El teatro cubano durante la Republica: Cuba detras del telon (review)

Abstract

Matias Montes Huidobro. El teatro cubano durante la Republica: Cuba detras del telon. Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2004.738 pp.Cuban writer, playwright, director, and critic Matias Montes Huidobro has been known among students of Latin American theater for his earlier extensive and fundamental studies in Cuban and Puerto Rican theater (Persona, vida y mascara en el teatro cubano, 1973; Persona, vida y mascara en el teatro puertorriqueno, 1986). In the work under review, he focuses in detail on the Cuban theater in the republican era (1902-1958).El teatro cubano is an impressive undertaking, nurtured by more than fifty years of intense and intimate involvement with Cuban theater and culture. Montes Huidobro was a prize-winning playwright and director in the 1950s and up to his exile in the late 1961. He then was student of theater, a playwright, and a director during his long exile. All the rich experience of a lifetime comes to fruition in this monumental work.In the still strictly partitioned world of Cuban studies, writing from exile imposes certain limitations (for example, inaccessibility of materials of potential value) and offers both ideological freedoms and pitfalls. Montes Huidobro's research in the period covered is exhaustive; it is hard to imagine that some of the indicated gaps (12) would substantially change the landscape as reconstructed by him (besides, some of the unpublished manuscripts appear to be lost for good). On the other hand, writing unapologetically from exile, as he is, he carves for himself a sensible space of dissidence, defying both the rituals of the now decrepit Marxist orthodoxy imposed on the island and the dulcified myths about the Republic fostered by some in exile. Montes Huidobro's principled yet dispassionate study points toward the unavoidable future space of encounter and dialog among the membra disjecta of the Cuban cultural universe.The book is organized in two parts: the first covers the foundational period of modern theater in the new Republic, 1902-1939, and the second studies the 1940s and 1950s. Montes Huidobro focuses on the modern serious theater coming from the late nineteenth century (Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov), in the first period, and from the Avant-Garde (Pirandello and later phenomena), in the second. Surviving forms of popular theater (teatro bufo) or revue theater (the famous Teatro Alhambra, 1900-1935, revived in Barnet's Cancion de Rachel, 1969, or the X-rated Teatro Shanghai, celebrated by Sarduy, in De donde son los contantes, 1967), are mentioned in passing.The theater in the first period reflects critically the vicissitudes of the nation-building phase of the Republic, centering on the social problems as mirrored within the family circle. …