Latin American Drama

Introduction

A brief survey of Latin American drama cannot do justice to the more than five-hundred-year history of such a vast body of work, even if a skeptic might make short shrift of much of the dramatic literature of Latin America. From the Southern Cone to the Latino communities of North America, from the earliest mystery plays used by the Spaniards to convert and assimilate the Indigenous peoples to the drawing-room comedies that have plagued serious critics and enthralled huge audiences throughout the past century, from the derivative experimentalism of arcane ensembles to the educational and agitprop methods of hundreds of revolutionary groups—all have made an impressive mark on theatrical performance.

Because of the historical importance of unscripted work (such as pre-Columbian religious rituals, colonial pageants, and “folk” theater) and of unpublished works of which only the gist and impact have been recorded, many recent scholars of Latin American theater study more than just texts that have been preserved as dramatic scripts and take into account a great deal of anthropological and even archaeological evidence to describe this complex and multifaceted history. Despite the undeniable importance of factual compilations, one must recognize the difficulty of summarizing trends and quoting names and examples too selectively, to the exclusion of many, and it is this challenge that is undertaken in this limited essay.

This summary includes only the theater of Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas, to the exclusion of Brazil and of the French- or English-speaking areas of the continent that are now considered part of Latin America. The Hispanic theater of the United States, however, is included, as a part of the historical continuum of the same linguistic and cultural area.

Aztec Precedents

Although many civilizations flourished in Central and South America thousands of years before the coming of the Spanish conquistadores, the history of pre-Columbian theater is very poorly understood. There are many reasons for this gap, including the fact that few records from the ancient Mayan, Olmec, and Aztec civilizations survive, and those that do exist are difficult for modern scholars to interpret. The main records of the Aztec civilization come from Spanish monks who arrived in the New World to convert the Aztecs to Christianity: Naturally, these records are very biased in favor of European civilization.

Performance art for the Aztecs was basically religious, and demonstrated the central focus of Aztec theology: the great interconnectedness between humanity and the gods. The Aztec calendar had eighteen months, and each month was marked with a major festival paying homage to the gods: Many of these festivals involved spectacular dances of numbers of performers wearing elaborate and beautiful costumes honoring, for instance, the Aztec god of rain and wind, Quetzalcóatl. This is probably the origin of the traditional quetzal dance still performed annually in Mexico, in which dancers wear headgear of paper, silk, and feathers measuring up to five feet (1.5 meters) in diameter.

A major component of the Aztec performance ritual was human sacrifice. For the Aztecs, this sacrifice demonstrated their connection to the divine, and sacrificial victims were thought to enjoy special privileges in the afterlife. One great theatrical ritual of the Aztecs was honoring the god Xipe Totec in the second month. In this ritual, prisoners reenacted sacred battles with Aztec warriors, similar to the Ta՚ziyeh plays still performed in Arab countries. At the end of the battle, the prisoners were shot with arrows or had their hearts removed with flint knives. Their limbs were then eaten in a ceremonial stew at a special meal. In the fifth-month ceremony, a young man who had spent a year spiritually impersonating the god Tezcatlipoca started a ritual of singing and dancing, and playing sacred instruments. At the end of the ceremony, he would climb the steps of a temple, breaking the instruments, and was seized by priests who swiftly removed his heart and head. In the eleventh month, the mother goddess was honored by an older woman who impersonated the goddess by ritually reenacting spiritual events. Finally, she was decapitated, and a male priest wore her flayed skin to demonstrate the unity of male and female in the divine plan.

Colonial Era

The Spanish conquest of the New World began in the 1490s when the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) was one of the largest cities in the world. The Spaniards were impressed with the Aztec accomplishments: Herná Cortés wrote to his king that the palaces of King Moctezuma were grander than anything in Spain, and the Spanish soldiers believed the marketplaces of the city to be greater than those of Rome or Constantinople. However, the conquering Spaniards saw the Indigenous Americans only as misguided savages despite their ancient and complex culture and their great achievements in architecture, art, weaving, and metalwork. To Spanish monks, the great Aztec gods were merely the devil in disguise, and converting the Aztecs and destroying their culture became a primary mission of the conquering Spaniards.

The theater was one of these newcomers' chief forms of entertainment, who often performed actos, entremés, or even dramas to fill their leisure time. Thus, in the explorers’ chronicles, there are reports that soldiers acted for fun in the late sixteenth century in northwestern outposts that are now part of the southwestern United States and in the 1760s, shortly after Spain acquired the Falkland Islands, off the coast of modern-day Argentina, from France, the local garrison put on a three-day festivity that included dramatic performances, with props and materials provided by the military governor.

