Chilean Theatre from 1957 to 1987

Abstract

In commenting on the theatrical performances that he saw in Chile during a visit he paid us more than thirty years ago, the American professor Willis Knapp Jones wrote in 1957: Of all the countries I visited on my winter theatre circuit, I could put Chile at the top for the abundance and excellence of plays, and when it comes to a national theatre, in the sense of playwrights and themes that are products of the country, there is no other South American nation even near to it.' Jones's statement is a fitting preface to the reflections that follow, all the more so if one considers that, no matter how interesting what he was able to see in 1957 may have been, the decade of the 1950s was only the beginning of what would become the second stage in the development of the history of modern Chilean theatre. This stage did not in fact reach its peak until some ten years later, when actors such as Carmen Bunster, Maria Canepa, B6lgica Castro, Mares Gonzalez, Maria Maluenda, Roberto Parada, or Agustin Sire; directors such as Pedro de la Barra, Eugenio Dittborn, Eugenio Guzmin, Jorge Lillo, or Pedro Orthus; set designers such as Rail Aliaga, Hector del Campo, Oscar Navarro, or Guillermo Nlifiez; musicians such as Gustavo Becerra, Celso Garrido, or Sergio Ortega; an outstanding costumer designer, Amaya Clunes; and at least two brilliant lighting designers, Victor Segura and Bernardo Trumper, joined hands with a team of exceptional playwrights whose works are now considered to be true classics of the dramatic literature of Latin America. I am referring to the plays written during this period by Isidora Aguirre, Fernando Debesa, Luis Alberto Heiremans, Maria Asunci6n Requena, Alejandro Sieveking, Sergio Vodanovic, and Egon Wolff. Thus, for Chilean theatre the 1960s were, as the great poet Cesar Vallejo would have put it, a time of intensity and height this did not prevent them from also being a time of uneasiness. The road mapped out by the Teatro Experimental de la Universidad de Chile (TEUCH), in 1941, and the Teatro de Ensayo de la Universidad