Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Three's Company in Oscar Liera's Las Ubárry

2010; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ltr.2010.0030

2161-0576

Ronald D. Burgess,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

SPRING 2010 69 Three's Company in Oscar Liera's Las Ubárry Ronald D. Burgess The Ubárrys are about to disappear, and the last two remaining members , a mother and daughter obsessed with continuing the family name, spend their days (92 of them up to this point) frantically trying to attract a man for the 62-year-old mother in the hope of producing a third family member, a son who will save the name from extinction. Oscar Liera lays out their obsession and along the way tosses in enough hooks to drag the reader/spectator — but especially the reader — into obsessing along with the mother and daughter in a desperate search for that elusive third element. In the midst of the mid-twentieth century doldrums of Mexico's theater scene, along came a new generation — the so-called Nueva Dramaturgia — to pull it up by its bootstraps. Some of those new dramatists have become familiar names, both in Mexico and in the United States, like Sabina Berman and Victor Hugo Rascón Banda; some resonated primarily in Mexico — Jesús González Dávila, Oscar Villegas, Willebaldo López, and Gerardo Velasquéz, for example; some made an impact, then disappeared much too soon, such as Tomás Espinoza and Oscar Liera. Liera shone brightly, but briefly (primarily in the late 1970s and early 1980s), before disappearing from the Mexico City theater scene, returning to Culiacán, and passing away with no fanfare and precious little information about his demise.1 He survived long enough, however, to produce more than enough plays to fill one disinherited and one "official" anthology2 — La piña y la manzana and Pez en el agua: Oscar Liera, respectively — and, much to his delight, to create a huge scandal with one play: Cúcara y Macara. Liera reveled in including his audience in the experience of his plays, and he reached his high point with the protests and finally the physical attack on the actors and the director during a 1981 performance of Cúcara y Macara.3 Las Ubárry, which premiered in 1978, 70 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW also incorporates the receiver, but here it is the reader (who can examine and re-examine the text) more than the theater audience. The play's two characters — María Dominga Ubárry and her daughter — are devoting yet another day, after 92 unsuccessful attempts, to gussying up the mother before heading out to walk circles in the plaza, where some — any — young man is supposed to find her attractive, go to bed with her, and produce the son who will ensure the continuation of the Ubárry name. The task falls to the 62-year-old mother because the daughter lost the ability to have children due to an operation necessary to save her life. Now she dedicates herself to making up and dressing her mother, and to insisting, cajoling, and forcing her to participate in this frantic, obsessive, and clearly hopeless project that nevertheless must succeed if the Ubárry name is not to disappear. The outreach to the reader begins with the mocking tone of the opening stage directions: "La recámara no podía ser más elegante ni decorada con mejor gusto, diría Reina. Cada uno de los elementos decorativos lleva inmerso en sí lo que representa, esto en otras palabras dicho sería: 'señores', todas estas piezas son auténticas'" [sic]. The insistence on authenticity (mentioned three times in the two paragraphs of stage directions) contrasts with the actions of the two characters, since the daughter is busily hiding her mother behind make up and, "Como si la muchacha también tratara de cambiar algo en el interior de la madre, habla" (50). The changes she hopes for include, first, the mental set of the mother, who realizes that she is too old to attract the required young man and, at 62, probably physically unable to bear a child, even if she got lucky, and second, the physical interior which must produce the child that will carry on the Ubárry name into the future. The important temporal aspect picks up with the characters...