Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Leper in Blue. Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater

2001; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 84; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3657852

2153-6414

Jacqueline Eyring Bixler, Amalia Gladhart,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

The Leper in Blue: Coercive and the Contemporary Latin American Theater. By Amalia Gladhart. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 2000. 245 pages.Once the least studied branch of Latin American literature, theater has gradually been sparking increased interest since the mid 1970s. In fact, in recent years we have witnessed a notable surge in book-length contributions to the field, not the least of which is Gladhart's The Leper in Blue, which analyzes nineteen Spanish American plays written between 1967 and 1990. In her book, the critic employs the very personal image of the leper in blue to evoke the instability of performance, as well as the repeated and inevitable slippage between stage and life. As Gladhart states in her introduction, all the plays studied in this book reveal a certain ambivalence toward theater and foreground performance within the dramatic text in order to critique theater itself (14). One of the critical hypotheses of the book is that performance and, by implication, theater are inherently neither liberating nor constraining, but rather provisional, contingent, double-edged, and even ambiguous insofar as performance is simultaneously normative and transgressive, a site of slippage. In the words of the author, Performance is not so much the sign of a universal resistance to a dominant authority as a paradoxical figure which demands compliance even as it draws out a suggestion of rebellion (28).Chapter I examines four historical plays (Vicente Lenero's Martirio de Morelos, Sabina Berman's Aguila o sol, Jose Antonio Rial's Bolivar, and Miguel Sabido's Falsa cronica de Juana la Loca) to demonstrate how the plays destabilize historical authority, in both official and alternative versions. Each of the plays stages historical moments of violence and oppression, which in turn signal the conceptual violence of the official histories they contest (32). Chapter II focuses on games, their underlying violence, and coercive character, in Mariela Romero's El juego, Maruxa Vilalta's Pequena historia de horror (y de amor desenfrenado), and Esteban Navajas's La agonia del difunto. Gladhart finds games an ideal ground on which to question the text/performance relation since they stage the effort to overcome or confront a previous text or rules. As she observes, Like performance, game-playing is inherently polysemous, conventional in its reproduction of rule structures, subversive in its refiguration of reality (97). …