The Contemporary Mexican Theater

When the history of the contemporary Latin American theater is written, it will take as its point of departure the experimental theater.* Just as modem poetry must be studied in terms of literary reviews-the generation of Contempordneos, the grupo de Martin Fierro-so the theater must be studied in these ephemeral experiments which, for all their usual commercial failure and brief existence, are the springboard for the professional theater. This is particularly true in the case of Mexico. If contemporary Mexican poetry can be said to begin with the end of modernismo, and the novel a few years later with the Novel of the Revolution, the theater did not come of age until 1928, the year of the experimental Teatro Ulises. Before 1928, the Mexican theater was in a deplorable state. It was, says Agustin Lazo, ... la rutina delet6rea de una falsa tradici6n.' The acting was a conscious imitation of the Spanish school of ... imitaci6n e improvisaci6n que llamaremos romAnticas, puesto que es preciso llamarlas de alguin modo.2 This degenerate imitation extended to the ludicrous extreme of imitating the ceceo, despite the fact that the actors themselves were Mexicans. The repertoire was composed of decrepit melodrama and operetta, with the slapstick astrakdn a particular favorite. The theaters themselves were in an equally bad state, and the producers did nothing to alleviate matters. The typical producer, says the Spanish playwright Angel Lazaro, was a speculator ... con comedias, como pudiera dedicarse a vender batista y percales. Para 61, lo de menos

Art · Visual arts · Historical and Modern Theater Studies