Tricks to Inherit: Re-centering a Transnational Translation Onstage

Abstract

Tricks to Inherit: Re-centering a Transnational Translation Onstage Olga Sanchez Saltveit (bio) Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tio, identified as the “first drama staged in California” (1) by Hispanic theatre historian Nicolás Kanellos, had been buried in the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library archives for over 200 years when Pedro García-Caro unearthed and transcribed the play for publication in 2018. When I first met García-Caro at the University of Oregon (UO) in 2015, he invited me to join the translation team so that it could be produced by UO’s Theatre Arts Department, where I would propose to direct it. Script unseen, I accepted. The opportunity to interpret the play written by Fermín de Reygadas in 1789, unproduced for over two centuries, was an adventure I could not resist. This essay chronicles the response to the problematic historical script through the crafting of a production for contemporary audiences (fig. 1). Brazilian director, teacher, and statesman Augusto Boal argued that theatre can correct the flaws of the state through empathy and catharsis (9). The emotional impact of performance, as well as its consciousness raising, has the potential to move audiences to identify or align with the struggles presented and join in activism to remove the associated challenges. It stands to reason, then, that if performance can support positive societal transformation, it can also reinforce the status quo or, worse, promote a regressive social direction. Theatrical scripts reveal the attitudes of their day, and incognizant revivals of old chestnuts can perpetuate prejudice, ignorance, and oppressions that a progressive society strives to eradicate. Harmful or offensive events can also be encountered in production elements such as casting, design, and dramaturgy. As I proposed Tricks to Inherit: A Nephew and His Uncle (the translated title) for the University Theatre’s 2017–18 season, I contemplated how the play’s politics and social commentary, grounded in the racialized and gendered social stratification of late colonial New Spain, might prove troubling. What harms or offenses occur by mounting the play as written? Should such transgressions be edited, excised, or ignored? How would I negotiate my twin responsibilities to the playwright’s words as the play’s translator and to the audience’s experience and conclusions? The historic significance of García-Caro’s transcription and illumination of this script cannot be underestimated. Astucias por heredar, inspired by an eighty-year-old French play,1 was written by a peninsular living in Mexico City, suppressed by the Viceregal Censor of New Spain, performed once in a remote colonial outpost of Alta California while that territory was still part of New Spain, and was eventually buried in California, US’s historical archives. It can be considered a European play for its French roots, Spanish setting, and peninsular authorship, but its crafting and first production occurred in New Spain. The text’s survival through the Mexican War of Independence and the Mexican-American War complicates its identification, for like the famous adage of the 1960s Chicano movement, the play did not cross the border, the border crossed it. A product of colonial nostalgia and shifting national allegiances, the transnational script reflects the cultural influences of France, Spain, and Mexico as well as a material journey through Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Furthermore, as with so much early Hispanic history of the southwestern United States (including that of the oppression of Native nations through colonization), its existence was overlooked. While the play is an important example of the rich legacy of Hispanic culture in the United States, the script’s [End Page 233] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Manuscript cover, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. (Photo: Pedro García-Caro.) [End Page 234] burial in the Bancroft archives in the late eighteenth century contributed to an inadequate historical characterization of Spanish settlers and by inference their descendants (García-Caro, “From the Stacks to the Stage”). Producing the play and acknowledging its history in the process would be an act of reclamation for the presence and cultural contributions of New Spanish ancestors in Alta California. Yet, despite the historical importance of the text...