protect myself o sea, back to the basics of performance It’s Chicano minimalism a contradiction in terms

but hell, I am a walking contradiction ... & so are you... So, dear foreign audience: Welcome to my conceptual set Welcome to my performance universe Welcome to my delirious psyche to the cities and jungles of my language las del inglés y las del espafiol so kick back, light up your conceptual cigarette . . . a prop (I LIGHT UP A CIGARETTE & INHALE)

& breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out now, reach over,

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 241

grab the crotch of your neighbor. ...comeon...

& massage...yes...

this is the basic exercise of Chicano Tantra Hey Pedro, can you clean my voice a bit?

Bueno, bueno, probando... probando... Alo? Alo? Fortress Europa Yestem Mexicainskim arteston. Asken siquieren jodersen. I wonder que would happen if, wenn du open your computero, finde eine message in esta lingua poluta et disoluta? No est Englando, no est Germano, tampoco es Franzo; not even Spanglish ese. No est keine known lingua aber du understande! Merde, wat happen zo! Habe your computero eine virus catched? Habe du sudden BSE gedeveloped o que? No, du esse lezendo la neue Europese lingua de Europanto Uno cyber-melangio mas

avec la chicanoization del mondo... mondo...

Mojado Existentialism (DONALD DUCK SPEAK)

This 1s the way English sounded to me when I was a kid. (INDIAN TONGUES)

This 1s the way my voice sounds when I’m on stage (FRENCH TONGUES)

This is the way my voice sounds when I attempt to be comedic an eshék absolu

Testing, testing... (TELEMUNDO ANNOUNCER)

En el proximo capitulo de El Malparido un Chicano se enfrenta a los demonios de la lengua...

Testing, testing... This 1s the way my voice sounds when I’m rehearsing

242 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA Testing, testing .. . the limits of my identity, testing This is not my real voice, probando, probando ... This is clearly not my real voice, probando .. .

This is... Connecticut??? a place in... America a state of mind, a way of being while forgetting, a certain pain, a strange malaise, a cultural pathology, an intercultural purgatory Ameeérica, my stage is your purgatory This stage 1s our battlefield ‘“Mexterminator against the Global Predator” This script is my uncertain fate, my tongue is my compass; your unbearable headache. (CHANTING)

The Pope just died per ipsum, ecu nipsum, eti nipsum et TV video patri omni impotenti per omnia saecula saeculeros . . . Ay!, que catholic I sound! Delete! Script change. (I PUT ON TECHNO-GLASSES)

Special Day for Humankind Ad-lib Ladies and gentlemen; Today is a special day for humankind. (LONG PAUSE)

Did you see the news today in the morning’? War 1S over.

President Bush has finally decided to pull all military personnel and equipment out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon has confirmed that by April 25th the US Army will have abandoned all military positions in the Middle East.

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 243

We are all extremely perplexed and happy, no shit. I would love to dance with someone (MUSIC BY PERCY SLEDGE)

Would anyone like to come on stage and dance with me’? War is over my dear contemporaries .. . at least for the duration of this performance. America’s Most Wanted Inner Demon

Memory file Late October, 2001. I’m looking for the cultural source of the post-9/11 anti-Arab racism. I turn on the multiple screens of my memory 1n search of images, clues, strategic words. (BROKEN TONGUES) I El Archeotypal Greaser:

(I SPEAK IN TONGUES) VOICE# 1(NORMAL):

Hello, my dear audience: Jeis suis El Archeotypal Greaser, born and raised South of the media Border where the continents of fear and ignorance overlap. Soy yo el mero mero great great grandson of Cortes y La Malinche l'enfant de la chingada da-da the bastard son of Lone Ranger and Tonto el hijo apocrifo de Frida Culo y Freddy Krugger the Meskin’ brother Banderas badly wanted to have a true Hollywood refusnik ... Soy yo Joaquin, pero el otro El que se perdiO when crossing the border Lost & found in the translation; misinterpreted by both sides. (I SING TO A CUMBIA BEAT)

“un, dos, el nasty one, un, dos, the rebel one,

244 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA el indomable e intraducible

undocumented/documentado” ... (NORMAL VOICE)

Shit! Iam a terrible cumbia singer. Pll try another persona. . . non-grata (TONGUES)

Il E] Mad Mex:

Soy el Mad Mex, Chero psycho-killer; prototype 187-GQ conceived at MGM with body parts assembled in TJ/Taiwan. ‘cause all Mexican artists were made in Taiwan; our body parts assembled by German curators to perform X-treme art fuctions at expos, festivals & TV ads. (PAUSE)

Primary Fuctions: 100 + identity morphing capabilities including el S&M zapatista el galant mariachi rocker el X-rated narco brujo servidor el transgender dandy servidor que cruza y penetra vuestras inmensas nalgas transnacionales. Delete. Open Accessories File: *chipotle squirting robo-jalapenio phallus to blind the migra when crossing over; shift.

*software located in my *&&% ... $%&R&K....

Shift. *my intelligent tongue, mastica computer nacho chips

imbedded in my *&*°&% ... $%RRK.... Shift. *my poisonous lips mastican your delicious, delicious white flesh “Viva gringuita!”

—cries El Chihuahua Chucky

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 245

my favorite Mexi-cannibal colega right before devouring your hardware. (I BARK)

Question: Can Americans differentiate Between a Latino and an Arab?