Theater was, from the beginning, a proselytizing tool. Some of the earliest attempts by Spanish missionaries to convert the locals involved the Spanish equivalent of the Passion plays and miracle plays of Western Europe. The evangelical zeal of the conquerors went to extraordinary lengths, as evidenced by the willingness of the friars to learn local languages and to present religious doctrine (often through drama) in those languages and by the cultural syncretism between Catholicism and Indigenous peoples' beliefs that appears even as late as the mid-seventeenth century, in an allegorical play by the famous Mexican writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Plays brought as instruments of ideological control and religious persuasion became part of the heritage of the ordinary people. Miracle plays can still be seen in Mexico (and in the former Mexican territories of the southwestern United States); village-wide reenactments of the Passion plays are still common at Easter in many parts of Mexico and Central America; and the quasi-ritualistic moros y cristianos plays keep alive the symbolic struggle between Christians and the Moors, in mock battles and full costume, throughout Latin America and even in the Philippines. Yet these traditional forms of Spanish theater survive primarily at the folk theater level. It was only in the late twentieth century that professional theater groups returned to them as sources of material and artistic expression, integrating them into a theater with a much wider audience.

Theater has served as a medium for satire or social protest in Latin America since the sixteenth century, but this was not a radical departure from one of the traditional functions of theater throughout the Middle Ages either. The earliest recorded case of a playwright being punished for writing such material was that of Cristóbal de Llerena, who in 1588 was banished to the Caribbean coast of South America from Santo Domingo for having published an entremés that satirized corruption and poor government in the colony.

Throughout the history of the colonies, theater played an important part in community entertainment, mainly on public holidays (like the king’s birthday) or in pageants and festivities welcoming a new viceroy or other dignitaries. There could be private performances of the latest plays from Spain, or works by local authors, in the courtyards or ballrooms of distinguished residents, while in streets and plazas, one often found plays presented by guilds and brotherhoods and performances by Indigenous or Black peoples that reflected the variety of diverse influences already present in the colonies. In the first half-century of Spanish rule, religious plays were performed in colleges, and occasionally, students and scholars introduced secular plays that merited censorship because of their content.

The development of theatrical activity in the different colonies depended on the degree of encouragement or repression offered by the representatives of the crown and by the Church hierarchy. In some cases, an enlightened viceroy or captain-general would strike a deal with the bishop, by which the Church would lift its ban on theatrical performances, and box-office returns would go to a needy institution (such as an orphanage, a women’s hostel, or a hospital).

Theater was usually presented in improvised public spaces or in a corral owned by an entrepreneur, but by the end of the eighteenth century, most principal cities of the Spanish colonies had theater houses to cater to the Mestiza elite and a rising bourgeoisie. Entertainment was not necessarily the priority only of liberal governments: One of the most impressive theaters was built in Havana by Captain-General Miguel de Tacón, who headed a very repressive government during the Cuban War of Independence; the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez Francia, who virtually sealed his country from the outside world, was a devotee of culture and built a beautiful theater.

The Era of Independence

Drama and theatrical activity played a minor albeit interesting role in the transition to independence and nation-building. The end of the eighteenth century brought the success of the sainete (a genre made popular in Spain by Ramón de la Cruz), the characters of which were drawn from everyday contemporary society and were often social types; these characters reflected the particular social makeup of a given colony, and in the unique origins, opinions, and speech patterns presented onstage, the colonized could begin to see their own distinctive national identity.

The patriotic theme was the subject of a few plays throughout Latin America, beginning in Chile, Peru, and Argentina between 1812 and 1820, then in Mexico around 1820 and eventually Cuba and Puerto Rico beginning around mid-nineteenth century. Abdala (pb. 1869), by the Cuban patriot José Martí, is an allegory of independence with an African hero, an early attack on colonialism, specifically Spanish domination of Cuba.

In Argentina, on the eve of independence, one could find some rural comedies and satires of Spanish theater. In Cuba, after the remainder of Latin America was free and long before Cuba’s wars of independence (1868-1900), comedy developed through the fifty-year career of a brilliant actor and impresario, Francisco Covarrubias, the author of several dozen comedies that laid the foundation of Cuban theater. (The texts were lost; only records of the performances remain.) Costumbrismo (comedy and drama that depict social types and customs) dominated the scene in most countries, and elements of it resurfaced even in the naturalist theater of the early twentieth century.

Romanticism flourished in the nineteenth century with several distinguished playwrights, such as Francisco Javier of the Dominican Republic, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera of Puerto Rico, Joaquín Lorenzo Luaces and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda of Cuba, and Carlos Bello of Chile. A theater of ideas or for social or political protest appeared occasionally: Juan Bautista Alberdi wrote his dramatic satire while in exile from Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas between 1838 and 1879, and Alberto Bianchi was jailed in Mexico in 1876 for criticizing the draft in Los martirios del pueblo (pr. 1876; the people’s martyrdom).

