Reviewed by: La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña. Trans/acciones de la identidad by Laurietz Seda Liza Ann Acosta Seda, Laurietz. La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña. Trans/acciones de la identidad. San Juan: Nuevos Cuadernos del Ateneo, 2018. 140 pp. In this brief but layered book, La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña: Trans/acciones de la identidad, Laurietz Seda proposes an important thesis regarding shifting and contested Puerto Rican identities. Through the insightful analysis of four texts by members of the New Playwrights Generation on the island—Malasangre by Roberto Ramos-Perea, Indocumentados by José Luis Ramos Escobar, El adiestramiento by Teresa Marichal, and Bony and Kin by Carlos Canales—Seda demonstrates how these works illustrate the rupture with the traditional discourse surrounding Puerto Rican national identity. In these works, Seda asserts, “coexisten una multiplicidad de discursos y voces que dan impulso a lo que he dado en llamar la(s) trans/accion(es) [End Page 142] de la identidad” (16). Seda defines trans/action as the conscious use of strategies to live (and survive) in between cultures, borders, genders, and ethnicities by challenging binary constructs. Heterogeneity and fluidity are defining characteristics; essentialism and strictly hierarchal categories are subverted. Notably, this generation of playwrights questions/dismantles previous attempts at a homogenous definition of Puerto Rican identity. Instead, they tackle issues that show the fissures in a monolithic identity: differences in social class and temporary or permanent emigration, for example. The chapters that follow detail the various strategies these authors apply to a problematized vision of identity. La carreta, by René Marqués, the quintessential play about a national identity tied exclusively to the land, serves as contrast to the ways identity is constructed in each work. With Malasangre, Seda affirms that identity in trans/action is deeply connected to the conflict between economic improvement found in the United States and the need to return to the island to support anti-colonial efforts, while class, gender, and level of education complicate the identity construct around “being” and “feeling” Puerto Rican. With Indocumentados, Seda demonstrates how Ramos Escobar’s use of intertextuality—again using La carreta as counterpoint—shows trans/action at play when a Dominican assumes the identity of a Puerto Rican; race is at the core of the fragmented and constructed identities present in the play. Seda’s analysis of trans/action in Bony and Kin by Canales amplifies the argument that identity is a social construction. Intertextuality, in the form of the gangster movies and TV shows that make up the characters Bony and Kin, displays trans/action via media and technology, which have contributed to transform “los referentes tradicionales de la identidad puertorriqueña” (68), such as the “jíbaro.” Finally, El adiestramiento by Marichal introduces characters who are trained to lose their identity through consumerism, yet they ironically survive through trans/action, by performing and negotiating between two cultures. According to Seda, the characters in the play subvert binary spaces and parody traditional discourses that insist on a monolithic identity. In conclusion, Seda elevates the New Playwrights as critical voices that uncover the deep problematic issue of identity on the island. La nueva dramaturgia puertorriqueña highlights the need for scholars to study these playwrights more extensively, for students to read plays that stand in contrast with the traditional literary curriculum that requires such texts as La carreta, and perhaps, for all of us to engage more fully with a theater that is a mirror of our colonized condition. [End Page 143] Liza Ann Acosta North Park University Copyright © 2022 Center of Latin American Studies the University of Kansas