Il E] Ayatollah Whatever: VOICE#3 (SATANIC):

Estimado publico aterrado: Due to profound cultural misunderstanding, America’s favorite sport Tonight, I am the most suspicious Other around (I LOOK AROUND)

The Other on the other side of the mirror, Und mexicanka aub globalizatum das TV set your evil twin, the brown one, perdido entre las torres gemelas. (RAPPING)

Iam... the boogeyman of ABC, the INS, the NSA, & the Homeland Security Gestapo Motto: Security for you; inseguridad para el resto del planeta Neta: I am que soy .. . whomever you want me to be dark, unscrupulous & genetically anti-American, I am que fui El capo de capos, Brown Vader Escobar morphing into the Lord of Heavens. “Mato luego existo/cruzo luego soy, fui, seré.. .” & by strategic association, or rather perceptual incompetence

at different times, I can be, I could be... the Mullah One, Body Snatcher Extraordinaire Osama morphing into Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, or Arafat, El Ayatollah whatever Mu-ja-he-din; Mojado-in

246 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA I am, I can be, I could be America’s most wanted inner demon the T-word, Tee, la te de terror embodied by a big, brown, muscular Vato Loco cause you know, we know, Arabs and Latins are as hard to distinguish from one another as a Hutu from a Tutsi or an Irish from a Scott

in the eyes of a Bengali Holy man... (TONGUES)

Cause at this point in time outside of Bush’s inner circle we are all “Arabs” (REPEAT PURPOSEFULLY)

or rather all Arabs are Latin Oh Sammy Bien Latin Sultan de los Tali-Vatos and please, please, s’il vous plait do not confuse “them” with the Tali-beaners, those phonies sponsored by the Gap cause tonight, tonight my mind is out of control and you, my dear audience, you’re caught in the crossfire. (I SPEAK IN TONGUES)

Remember? Remember me?

I used to be. . . Mexican. Remember my original text? Should I attempt to remember it? I open memory file #187.6; a Word document. Tijuana, 1987 (I TAKE OFF GLASSES & PUT ON STETSON HAT)

Rrrroomantic Mexicou Today, the sun came out in English the world spins around en inglés

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 247

& life is just a melancholic tune in a foreign tongue, like this one (I SHOW MY TONGUE TO THE AUDIENCE)

Ay Mexico, rrrroooommmantic Mexico “Amigou Country” para el gringo desvelado Tijuana Caliente, la “O” Mexicali Rose para el gabacho deshauciado El Pasou y Juarréz ciudades para encontrar el amor amor que nunca existio ay Mexico, rrrooommmantic Mexico paraiso en fragmentacion mariachis desempleados concheros desnutridos bandidous alegris beautiful sefioritas mafioso politicians federalis que bailan el mambou el ronchero, la cumbia, la zambia en-tropical skyline sprayed on the wall “dare to cross the Tequila border” “dare to cross the line without your coppertone”’ transcorporate breeze sponsored by Turismo (MEROLICO)

Crunchy nachous to appease the hunger. Tostada Supreme para aliviar las penas Enchilidas y Mac Fajitas peso little-eat so grand1! where else but in Mexico. (USE INHALER)

Albuterol.

Aqui Gomez-Pefia again, with another Mexican Brechtian moment. Dear foreign audience. I’d like to ask you some basic questions which are at the core of American identity. ’ ve been asked myself each of these questions at least 100 times. No big deal. May I? House lights please!.

248 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA (HOUSE & STAGE LIGHTS)

(I GRAB MEGAPHONE, INQUISITIVE W/MEGAPHONE):

How many of you consider yourselves pure blooded “whites”? what about “people of color”? And the rest? Any “illegal immigrants” in the audience? people who once were illegal perhaps? . . . besides me? (I RAISE MY OWN HAND)

What about people who married an “illegal alien” to help them get their green card? (If so) hey that’s transnational solidarity. Any people who have hired undocumented migrants for domestic, or artistic purposes? Hmmm... To do what exactly, sir? How much did you pay them’? Thanks for your sincerity (miss or mister). Has anyone here ever reported a “suspicious” foreigner to your local Homeland Security office? No one? What an enlightened community!! ’Cause I did, last week You know I live in San Francisco I saw these 2 guys in my building They looked like they were from Iowa or Texas I was scared! But let’s return to the script, and get a bit more personal People who have had sex with an “illegal alien” in the last month? No one? (OPTIONAL IF PEOPLE ARE ROLLING)

What about sex with an alien, I mean abduction? Can you please describe their genitals in detail? Just kiddin’ Ok, you’re not in for the subject matter An easier one: Intercultural fetishes, Have any of you ever fantasized about being from another race or culture? Which one? Black, Indian? Mexican? French? Arab? Why? We’re getting there. Thanks for your candor. Now, let’s reverse the gaze,

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 249

Would anyone like to ask me a question, any question, as irreverent or indiscreet as it may be? (I ANSWER IN NAHUATL)

Memory file 229. House lights out! I love Galapagos I see I mean, Galapedos Digo, Galapenis Jalapinis Jalapedos Jalapefios, purdon Yo soy haperendiendo un poquido di espafiol Castillian, I mean Pero yo soy solo un gringo loco

En amor per una chic... Ana Calienti In the street Me mira como florecida de cinque tamalo Digo, chingo y malo I mean, Cinco di Mayo Translation please . . . just kidding!! Welcome to the colonized territory of your psyche Spanglish Poltergeist y qué?

