Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001 by Sarah M. Misemer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001 by Sarah M. Misemer Victoria L. Garrett Misemer, Sarah M. Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2017. 215 pp. ISBN: 978-16-1148-797-8. Situating itself in the context of such global crises as Argentina's and Uruguay's 2001/2002 monetary crisis, the 2008/2009 Wall Street financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS and ISIL, and narcotrafficking, this book examines the expressions of crisis of traditional spaces of power, such as the state, in twenty-first century Uruguayan independent theater. As such global events illustrate, when competing viewpoints or contradictory frameworks of power meet, a crisis is provoked. Theatrical Topographies explores the spaces of such geographic, cultural, social, gendered, and aesthetic crises. Presenting a wealth of knowledge about the independent theater scene, the book focuses on select works by Gabriel Peveroni, Marianella Morena, Santiago Sanguinetti, Gabriel Calderón, and Sergio Blanco. By drawing on cutting edge theories of space, gender, performance, geography, and globalization, Misemer presents fresh and innovative approaches to contemporary theater studies. The first chapter teases out extensive intertextual references between Peveroni's Shanghai and both his two previous plays Groenlandia and Berlin as well as Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths." These intertexts open multiple interpretive paths that illuminate contemporary crises related to biopolitics and biotechnology. Misemer analyzes how identity is destabilized through the Shanghai's theme of DNA kits, as well as how the play's global spaces simultaneously evoke different geographies (from other plays and references), their (violent) histories, and themes specific to Uruguay. As she persuasively argues, post-dramatic insertions that disrupt linear plot lines allow for meaning to be produced in the spaces between [End Page 179] different texts, histories, and geographies. The result is a play that questions the efficacy of different economic models and the implications of bodies under biotechnology. Misemer's chapter on sex, gender, and national identity in Morena's work shows how her renditions of the classics Don Juan and Romeo and Juliet position identity and economics as places of crisis, contestation, and ambiguity. She posits that Don Juan: el lugar del beso's emphasis on tongues, oral sex, and consumption repositions feminist discourse over Uruguay's patriarchal landscape and creates an economic space of crisis. Her analysis unveils a connection between Don Juan's infamous sexism and contemporary consumerism, which illustrates the uneven effects of globalization wherein we both consume and are consumed. Misemer aptly explores Las Julietas' use of psychogeography as a critical response to the control represented by urban planning, revealing hidden cartographies and inviting new perceptions of Uruguayan identity in the twenty-first century. Analyzed in the context of other cosmopolitan versions of Romeo and Juliet, Morena's treatment of gender deconstructs, demystifies, and deflates the cultural baggage of Uruguay's national identity to render certain obsessions ridiculous. In Chapter 3, Misemer reads Sanguinetti's Ararat o Las moscas sobre Valkulnichuk and Nuremberg as placing the concept of justice and religion in crisis. Whether evoking the story of Noah's ark, Russia during World War II, or the Holocaust, both works link genocide and justice, as well as World War II and contemporary Uruguay, by focusing on the crisis of human rights and memory. In particular, she focuses on the Jewish Midrashic tradition, which is a performative, improvised act of interpreting scriptures that decenters the text's singular meaning and thus places in crisis univocal accounts of history. Misemer's extended engagement with studies of the ultra-right in twentieth century Argentina effectively makes the case for anti-semitism as a defining political framework for political power in Río de la Plata. Likewise, the insertion of footage from the Nuremberg Trials and Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin evokes Uruguay's recent dictatorship and impunity laws in a way that superimposes disparate geographies and time periods to demonstrate the current emergence of neo-fascism, particularly with the extreme right in Germany and Russia. The result, as she reveals, is a complex engagement with the vexed negotiation between local and international pressures. The final full chapter explores concepts of...