Home is Where the (He)art is: The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater (review)

Abstract

216 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW Throughout Memory, Allegory, and Testimony, Puga passionately defends a resistant, counter-hegemonic theatre that makes productive use of both allegory and testimony, and that has resulted in politically and aesthetically “transformative” works. The project is slightly marred by a somewhat alarming number of typographical and diacritical errors, and by what I found to be the introduction’s unnecessarily essentialist rejection of a politicized postmodernism, a concept crucial to understanding the work created by the generations of Southern Cone theatre practitioners who followed the playwrights Puga discusses in such productive detail. Such concerns aside, Memory, Allegory, and Testimony is a most welcome contribution to Southern Cone theatre studies and to Routledge’s growing series on Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. Jean Graham-Jones The CUNY Graduate Center Magnarelli, Sharon. Home is Where the (He)art is: The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008: 293 pp. Sharon Magnarelli’s study treats a wide range of plays from Mexico and Argentina, by well known playwrights such as Griselda Gambaro, Sabina Berman, Roberto Cossa, Hugo Argüelles, and Marcela del Río. With the exception of Luisa Josefina Hernánez’s Los huéspedes reales (1956), the plays treated date from the 1980s and 1990s. Magnarelli asks what anxieties (on the part of the audience) are assuaged or aggravated, and what images of family and home — often unexamined or unacknowledged — are reinforced or challenged in these plays. Equally important are the possible implications of the theatrical representation of family for what she terms “ the larger sociopolitical body” (12). The plays studied encompass a variety of styles; some are highly comical while others are violent, and the realities presented on stage vary in their degree of stylization. “Family” covers a multitude of relationships; the plays in this study tend to address the mother-daughter relationship, or to recast in some way the mother-child (most often adult child) bond. The mythology surrounding the mother-child dyad is wide ranging, and Magnarelli draws on those myths (such as that of Medea) explicitly evoked within the plays as well as on the ways in which interpretive frameworks, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, that draw on classical mythology (and theater) can constitute one more mythologizing strand. In her use of the term family romance, Magnarelli stresses, “the embedding of narrative within the experience of family and the quest to invent, imagine better parents/origins” (15). Magnarelli demonstrates the many ways in which the families in these plays are both home and art (or artifice) for character and spectator alike. The theater shows us how some families are, or might FALL 2009 217 be, and at the same time teaches us how to constitute and interpret our own families, or how to rebel against particular understandings of family or home. Magnarelli further underscores the spatial continuity whereby the intimacy of the domestic space is apparently, though often deceptively, mimicked by the theatrical space. Magnarelli rightly stresses the importance of memory to the family as imagined community; the role of memory can be seen in those plays that draw on historical events, such as Griselda Gambaro’s La malasangre, with its highly stylized evocation of the Rosas dictatorship inArgentina, and also in those plays centered on contemporary domestic relationships. Manuel’s negotiations with his dead mother in Eduardo Rovner’s Volvió una noche rehearse his recollections of the way things “always” were as much as they attempt to move forward. But memory is also central to the spectator’s experience in the theater. As Magnarelli observes, “any reaction to an art form, but perhaps particularly to theater because of its ephemeral character, is already necessarily a memory as we re-member ... what we saw or what we think we saw” (21-22). Highlighting aspects of the plays that have not been treated elsewhere, Magnarelli’s readings are consistently perceptive. Several of these plays (such as Berman’s Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda) have already been widely studied, but the emphasis on the family romance within them is new and illuminating. In her discussion of Los huéspedes reales, for example, Magnarelli convincingly challenges previous interpretations of...