Part two: The politics of language. I truly believe that Americans know more Spanish than they are willing to accept and I'd like to prove it right now with a poem. I SHOW MY TONGUE AGAIN

Dear perplexed students, repeat with me out loud: Mexico es California Marruecos es Madrid Pakistan es Londres Argelia es Paris Cambodia es San Francisco Turquia es Frankfurt Puerto Rico es Nueva York Centroamérica es Los Angeles Honduras es New Orleans Argentina es Paris

250 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA Beijing es San Francisco Haiti es Nueva York Nicaragua es Miami Quebec es Euskadi Chiapas es Irlanda Ramallah es East LA (PAUSE)

Your house 1s also mine (LONGER PAUSE)

Your language mine as well And your heart will be ours one of these nights Es la fuerza del sur. Robo-esperanto #2

La globalizacion logr6 sus objetivos epistemoldgicos: Crear una ilusi6n Optica de la destruccion de fronteras; the linguistic vertigo of the

immediate future...

(I SHOW MY TONGUE/I MAKE SOUND WHILE EXPELLING AIR)

So... ladies and gentlemen: enchiladas y burritos bagels and croissants; let’s imagine for a moment a post-colonial robo-barroque esperanto composed of 5 European languages plus Latin, Nahuatl and Chicano slang what would it sound like? In the Americas, things are even more complicated regarding |’1dentité

...y es que la neta escueta we just don’t know where exactly

are the new borders located ... Tiyuana, Bagdad... plus o moin? Texas, Kaboul .. . aqui o alla? Earthlink, Yahoo... .

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 251

ceci, cela? que esto/que aquello ici/la-bas que tu/que yo, I mean not really wanting to decide yet “cause

for the moment, machin aujourd’ hui

tlacanacatl el mio Il corpo pecaminoso hurts un chingo especially my feet ikchitl pero también otras partes del cuerpopo-po-ca, capiscas gtiey? tenepantla tinemi

y es que la pisca existencial esta ka... ka. so drop your cuete mujer et fiches-moi la paix y hagamos la paz con la lengua babe, ic1, dans la voiture sacré, en la mera rrranfla

my toyota flamigero.. . toyo-tl la salle du sex transculturelle my low-rider sanctuary tlatoani I say je n’al rien a declarer: “EI arte nunca sera suficiente” Translation:

Art is just a pretext for... for...for... thank you (I TAKE OFF HIGH HEEL #2) (I PUT ON GLASSES AGAIN/TAKE OFF HAT )

Exercise in Political Imagination #18 The following piece was recorded for and censored by NPR. Dear listener: I want you to engage in an exercise of political imagination I politely ask you to close your eyes and imagine a faraway country

252 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA controlled by far-right politicians in their 60s & 70s... Just imagine!! they are supported by religious fundamentalists oil tycoons and gun manufacturers They believe (or rather pretend to believe) that “the liberal media” and experimental art have thoroughly destroyed our social fabric, our moral and family values, our national unity and they are determined to restore them at any cost. Under the pretext of national security they have decided to scrutinize everything that goes on radio, TV, printed journalism, the Internet, performance art; including this very (beep). So, from (beep) to sitcoms, and from news (beep) to (beep) programming, they have digital censors which can detect key words that trigger ideological or (beep) difference. Since it 1s practically impossible to monitor everything, they have devised a mechanism via which (beep) the syntactic and conceptual coherence of a thought 1s (beep), especially when dealing with conflicting opin(beep). So, when it comes to expressing political di(beep) most critical words have been (beep). And I mean, just words, such as (beep) or (beep) or (beep)or even an innocent term like (beep). In a world such as this, content would be restricted to (beep) and the possibility to make intelligent civic choices would be affecting our funda-(beep) to (LONG BEEP INTERTWINED WITH DIPTONGUES).

Imagine, what kind of a world would this be? Campaigning for the Brown House.

I’ve always worked with cultural and political inversions. It’s Chicano epistemology. What if the continent turned upside down? What if we were the actual center? What if yo were you y td fueras I mister? So let’s imagine The Third Party Chicano candidate addressing the Brown House Two months before election day. (I PUT ON DARK GLASSES & BANDANA)

Dear Chicanos and honorary Chicanos: The historical mission of the U.S. is to put the world at risk and then to save it from the very risks they have created;

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 253

for example, to arm other countries and then to attack them for being armed; to provide weapons and drugs to the youth of color and then to imprison them for using them; to endanger the species and then to raise consciousness and create programs to save them; to evict the poor and then punish them for living on the streets; to turn women and people of color into freaks & then laugh at us for acting out accordingly. The historical mission of the U.S. 1s very, very peculiar. (FROM NOW ON I TAKE OFF GLASSES EVERY TIME I SHIFT VOICES)

(BOLD LINES DELIVERED IN NORMAL VOICE/OTHERS IN HYPER-CHICANO ACCENT Dear audience: If I were a politician, would you vote for me? Despite my outlaw looks, my obvious vices? Despite my lack of theatrical training? If this was, say, a presidential campaign and not a performance art piece, What should I say? Imaginary political speech #5 Script change (ABRASIVE W/MEGAPHONE):

Dear citizens of the millennial barrio: We are faced with a very serious dilemma: we have now entered the post-democratic phase of advanced capitalism, el Imperio Tejano part 2 and there’s simply .. . no return. Orale! Parezco Malcolm Mex.

