Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba by Bretton White

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba by Bretton White Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes White, Bretton. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2020. 258 pp. Queerness is a complex and treacherous topic in Cuba. In Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba, Bretton White focuses on how theater in the Caribbean socialist nation is marked by economic precarity and challenging conditions for audiences and performers. White compellingly analyzes dramatic works in the context of "the Cuban state's project of masculine heteronormativity" (3), focusing on five post-1959 examples that highlight the challenges and tensions related to queerness, cognizant that "queer Cubans have long been targets of state control" (3). As the author states, "The performances studied here concentrate on an aesthetics of fluidity, and thus upset traditional understandings of performer and [End Page 157] spectator, as well as what constitutes the ideal Cuban citizenry" (2), further asking: "How is Cuban theater agile in its critiques considering the state's limitations on expression? How do queer performances allow for new understandings about the effects of the state's failing socialist utopian contract with its citizens? And, can Cuban bodies that come together in queer ways reimagine Cuban citizenship?" (2). In the introduction, White contextualizes post-Soviet life in Cuba, drawing on the work of Jill Lane, Rine Leal, Camilla Stevens, and Norge Espinosa to illuminate Cuban theatre history. In each chapter, White pairs Cuban plays and productions with U.S.-centered queer theorists. Chapter 1 ("Instigating Intimacies: Las relaciones de Clara and Uncomfortable Closeness") focuses on the director Carlos Díaz's creative 2002 staging of a 1999 play by the German playwright Dea Loher, specifically "the blurring of distinctions between audience and actor" (23). White's reading of Díaz's production is informed by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips's Intimacies. In chapter 2 ("Sharing Shame: Reimagining Entrepreneurship in Baños públicos, S.A."), White focuses on a play by Esther Suárez Durán that received the UNEAC Playwrighting award in Havana in 1998. Dialoguing with Michael Warner, White "shows how a more liquid connection between shame and dignity might allow for the introduction of queerness into dialogues about national identity" (23). Chapter 3 ("Frustrating Futurity: Beauty and Pain in Pájaros de la playa") focuses on a 2004 theatrical adaptation by El Ciervo Encantado of Severo Sarduy's homonymous novel, which focuses on AIDS. White reads the negotiation between suffering and beauty in relation to Lee Edelman's sinthomosexuality theory, which "postulates that reproductive futurity is not representative of possibility, but of restrictive linearity" (24). Chapter 4 ("Vexing Visibilities: Space and Queerness in Chamaco") analyzes a 2005 play by Abel González Melo that was directed by Carlos Celdrán in dialogue with works by José Esteban Muñoz and John Paul Ricco to see "how the play references the characters' cruising of the minor architectural spaces of Central Havana by staging visual nothingness" (24). Finally, in Chapter 5 ("Fronting Failure: Testing Continuity in Perros que jamás ladraron"), White analyzes a 2013 play by Rogelio Orizondo to show how "disabled, queer, black, and female bodies redefine words, images, and legacies of the revolution while courting audience participation" (25), engaging Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure. White's Staging Discomfort is an elegantly argued, intellectually-stimulating, and necessary read for any scholar interested in the Cuban scene and in theorizations of affect and performance. Its main limitation is its failure to engage the queer of color critique in a more substantive way. [End Page 158] Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes University of Michigan Copyright © 2020 The Center of Latin American Studies