Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Tragedy and Trauma: Antígona oriental de Marianella Morena

2013; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scr.2013.0024

1549-3377

Sarah M. Misemer,

Schopenhauer and Stefan Zweig

Tragedy and Trauma:Antígona oriental de Marianella Morena Sarah M. Misemer (bio) Marianella Morena's Antígona Oriental, a production supported by the Goethe Institute in Montevideo, Uruguay, debuted with eight functions in January-February 2012. This play, developed from Sophocles' original Antigone, incorporates testimony from ex-prisoners, daughters of the persecuted, and exiles of the Uruguayan military dictatorship that lasted from 1973-1985.1 Morena's play was directed by Volker Lösch, the controversial German director known for his highly politicized and modern updates of classic plays. Lösch works primarily in Berlin but was raised in Uruguay, and during a recent trip to Montevideo in 2009 a spark ignited for what would become Antígona oriental and his collaboration with Morena. After visiting the Museo de Memoria [Memory Museum]2 in Montevideo, where he met Ana Demarco (an ex-political prisoner of the dictatorship), Lösch began to formulate an idea for a play to showcase ex-prisoners like Demarco and their stories. He soon sent a proposal for the idea, and thereafter Lösch and Morena began a creative partnership that later led to a meeting with representatives from the Teatro Solís and an agreement to begin work on the play.3 The play features Lösch's unique imprint of experimental staging that combines non-actors with professional actors, something he is known for in his previous German productions like Marat/Sade (2008), which featured unemployed people, Berlin Alexanderplatz (2009), which had a chorus of ex-prisoners stationed throughout the public, and Lulu (2011), which employed sex workers.4 The Teatro Solís, where the play debuted, is the oldest and most prominent theater in Uruguay. It is located in the Plaza Independencia in the Ciudad Vieja part of the city—the first section of Montevideo that was built when the city was founded. The decision by Morena and Lösch, and the subsequent support by the Teatro Solís, to stage the play in this venue speak to its importance as a powerful cultural artifact, as an effort aimed at the recuperation of memory, and an explanation of the legacy of the military dictatorship. By staging a modern version of a classic Greek tragedy in a classic theater with a modern audience, Morena and Lösch interrogate the effects of trauma via its historical, [End Page 125] political, and personal referents and demonstrate its persistence in the contemporary setting of Uruguayan culture. In Antígona oriental the use of intersecting narratives, metatheatrical and historical references, and the mix of professional and non-professional actors provides a layered framework for Morena and Lösch to examine the complex effects of Uruguayan politics of impunity and memory on discourses of history and human rights abuses. The unorthodox conflation of non-actor/actor on a traditional stage is mirrored in the structure of the play's dramatic action along with its temporal contexts. The play vacillates between past and present contextual cues; for instance, survivor testimony from the non-actors is interspersed with intertexts from the original Greek tragedy performed by professional actors, and current political debates over Uruguayan Constitutional law are contrasted with Creonte's law from the Greek tragedy. Thus, linear chronological time is disrupted by the simultaneity of past and present in Morena's script. This format suggests, as many of the post-modernists of the last decade have insisted, that History (official) is not synchronous with history (personal). It also intimates that memory studies, which have been evolving since the post-World War II era, are vitally important as we seek to understand the effects of trauma in daily life and in cultural and artistic productions. The meaning of human experience is complex, and as Pierre Nora's studies on memory imply, it cannot be situated in one place or viewed from one angle, but rather must be seen in the plural.5 In fact, a more appropriate view of memory, especially in the case of Antígona oriental, might be understood through Susan Sulieman's definition of "crises of memory." Sulieman's study of memory centers on what she calls "affairs of memory." These affairs of memory encompass public understanding...