We politicians have total disregard for human pain, for the homeless, the migrants, our elders and teens, the queers, the artists, the infirm. We have gotten used to living without seeing, without empathy for those on the other side of the TV screen. For the moment all we share is . . . the moment. No, no, no, that’s a bad Daoist phrase. Pll try another imaginary political speech. I’m now addressing the Republican Convention

254 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA (I DROP MEGAPHONE & RAISE MY RIGHT FIST) (FASCIST TONE)

Dear orphans of the nation/state:

We now live...

we now live in a fully borderized world composed of virtual nations, transnational pop cultures & hybrid races. That’s a good line That’s almost a haiku & all we share is fear & vertigo (TO AN AUDIENCE MEMBER)

Fear? fear of the future, of war, censorship & disenfranchisement And vertigo?

The feeling of standing on the edge of a new millennium. Yessss!!

Pure horror vacui: Y2K, y qué, Apocalypse Mafiana! What did I say? White 2K? Qué weird! We feel it in our crotch & it goes up our spine & out into our throat & out of our nostrils and eyes & it’s fucking unbearable!!!!! Sorry, I’m overdoing it, I know, but I see no other way to make my point. Wait, there might be another way... a joint! (I LIGHT UP A JOINT & SMOKE IT) (STONER VOICE)

Imaginary political speech #12

Dear generic American citizenry, If you vote for me I can assure you that as the first Mexican president of the USA, I will fulfill your fears and desires

like... like... like no other politician ever did & all your stereotypes will come true carnales.

Pll open all borders, legalize drugs, create nude university campuses,

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 255

make daily sex mandatory, make Spanglish the official language, expropriate all TV stations and hand them over to poets, abolish the police force & the national guard, ban all weapons, from handguns to missiles, deport Bush back to Texas & Gonzalez back to his Episcopalian Inferno down there, next to Ashcroft. Orale, feels great to imagine... que no? What else do we pinche have at this point in time? El] Phony Shaman.

Memory file #2518. (CONVERSATIONAL) I always get invited to places where no other Chicanos get invited. So, this time I am in Germany at a weekend “Indian retreat,” 10 miles east of Hamburg. This phony shaman is addressing a group of naked Indian wanna-be Germans. I get inspired to write this irreverent “49er.” (I PUT ON MY HEADDRESS) (FAKE NAHUATL)

(I SING THE TRADITIONAL HARE KRISHNA)

Hare Krishna, Krisnahuatl Hare grandma, hairy nalga

Ommmmmmm... mocos giiey (IMITATING POW-WOW-LIKE CHANTING)

Christian girls, Christian girls, Christian girls, Christian girls, Oh how I love, oh how I love, oh how I love those Christian girls. ahhhhh

New age girls... (REPEATS CHANT) Skinhead girls ... (REPEATS CHANT) Muslim boys... (REPEATS CHANT) (SHAMANIC TONGUES INTERTWINED WITH WORDS)

(tongues)... Tezcatlipunk (tongues)... Funkahuatl (tongues)... Khrishnahuatl (tongues). .. Chichicolgatzin (tongues). .. Chili con Carne

256 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA (tongues). . . Taco Bell Chihuahua (tongues). .. Santa Frida (tongues). .. Santa Selena (tongues). . . Santa Pocahontas

(tongues)... Santa Shakira NAFTA, Viagra, Melatonin, NAFTA, Viagra, Melatonin, (SCREAMING)

Melatonin!! Now everybody, take your pill. Ginseng, Gingko, Guacamole, Ginseng, Gingko, Guacamole, (SCREAMING)

Guacamole!! Now everybody, take a dip.

I’m sorry for inconveniencing your mind I’m just a nanabush, a fancy dancer tightrope walking coyote; & my only privilege here 1s to be allowed to cross the many many forbidden borders that exist between my mouth and your fears. And I would like to dedicate this piece to President Bush. God bless Mexico God bless Iraq God bless Afghanistan God bless Pakistan God bless Venezuela God bless Colombia God bless Cuba God bless Iran God bless China God bless Sri Lanka God bless Thailand God bless Palestine God bless Sudan God bless France God bless Finland God bless Canada God bless Fiji

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 257

God bless The Bahamas God bless... (AUDIENCE RESPONDS) And we almost forgot God bless the USA as well. (I PUT ON COWBOY BOOTS & SQUAT TO GATHER MYSELF) (I TAKE TIME)

Millennial Doubts.

