A Triple Insurgence: Isaac Chocr�n's La revoluci�n

Abstract

A Triple Insurgence: Isaac Chocrón's La revolución Kirsten F. Nigro University of Kansas Of all the Latin American nations Venezuela is perhaps the one which today is enjoying the greatest flurry of theatrical activity. Its numerous commercial and experimental theaters are vigorous, as well as successful, economic and artistic ventures. In the past decade this oil-rich country has become an energetic patron of the dramatic arts, sponsoring international theater festivals and establishing centers for research into and the dissemination of materials concerning Latin American drama. Venezuela also has produced a corps of first-rate actors and directors (most notably, José Ignacio Cabrujas) and playwrights, among whom Isaac Chocrón is surely one of the most prominent and respected. His play production has been a varied one, beginning with early realistic works, a style Chocrón has not totally abandoned but which has been complemented by hts-more strikingly experimental plays written during the 1970s.1 Yet despite their particular conventions, these plays share a thematic or substantive concern that make them distinctively Chocrón's; for with very few exceptions they are scathing condemnations of a world in which almost every human activity has been reduced to a monetary transaction. For example, in O.K. (1969) the tensions of a ménage-à-trois are released when one of its members is apparently bought off; in El quinto infierno (1961) the materialism of the United States mirrors that of Venezuela, whose populace is "controlado [sic] por un frenético afán de poseer, amasar y, sobre todo, de lucir."2 It is this same greed for the things a dollar can buy that makes an entire nation quite literally sell itself to the highest bidder in Asia y el Lejano Oriente (1966). Chocrón's most powerful statement about the capitalist ethic is contained in La revolución (1971), which is also the most electrify1 .Among Chocrón's most important plays are (in chronological order): El quinto infierno (1961), Animales feroces (1963), Asta y el Lejano Oriente (1966), published together in Teatro (Caracas: Monte Avila), 1974; Trie Trac (1967), in Teatro de Ia vanguardia: Contemporary Spanish American Theatre, ed. Myrna Casas (Lexington , Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company), 1975; O. K. (Caracas: MonteAvila), 1969; La máxima felicidad (Caracas: Monte Avila), 1974; El acompañante (Caracas: Monte Avila), 1978. 2.Teatro, p. 34. 48ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ing play he has written thus farin his career. Set in a sleazy cabaret, La revolución is a two-man show, played by the transvestite Gabriel, otherwise known as Miss Susy, and by Eloy the M.C., a finicky, puny-willed homosexual. Their public is never actually treated to the floor show promised them by Eloy; instead, the repartee between the two men, their reminiscences, quarrels, and reconciliations comprise the essential action of the play's two acts. Yet this prelude to the performance-as-advertised is in itself an explosive theatrical event, a kind of triple insurgence against the sexual, artistic and political codes of a society ruled by the mighty money market. Chocrón's principal antagonists to this less-than-holy trinity are his two sexual derelicts, who are offered as proof that "Uno nunca es nada. . . .Lo que nos rodea es Io que nos hace ser cosas."3 What surrounds them, as Gabriel is so quick to perceive, is "un mundo lleno de partes y de porcentajes" (p. 24), a stock market of sorts in which human worth is measured in dollars and cents. Thus while Gabriel and Eloy may be social outcasts, they are both the product and mirror of the very society that has banished them to its fringes. Theirs is not a sub- or a counterculture, but a culture in miniature and not a very pretty one at that. Gabriel knows this to be true and quite openly admits that almost everything in his life has been a buying and selling proposition. Sex, in his vocabulary, is a business deal, "un asunto de cuerpos y no de personas" (p. 23), wherein he usually trades some prize personal possession in exchange for the physical attention of young, virile men. Despite the years of...