You Mean, There is Theatre in Latin America

You mean, there is theatre in Latin America?” Adam Versényi This was the typical question I would receive a little over twenty years ago when I began to talk about my burgeoning interest in Latin American theatre. The region and the theatre were not linked in the minds of either US theatre professionals or the general public. And, if the truth be told, at the time I was not much further ahead of my perplexed questioners. While I was in my first year of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism program at the Yale School of Drama, had been involved in theatre from an early age, had traveled and studied in Latin America, and was well aware of the high quality of Latin American fiction and poetry; it had simply never occurred to me to investigate the region's theatre. My interest was piqued that year when Alberto Minero, then head of the arts section at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York City, organized a minifestival of readings of contemporary Latin American plays. He sent two of those plays, by the Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro, to the Yale Rep for consideration. The scripts were in Spanish and Gitta Honnegger, then resident dramaturg at the Yale Rep, passed them on to me for review knowing that I had the Spanish to do so. As I read those two plays, La malasangre (Bitter/bad blood) and Del sol naciente (From the rising sun), my initial mild interest became a passionate response to the richness of the work. That passion soon turned into an obsessive desire to discover as much as I could about theatre in Latin America and to disseminate that [End Page 445] knowledge to an English-speaking audience. As an aspiring dramaturg myself at the time, I saw my audience as both academics and theatre professionals and began to craft a two-pronged approach of translating plays for US production, directing those and other translations myself, writing performance criticism of Latin American productions, and pursuing scholarly publications designed to introduce Latin American theatre to as wide an audience as possible, enabling others to mine the multifaceted mother lode of Latin American theatre history, text and performance, and social and political engagement. When I began to work on Latin American theatre, there was virtually no one else working on the region from the perspective of theatre studies. Both scholarly research and translation of theatre texts had been undertaken almost exclusively by academics from literature and language departments. While much good work was done, the tendency was to approach dramatic literature primarily as literary text, and translations were undertaken for meaning rather than for produceability. There was one specialized journal in the field, Latin American Theatre Review, and, with the exception of an occasional article or issue focusing on the region, the major theatre studies journals largely ignored the field. Whatever courses existed in Latin American theatre were conducted in Spanish or Portuguese in language and literature departments. Today, a great deal has changed. A small, but steadily growing, number of Latin American theatre scholars and theatre practitioners with an interest in the region in US university theatre and performance studies departments approach their work informed by profound knowledge of the theatrical process and the demands of performance. Perhaps even more importantly, the larger number of Latin American theatre scholars from language and literature departments has increasingly produced work imbued by an understanding of performance. Translations of Latin American plays and performance pieces are no longer primarily wooden and unplayable. The works of Griselda Gambaro, Osvaldo Dragún, Augusto Boal, Emilio Carballido, Ricardo Monti, Sabina Berman, Isidora Aguirre, Isaac Chocrón, Mariela Romero, Beatriz Seibel, Rodolfo Santana, Enrique Buenaventura, Astrid Hadad, Santiago García, and Denise Stoklos—to name just a few—have either been produced or published in English translation. Latin American Theatre Review has been joined by Gestos: Teoría y Práctica del Teatro Hispánico and several other journals with a focus on the region, and the major theatre studies and performance studies journals regularly feature articles or publish special issues covering the field. Courses on Latin American theatre are now regularly offered in theatre

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