Queridos colegas: I’ve been agonizing all day over How to end tonight’s “keynote” I’m feeling a bit insecure & introspective tonight. I just turned 49 & I wonder if I’m still asking the right questions or am I merely repeating myself”? (SILENCE)

Am I going far enough, or should I go further? North? But the North does not exist, South? Should I go back to Mexico for good? Regresar en espafiol a las entrafias de mi madre? But the Mexican nation-state is collapsing as I speak so stricto sensu, Mexico en espanol no longer exists ‘cause every day Mexico & the US., like Fox and Bush. look more & more like one another & less & less like you and I which means, “we” are no longer foreigners to one another. Follow my Kantian logic? Therefore, as orphans of two nation-states we’ve got no government to defend; no flag to wave. We’ ve only got one another which sounds quite romantic, I mean, politically speaking, but it 1s a philosophical nightmare .. . I mean, if neither the North nor the South are viable options anymore, where should I go? East? EST? Should I go deeper into my global psyche & become a Chicano Buddhist? Or should I cross the digital divide west

258 GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA & join the art technologist cadre? How’?

Alter my identity through body enhancement techniques, Laser surgery, prosthetic implants, & become the Mexica Orlan? A glow-in-the-dark transgenic mojado? Or a post-ethnic cyborg, perhaps? A Ricky Martin with brains? That’s a strange thought!!! Maybe I should donate my body to the MIT artificial intelligence department so they can implant computer nacho chips in my pito implant a very sentimental robotic bleeding heart and become the ranchero Stelark? What about a chipotle-squirting techno-jalapefio fallus to blind the migra when crossing over? Or an “intelligent” tongue . . . activated by tech-eela? You know, imaginary technology for those without access to the real one. I mean, I’m arguing for an obvious fact: When you don’t have access to power Poetry replaces science And performance art becomes politics. Mex-plico? No?

I got to get me a “real” job, a9 to 5 job. But the question is, doing what? Wait, I could be an inter-cultural forensic detective An expert in X-treme identity analysis... nay! I can teach “Chiconics” in Jail, I mean Yale. Or at Brown or State Penn, I mean Penn State ‘“What’s up esos, chinguen a sus professors. Saquen la mota y el chemo. Forever, Aztlan nation” Which loosely translates to “a moment of enlightened rebelliousness.” By T. Esssse Eliot How about posing as a model for a computer ad: (PUT ON MY TECHNO GLASSES & STETSON HAT & POSE)

“El Mexterminator thinks different, y que?” Or posing as a wholesome eccentric for a Ben & Jerry’s poster?

MEXTERMINATOR VS. THE GLOBAL PREDATOR 259

I could conduct self-realization seminars for Latino dot-commers: “Come to terms with your inner Chihuahua.” (I BARK)

or conduct a workshop for neoprimitive Anglos? “Find your inner Aztec.” (I SPEAK IN PSEUDO NAHUATL)

I look the part que no? ... kind of... (TAKE OFF GLASSES)

I could write a best seller for conservative minorities titled... “Inverted Minstrel: 100 ways to camouflage your ethnicity to get a better job”; no, Condoleezza is already writing it I just don’t know anymore It’s tough to find a useful task for a performance artist nowadays. In the age of the mainstream bizarre, globalization-gone-wrong, weapons of mass distraction . . . the war of civilizations according to the Texan scriptures in this time and place what does it mean to be “transgressive”? What does “radical behavior” mean after Howard Stern, & Jerry Springer? After Bin Laden, Ashcroft, and Cheney became celebrities of despair? What does radical mean when a theological cowboy is running the so-called “free world” as if he were directing a Spaghetti Western on the wrong set? Or when Conan the Barbarian becomes governor of California in a reality show named “California” Cofio, I ask myself rhetorically, what else is there to “transgress”? Who can artists shock, challenge, enlighten? (LONG PAUSE)

Can we start all over again? Can we’?

May I? Should I burn my bra or my green card? Thank you for being with me tonight. Thank you for being so open and generous. Thank you for tolerating my madness. Gracias.

Contributors GasTON A. ALZATE is associate professor of Spanish at California State University-

Los Angeles. His primary line of research and publication has been Mexican and Colombian literature, with a focus on theater and performance arts. Originally from Cali, Alzate has published two books: Teatro de cabaret: imaginarios disidentes (Ediciones de Gestos, 2002) and Un aspecto desesperanzado de la literatura: Séfocles, Hélderlin, Mutis, a book on poet Alvaro Mutis, which won the 1993 Instituto Colombiano de Cultura national essay award. He also earned a national short story award in 1985 for “Luisa Fernanda” (Asociacion Alejo Carpentier-Universidad Central). Alzate has published articles in journals such as Latin American Theatre Review, Latin American Literary Review, Chasqui, Gestos, Hispanic Issues, Revista de Psicologia Politica (Universidade de Sao Paulo), Tramoya, and Revista de Estudios Colombianos. JACQUELINE E. BIxLer is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech and associate editor of the Latin American Theatre Review. Her book, Transgression and Convention: The Theatre of Emilio Carballido (Bucknell University Press, 1997), was translated and published in 2001 by the Universidad Veracruzana. She is the editor of the book Sediciosas seducciones: Sexo, poder y palabras en el teatro de Sabina Berman (Escenologia, 2004) and coeditor of the collection El teatro de Rascon Banda: Voces en el umbral (Escenologia, 2005). Bixler has also published numerous essays on contemporary Mexican, Argentine, and Chilean theater in edited collections and in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Theatre Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Hispania, Gestos, Conjunto, Tramoya, Literatura Mexicana, and Revista Teatro XXI1.

