The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Sabina Berman. The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays Sandra M. Cypess The Theatre of Sabina Berman. The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays. Translated by Adam Versényi with an Essay by Jacqueline E. Bixler. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003; 192 pages. $40.00 cloth, $21.00 paper. As one of the most active, original, and talented playwrights of Latin America, Sabina Berman merits a warm welcome among English-speaking audiences. Adam Versényi's translations of four plays by Berman and the informative introductions by Versényi and Latin American theatre critic Jacqueline Bixler provide the appropriate cultural context to appreciate Berman's work. She is one of the most prolific and commercially successful Mexican playwrights, winner of prestigious awards, and the most feminist in a distinguished group of Mexicans which includes Emilio Carballido, Vicente Leñero, and Hugo Argüelles. She is versatile in her creative efforts, known also as an accomplished poet, prose writer, essayist, and director of plays and movies. The plays selected for publication in English in this volume, The Agony of Ecstasy, Yankee, Puzzle, and Heresy, provide an overview of Berman's versatility and varied interests, which range from an exploration of the nature of identity as it links with ethnicity and gender issues, to revisions of the myths of Mexican history. She deals with heady and heavy topics with doses of humor and dramatic techniques that explore the performative nature of human behavior. As Bixler notes, Berman "has consistently defied and challenged the patriarchal order of things with penetrating and humorous studies of the battle for sexual or political power . . ." (xxi). The three brief one-acters of The Agony of Ecstasy (El suplicio del placer, 1977), for example, offer a playful yet thought-provoking exploration of social constructs of sexual identity and gender relations. Each playlet has two characters named "He" and "She," but even those generic terms offer no concrete clue to how they will behave. In the first playlet, "The Mustache," an effeminate man and a masculine woman share a mustache between them, using the artifact as a sign of masculinity, but showing how the sign changes, depending on context. Berman cleverly addresses contemporary societal ideas and misconceptions about bisexuality, transvestism, and androgyny. "The Love Nest" is more rooted in Mexican culture and machismo as it depicts a married man and his lover in their casachica, or love nest. What Berman unmasks here is the male's idea that he is in control of the sexual situation, for [End Page 522] "She" shows the audience by her behavior that "She" is playacting the role the male authority figure wants her to accept. "The Pistol," a demonstration of Berman's more sinister side, deals with yet another couple engaged in a battle of wits as they try to conceal a pistol from each other. The firearm is real, but the couple engages in playacting that forever defers a revelation of their "true" identities, the very existence of which is questioned. Berman highlights in these three plays the extent to which the idea of gender is a performance, a theatrical event. From her first published play, initially called Bill (1979) and then changed to Yankee, Berman has been concerned with the interrelationships between individual and national identities and the influences that affect their formation. The change in names of the play is a sign of the struggle she dramatizes: Bill is the name of the individual while "Yankee" is the national category to which Bill belongs. Berman analyzes patterns of human experience that go beyond the initial context of Mexican-US relations that the plot initially suggests. Although Bill may be a Yankee in Mexico, his individual struggle to understand himself, along with his changing relationships with the Mexican family that takes him in, problematize his stereotyped characterization as the "enemy" or "Other." Also, with this play Berman begins her deconstruction of official history and national myths that will be an essential subtext in Herejía (Heresy 1983), Aguila o sol (Heads or Tails, 1985), and Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Villa and a Naked Woman, 1995). Berman is a Mexican of Polish-Jewish...