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Sabina Berman Redux: Adaptation and the Anxiety of (Self)Influence

2015; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rmc.2015.0020

2165-7599

Jacqueline Eyring Bixler,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Sabina Berman Redux: Adaptation and the Anxiety of (Self)Influence Jacqueline E. Bixler Adaptation is a bit like redecorating. Alfred Uhry Since 2012 and the premiere of El narco negocia con Dios, there has been considerable fanfare over Sabina Berman’s return to the theatre after a decade of devoting her creative energies to film, television, narrative, and cultural politics. Yet, unknown to all but her most devout followers, this return to the theatre has primarily entailed the rewriting of an obscure little play that she wrote in 1994: El gordo, la pájara y el narco. In fact, during the past twenty years, Berman has adapted and staged this one-act piece three times and with three different titles: Krisis (1997), El narco negocia con Dios (2012), and Tic Tac Boom! (2013). Nonetheless, this particular instance of Berman redux is not due to monetary motives or creative inertia, but rather constitutes a response to both the changes and the lack of changes that have taken place on Mexico’s political and social stage during the past two decades. Theories proposed by Linda Hutcheon, Marvin Carlson, Julie Sanders, Richard Dawkins, and others elucidate the meaning of adaptation itself in Berman’s continuous effort to reflect a changing real-world scenario to an audience who has likewise had to adapt in order to survive. Among the most commonly remarked features of Berman’s theatre are her perfectionism and, more specifically, her penchant for revision.1 As Mexican theatre critic Olga Harmony notes, “Ese rigor, que pocos de nuestros dramaturgos poseen, la lleva a escribir una y otra vez sus textos, cambiando no solamente el nombre de sus obras . . . sino la esencia misma de ellas, según va [End Page 227] madurando y según corren los tiempos y las costumbres” (“Sutilezas” 112). This habit dates back to 1979 and her first full-length play, Machinegun, a title that she promptly changed to Yankee after realizing that the former sounded too much like “más chingón.” Another play, Herejía (1983), is also known as Anatema, Los Carbajales, Los marranos, and En el nombre de Dios.2 Berman’s seemingly obsessive need to revise her plays extends, however, well beyond changes in title to the detailed reworking of a prior text, which Linda Hutcheon identifies as “adaptation,” or “repetition with variation” (4).3 The act of rewriting is nothing new. In his seminal study on literary influence, Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom posits that all writing is influenced by previous writing. He describes this influence, however, in positive terms such as “creative revisionism” and the “recollecting forwards, of breaking forth into a freshening” (83). Likewise, Edward Said, in his treatise on originality, states that “the writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting” (135). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodern expression is “[t]he conscious and calculated recycling of material, from one’s own previous life and work as well as those of others, . . . not only in literary texts but in theatrical performance” (14). Indeed, adaptation is as inherently political as the act of writing itself. As Julie Sanders states, “a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer’s, director’s, or performer’s decision to re-interpret a source text” (2). In the case of Sabina Berman, this politico-ethical commitment is to the change required if Mexico is to survive the current levels of violence, corruption, and moral decay. The reading or viewing of an adaptation is significantly different from that of an isolated play. To fully appreciate a theatrical adaptation, one must consider the dialogic relations that exist among the various re-writings as well as the temporal, political, and cultural context in which they have been written and performed. As Hutcheon explains, the knowing audience, familiar with the source play, experiences “an interpretive doubling, a conceptual flipping back and forth between the work we know and the work we are experiencing” (139). There is, additionally, an element of pleasure in the experience of difference: “On an experiential level, the conservative comfort [End Page 228] of familiarity is countered by the unpredictable pleasure in difference – for both creator and audience” (Hutcheon 173). Consequently, rather...