Becky BoLinc is professor of Spanish at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She focuses her research on contemporary Spanish-American narrative and theater with a strong interest in women’s writings. She has published essays in journals such as Gestos, Latin American Theatre Review, Chasqui, Hispanofila, Hispanic Journal, and Letras Femeninas on authors such as Griselda Gambaro, Elena Garro, Emilio Carballido, Sergio Magafia, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ana Maria del Rio, Mayra Montero, and Sylvia Molloy. In the field of drama, she is particularly interested in the nature of spectacle itself and in the portrayal of gender. GaIL BULMAN Is associate professor of Spanish at Syracuse University, where she teaches courses on Latin American theater and narrative. She has published articles in Gestos, Latin American Theatre Review, OLLANTAY Theater Magazine, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature, Symposium, and Hispanofila. Her book, Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theatre, was published in 2007 by Bucknell University Press.

260

CONTRIBUTORS 261 STUART A. Day 1s associate professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas and editor of the Latin American Theatre Review. Before joining the faculty at Kansas, he taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Staging Politics in Mexico: The Road to Neoliberalism, was published by Bucknell University Press in 2004. He has also published an anthology of Chilean and Mexican plays (Didlogos dramaturgicos: México-Chile, Tablado Iberoamericano, 2002) and coedited, with Jacqueline Bixler, the collection E/ teatro de Rascén Banda: Voces en el umbral (Escenologia, 2005). Day has published book chapters on Mexican theater, as well as articles, play introductions, and interviews in a variety of journals. WILLIAM GARCiaA 18 associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Union College (New York), where he has directed the Latin American & Carib-

bean Studies Program. He received his graduate degrees from Rutgers University. Garcia has published several articles on Latin American theater and Caribbean literature in edited collections and in journals such as Latin American Theatre Review. He is currently working on a manuscript project on queer identities and agency in Latin America. AMALIA GLADHART 1S associate professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon.

She is the author of The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages

and Literatures, 2001). Gladhart has published essays on contemporary Latin American theater and narrative in journals such as Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Hispanic Review, Confluencia, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Latin American Literary Review. Her translation of La Virgen Pipona (The Potbellied Virgin), by Ecuadorian novelist Alicia Yanez Cossio, was published by the University of Texas Press (2006). Performance artist/writer GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA lives in San Francisco, where he

is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978. His pioneering work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism, and cultural theory explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, “extreme culture,” and new technologies. He is a MacArthur fellow and an American Book Award recipient. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US

and Mexico, and contributing editor to The Drama Review. He is the author of several books, including Warrior for Gringostroika (1994), The New World Border (1996), Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (1997), Codex Spangliensis (2000), Dangerous Border Crossers (2000), and El Mexterminator (2002). In Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator (2005), GOmez-Pefia plays a brujo-poeta who explores the fear of immigration, the dark side of globalization, the digital divide, censorship, and interracial sexuality. GUILLERMO B. IRIZARRY 1S associate professor of Spanish and Latina/o studies at

the University of Connecticut-Storrs, where he also directs the Institute for Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. He has held faculty positions at Bucknell, Brown, Yale, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His publications on Caribbean, Latin American, and US Latina/o literature and culture have been included in Revista Iberoamericana, La Torre, Chasqui, Latin American Theatre Review, Latino Studies Journal, and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispdnicos. His book, José Luis Gonzdlez: el intelectual n6mada, was published in 2006 by Editorial Callejon.

262 CONTRIBUTORS His current research is devoted to the hegemonization of US Latina/o literature and culture. SHARON MAGNARELLI has published extensively on contemporary Spanish-Ameri-

can prose and theater and is the author of four books: The Lost Rib: Female Characters in the Spanish-American Novel; Reflections/Refractions: Reading Luisa Valenzuela; Understanding José Donoso; and Home Is Where the (He)art Is: The

Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theatre (Bucknell University Press, 2008). Professor of Spanish at Quinnipiac University,

she has served on the editorial boards of Letras Femeninas, Antipodas, Latin American Theatre Review, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Litera-

ture, and GETEA (Grupo de Estudios de Teatro Argentino e [beroamericano), among others. Her article “Tea for Two: Performing History and Desire in Sabina Berman’s Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda” received the 1996 Best Paper in Women’s Language and Literature prize awarded by the Northeast Modern Language Society Women’s Caucus. SARAH M. MISEMER 1S assistant professor at Texas A&M University, where she teaches Latin American and Spanish theater. Her book, Secular Saints: Performing Frida Kahlo, Carlos Gardel, Eva Peron, and Selena, is scheduled for publication by Tamesis. She is the author of several articles on contemporary River Plate, Mex-

ican, and Latino theater in journals such as Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispdnicos, and Hispanic Poetry Review. LAURIETZ SEDA is associate professor of Spanish at the University of ConnecticutStorrs, where she was granted the 2006 Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award by

the Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center. She is the editor of the theater anthology La nueva dramaturgia puertorriquena, coeditor of Teatro de frontera 11/12, and guest editor for a special issue of Latin American Theatre Review (Spring 2004) on Caribbean theater. Seda serves as a member of the editorial board for Latin American Theatre Review, Revista Teatro XXI, and Boletin del Archivo Nacional de Teatro y Cine del Ateneo Puertorriqueno. She has also published numerous essays on contemporary Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Argentine, and Chilean theater in edited collections and in journals such as Hispanic Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Conjunto, and Revista Teatro XXI. Seda has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts summer grants and

a Fulbright, and is the founder and director of the George Woodyard Theatre Award.

