Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater (review)

Abstract

168 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW In this collection, the first two plays, Strange Toy and That’s All That, contain the most concrete plots. The first is a metatheatrical work in which three characters repeat, invent and ultimately dismantle their roles as dowager sisters and a traveling salesman to explore their anxieties about control, violence, and appearances. The second play follows a group of male friends as they move through four periods in life, showing their closeness, hostility, nostalgia and hypocrisy. The following plays, Mystic Union, Siren’s Song and Paradises Lost, can all be grouped under the rubric of “experimental” for their lack of narrative storyline and stage directions, and for their emphasis on the importance of message over a linear development of action. Mystic Union is a tri-part look at the emotional and psychological impact of HIV/ AIDS on a woman, her male lover and the prostitute from whom he contracted the disease. Siren’s Song is a four-part monologue, in which a character moves through the stages of desire, loneliness, meaning and passion, in order to find and define the divide between soul and body. In Paradises Lost, a man and woman contemplate the complex meaning of their relationship, the definition of love and their sense of fulfillment as they hover on the brink of a break up. The final two plays, Zero and She, combine the sensibilities and styles of Torres Molina’s previous works, uniting the traditional with the experimental. In Zero, Torres Molina again plays with the notion of performance, though here it is experimented with in the form of gender roles and sexual desire as a woman hires a gay male prostitute. Like the first play Strange Toy, Zero is also metatheatrical as it calls attention to role-playing and the breakdown of clear boundaries between “reality” and illusion. Finally, She, which is comprised of a series of eleven brief tableaux between two male characters, relates the story of two men in love with one woman and the power struggle that ensues to find out the truth about her love, her affairs, and each other, despite the lies they have all been telling. In sum, André’s collection of Torres Molina’s works in translation reminds us of the wealth of talent that still remains unknown outside of LatinAmerica. Despite some of its minor flaws, this anthology will contribute greatly to the reckoning of this debt. Sarah M. Misemer Texas A&M University Bulman, Gail A. Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2007: 276 p. Whether the focus has been on theatre or narrative, questions of nation have been prominent in literary criticism in recent years. Staging Words, Performing Worlds takes a new approach to the topic by examining intertextuality in Spanish SPRING 2008 169 American drama to show “how the incorporation of a precursor text into a play-text can rewrite a national discourse, a discourse that may not be apparent without such an intertext” (16). The book comprises a theoretically oriented introduction, four chapters, each dedicated to works of one country, and a brief conclusion. In her well-researched introduction, Bulman reviews contemporary theories of nation and intertextuality and proposes to study nation as text. For her intertextuality is a technique that enriches both the precursor and the new text as it broadens readings of both the play itself and the culture/nation it represents. Recognizing that the differences between the precursor and the new text are as important as the similarities, she posits that nation evolves in each individual and collective articulation. Chapter 1 is dedicated to Mexico and analyzes two plays: Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda’s La Malinche (1998) and Maruxa Vilalta’s En blanco y negro: Ignacio y los jesuitas (1997). Bulman looks at seven intertexts in the Rascón Banda play and argues that the Malinche figure evokes a nation that has historically blamed the other (rather than the self) for its problems. Similarly, she posits that Vilalta uses historical texts to propel Ignacio into present day Mexico and that by taking the historical texts out of context, manipulating and distorting them, Vilalta forces the...