The Unstageable Birth of the Crip Galán: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Las paredes oyen

Abstract

Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Las paredes oyen is not an ordinary comedia. Its verses portray the embodied and social experience of disability in seventeenth-century Spain from the insider perspective of a disabled person. The play had a successful eighteen-year run in the Habsburg Court of Philip IV, but, paradoxically, it was never performed as Ruiz de Alarcón originally envisioned. Archival evidence shows that the play’s main character, a man with an undisclosed bodily deformity, was consistently portrayed as bodily normative. The present study delves into the logic behind such an intentional omission, ascribing these attitudes toward the staging of deviant corporealities in leading parts to both the principles of dramatic decorum and theater’s financial reliance on the audiences’ preferences. In addition to inviting playgoers to experience life as a person with a disability vicariously, Ruiz de Alarcón’s ultimate intention in Las paredes oyen is to challenge the way in which non-normative bodies were traditionally represented in Golden Age theater. To convey his message, Ruiz de Alarcón bent the rules of decorum in the characterization of the leading man, a departure from the playwriting conventions of the Arte nuevo that led to a bitter dispute with Lope de Vega.