CAMILLA STEVENS 1S associate professor of Spanish at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on Caribbean literature and Latin American theater. Her book,

Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama (University Press of Florida, 2004) analyzes the discourses of family and nation in Cuban and Puerto Rican theater. She has also published articles on cultural identity and racial politics in Caribbean theater in Gestos, Hispania, Latin American Theatre Review, and Modern Drama. GEORGE WoopyarbD is professor emeritus of Spanish-American literature at the University of Kansas. Founder of the Latin American Theatre Review, he served as editor of the journal for forty years. He has prepared various anthologies, collections, and bibliographies on Latin American theater and has published over one hundred articles, chapters, and notes in journals such as Hispania, Comparative

CONTRIBUTORS 263 Drama, Conjunto, Teatro XXI, and others. International recognition of his work in the field includes the Premio Ollantay in Caracas, the Armando Discépolo from the University of Buenos Aires, a diploma of merit from the Asociacién Mexicana de Investigacion Teatral, a lifetime achievement award from the Teatro Avante of Miami, and a special honor from the Festival of Experimental Theatre in Cairo. He has been a Fulbright awardee and the recipient of various grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Index Adamson, Joseph, 115 Casa de las Américas, 26

Adaptation, 72, 78, 90n. 57 Case, Sue-Ellen, 171

Agustin, José, 33 Chasteen, John C., 118

albur, 164—66, 177 Chaudhuri, Una, 49, 54n. 34 Almodovar, Pedro, 176 chicano theater, 32 Alzate, Gaston, 20, 164 Cioppo, Atahualpa del, 25

Arlt, Roberto, 28 Conjunto, 26

Armand, Phillipe, 84 Cossa, Roberto, 71 n. 21

Artaud, Antonin, 24, 34 creacion colectiva, 31, 35—36n. 12,

Augé, Marc, 229, 235 36n. 18

Cuban Revolution, 26

Barba, Eugenio, 34

Barbero, Jesus Martin, 161 Day, Stuart A., 19, 90n. 53 Barletta, Leonidas, 27—28 Del Estal, Eduardo, 144, 145 Barrio, Paquita la del Barrio (Francisca Denning, Michael, 179

Viveros Barrandas), 160—78 Dentith, Simon, 113

Beck, Ulrich, 73 Derrida, Jacques, 115 Benjamin, Walter, 171 Diaz, Jorge, 31

Berman, Sabina, 33, 72—90; eXtras, Dodera, Maria, 63, 68, 70n. 15 72—90; Feliz nuevo siglo, Doktor Dubatti, Jorge, 143

Freud, 125—42 Duchesne Winter, Juan, 21, 227, 228, Bert, Bruno, 76 231, 235 Bhabba, Homi, 166 Bharucha, Rustom, 79 Eidelberg, Nora, 199 Bixler, Jacqueline, 18, 23n. 15, 88nn. Estorino, Abelardo: Parece blanca, 20 and 32, 133, 135-36, 197 91-107

Boling, Becky, 20 Evans, Ruth, 79

border studies, 22n. 8

Brecht, Bertolt, 24, 26, 29 Featherstone, Mike, 73—74 Brook, Peter, 18, 37, 45, 47, 126, Ferris, Lesley, 212, 214

128-30 festivals, 21—22n. 2; Latin American

Buenaventura, Enrique, 31 Theatre Today, 22n. 2, 228, 236n. 6; Bulman, Gail, 19, 20, 158n. 8 Manizales, 25 Bush, George W., 15, 234-35 Fitch, Melissa, 213, 220 Butler, Judith, 18, 204, 209n. 25, 224n. Flores, Yolanda, 197

10 Foster, David William, 28, 163, 213, 217

Cameron, Derrick, 72, 73 Fraenger, Wilheim, 144, 157n. 6 Carballido, Emilio, 29, 30, 33, 34 Fuente, Alejandro de la, 94 Carlson, Marvin, 18, 55, 57, 128 carpa, 164, 166, 177, 178n. 7, 193n.12 Galvan, Felipe, 33

Carrefio Carlon, José, 119 Garber, Marjorie, 20, 202, 205, 212 264

INDEX 265 Garcia, Santiago, 25, 30, 31 Lopez, George, 182, 185—86, 188,

Garcia, William, 21 193-—94n., 24 Garcia Canclini, Néstor, 13, 22n. 6, 161

Garner, Stanton, 55 Magnarelli, Sharon, 18 Gibson, Walter, 144, 145 malinchismo, 76, 86

Gladhart, Amalia, 19, 150, 152, 197 Manzor, Lillian, 97, 102

Glickman, Nora, 51n. 1 Marin, Carlos, 115-19, 121 globalization, 14, 15, 16, 23nn. 11 and Marin, Cheech, 182, 184, 187, 193-

