Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Greek Tragedy or Theatre of the Absurd? Montes Huidobro's Oscuro total

2004; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2161-0576

Phyllis Zatlin,

Samuel Beckett and Modernism

In his groundbreaking study on the Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggests a connection between Greek tragedy and the twentieth-century movement. The connection is made explicit in Matias Montes Huidobro's Oscuro total. The play has as its pre-text a real episode: the 1989 killing, in California, of Jose and Mary Louise (Kitty) Menendez by their sons Lyle and Erik. Montes Huidobro takes the horrifying, real tale of a dysfunctional family in the United States and re-creates it as a powerful meld of classic Greek tragedy and contemporary absurdist theatre of cruelty. (PZ)