15, 73-76, 86, 161 94n. 24

Goémez-Pefia, Guillermo, 13, 17, 21,73, Mato, Daniel, 14

227-37; Mexterminator vs. The McAuley, Gay, 38, 52n. 5, 54n. 34

Global Predator, 227—59 McLean, Albert, 180

Graham-Jones, Jean, 21n. 2, 197, 204, | Medina, Joey, 182, 185

206 Metz, Christian, 154, 155

Grotowski, Jerzy, 34 Miller, Arthur, 24, 33, 34 Guillaumin, Dagoberto, 30, 33 Misemer, Sarah, 18, 70n. 9, 71n. 18 Guzman, Ivan, 111 Moraga, Cherrie, 89n. 42, 90nn. 56 and 58 Hadad, Astrid, 164, 175 Morafia, Mabel, 177 Hall, Stuart, 18, 20, 179 Mufioz, José Esteban, 21, 211, 213, Harmony, Olga, 76, 82, 84, 114 215, 219 Hernandez, Maria Luisa, 30

Holland, Peter, 55 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 227

Huerta, Jorge, 32, 36n. 14, 214, 221, Nigro, Kirsten, 89n. 42, 90nn. 56 and

224n. 12, 225n. 15 58; 111, 120

Hutcheon, Linda, 18, 72, 73, 75-80, North American Free Trade Agreement

83-86, 113, 144, 145, 147, 152 (NAFTA), 15, 22, 73, 82, 83

Hutton, Patrick, 132 Neruda, Pablo, 25, 35n. 3

, , Ojito, Mirta, 102 a Mere te Qi ead, 92

Inzarry, Guillermo, 20 Orieinal Latin Kings of Comedy, ets, 73. 75. 77, 79-81, 84-86, 87n. Ortiz Pinchetti, Francisco, 113, 116

5, 89n. 48, 90n. 50 Parra, Marco Antonio de la, 33, 71n. 19 Patton, Cindy, 214, 220

Kanellos, Nicolas, 32, 36n. 14 Pavis, Patrice, 83

2 Paz, Octavio, 72

Kartun, Mauricio, 37, 42, 45, 47, 52n. Pavlovsky, Eduardo, 31, 71n. 25

Krauze, Enrique, 118 Pellettieri, Osvaldo, 24, 27, 146, 147,

Kutzinski, Vera, 93 155, 156

Peveroni, Gabriel, 55—71

Larson, Catherine, 152—53, 196—98, Pirandello, Luigi, 24, 34 206

Lefiero, Estela, 111 Ramos-Perea, Roberto, 34

Lefiero, Vicente, 109—24; Manual de ranchera, 160, 161, 162, 164, 172-75,

periodismo, 114-117, 119, 121; 177, 177-78 n. 2 Nadie sabe nada, 109-24; Vivir del Reyes, Guillermo, and Deporting the

teatro, 112—13, 122—23n. 20 Divas, 211—37

Lepage, Robert, 72 Riva Palacio, Raymundo, 118-19

Limon, John, 181 Rizk, Beatriz, 36n. 13

266 INDEX Rodriguez, Jesusa, 164 Teatro Ulises, 28—29

24 Toro, Alfonso de, 170

Rodriguez, Paul, 182, 186, 193—94n. Tlatelolco, 33

Rokem, Freddie, 127, 128 Torre, Miguel A. de la, 102

Rovner, Eduardo, 34 Torres Molina, Susana, and ... Yaotra cosa mariposa, 196—210

Said, Edward, 78, 91, 92, 102-3 “trans,” 16, 38, 78-79 Sanchez, Florencio, 27, 28, 29 “tradaptation,” 72, 75, 87n. 4 Sanchez-Eppler, Benigno, 214, 220 “trans/act,” 17, 228

Sano, Seki, 29-31 transculturation, 89n. 35, 92 Sarrain, Alberto, 92, 97, 100, 101 transnationalism, 23n. 11

Schechner, Robert, 81 Triana, José, 26, 33 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 234, 237n. 25

Scolnicov, Hanna, 55, 60, 68 Ubersfeld. A 38 54n. 35. 55. 58 Seda, Laurietz, 23n. 15, 75, 86n. 10, ‘0-61 63 "67 68. Be 292 299 90%

Shakespeare 76, 199 rpton, Carole, 7 ’ »William, I’ Usigli, Rodolfo, 29, 30,

209 n. 20 , ; ,Simon, Valdés, Luis, 32 Sherry, 79, 80 Vasconcelos, Tito, 164

35n." 7 Sifuentes-Jauregui, Ben, 200-201, sei ixpewe® Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 181, vaudeville. 180

SOlan, oa do. 71n. 21 Venuti, Lawrence, 75, 86 Pemmando, / iT. , Villaverde, Cirilo, and Cecilia Valdés, Spregelburd, Rafael, and La estupidez, 91-93. 95. 97-102. 105—6n. 19

siomd-un comedy 179-94 Villegas, Juan, 146 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 24 Virno, Paolo, 179, 190, 191

Stevens, 19, 106n. ,, , ” ce?Camilla, Weiner, Tim,22118,

119

Suarez, Patricia: Las polacas, 37-54 Woodyard, George, 18

Tanaka, Michikos, 31 . Tavira, Luis de, 110, 111, 115, 122n.8 | Yuyachkani, 36n. 12 Taylor, Diana, 71n. 24

Teatro Abierto, 33 zapatismo, 80, 83

Teatro del Pueblo, 27 Zarrilli, Phillip, 20, 198-200, 205 Teatro Repertorio, 101 Zizek, Slavoj, 190