The teatro bufo of Cuba, with its stock characters, spanned a quarter-century and had its counterparts in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It, too, was an important spawning ground for impresarios, actors, musicians, and playwrights. It is interesting to note that although many of the plays elicited sympathetic responses from patriotic (anti-Spanish) audiences, many of the playwrights were opposed to independence, and that the early teatro bufo, with its comic sketches of unique freshness, gave way after independence (1900-1920) to burlesque and vaudeville similar to those of the United States.

Twentieth Century Drama

As the independent republics became relatively stable democracies with increasing industrialization and European immigration, the theater continued to develop along two main lines: “serious” drama that addressed grave questions and moral issues or the human condition, in a fairly traditional, formal structure; and popular theater that broached topical issues or questions of morality, lightly at best, in a satiric vein.

The first sophisticated social drama emerged in the early twentieth century, with the theme of national identity still prominent, either in response to a changing historical and political reality or as a new perspective on the same old problems of race and class. Historically, playwrights, like other Latin American artists and intellectuals, have been committed to their role as critics and are often involved, through their main profession (as teachers, journalists, and diplomats), in the affairs of their country. Many have used drama to express their commitment. A few good writers have made the stage a powerful forum for debates by characters that are often allegorical or stereotypical yet manage to move an audience and challenge prejudice, outmoded behavior, and destructive systems.

José Antonio Ramos, a leading Cuban intellectual and diplomat, analyzed his country’s most basic conflicts, embodied in different family members whose future is tied to their large estate, in his play Tembladera (pr. 1917). The play explores intergenerational conflict and the roots of Cuba’s economic crisis; American penetration of Cuba, especially after the Spanish-American War, and the remnants of loyalty to Spanish tradition; and the contradictions inherent in cultural tradition and in progress.

Between 1903 and 1906, in a similar naturalist vein attacked the prevailing assumptions about national identity and immigration in Argentina and Uruguay. His Barranca abajo (pr. 1905; down the precipice) exposes the real condition of an old peasant: Changes in economic relations and control of the land strip him of his property and his dignity, leading him to suicide. La gringa (1904; The Foreign Girl, 1971) is about the daughter of Italian immigrants: Her marriage to a local youth promises a solution to the conflict between the value systems of the “old,” rural Argentina (or Uruguay) and the different austerity imposed by the newcomers.

Antonio Acevedo Hernández, who was influenced by Florencio Sánchez and Russian author and by Pyotr Kropotkin’s ideas, detailed in a fairly brutal manner the degradation of the rural poor in Chile. He won the national theater prize four times in forty years with such plays as Almas perdidas (pr. 1917; lost souls, a play about the slums of Santiago), La canción rota (pr. 1921; the pauper song, about the indentured farm laborer), and El arbol viejo (pr. 1928; the old tree, about young people leaving their roots and their father to go to the city).

In Mexico, Federico Gamboa, a novelist, wrote some of the strongest naturalist dramas of the years before the revolution of 1910. La venganza de la gleba (pb. 1907; the revenge of the soil) is considered the first weighty criticism of the system crushing the Mexican peasant.

Historical drama finds its best voice, perhaps, in Rodolfo Usigli, who in a famous “antihistorical” trilogy challenges three historical myths of Mexico: the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Corona de luz: La virgen (pr. 1963; Crown of Light, 1971); the role of Doña Marina in Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico and the martyrdom of chief Cuauhtémoc in Corona de fuego (pr. 1960; crown of fire); and the madness of Carlota, after the execution, by a Mexican firing squad, of her husband, Emperor Maximilian, in Corona de sombra (pr. 1943; Crown of Shadows, 1946). In each of the dramas, the historical characters are at once fictionalized and humanized, thus becoming keys for a new, critical understanding of three crucial periods in the formation of the modern Mexican nation: the conquest and domination of the Indigenous peoples; the merging of cultures; and the emergence of the liberal republic under Benito Juárez (the historical antecedent of the revolution of 1910).

An equally celebrated play of Usigli is El gesticulador (pr. 1947; the impostor), one of the earliest critiques of the political system that was established after the revolution. The play’s protagonist, a history professor, enters politics by assuming the identity of César Rubio, a revolutionary hero who disappeared during the war, but the protagonist finds that he has entered a labyrinth of lies. The protagonist is murdered by the rival candidate, a corrupt politician who was responsible for the death of the original César Rubio, and the protagonist’s death (blamed on a fanatic enemy of the revolutionary party) becomes the killer’s ticket to victory. The analogy to Julius Caesar is obvious, as Usigli takes a historical referent that to this day epitomizes the ambiguity of power and of human motivation, adapting it to illustrate also the ambiguities of contemporary events. Usigli’s younger contemporary Wilberto Cantón looks very critically at a turning point in the revolution in Nosotros somos dios (pr. 1965; we are God).

Contemporary Drama

The final four decades of the twentieth century saw terrible upheavals in Latin America: poverty, disease, hunger, natural disasters, guerrilla fighting, oppression, torture, kidnappings, hijackings, strikes, riots, wars, and the appearance of death squads, drug cartels, and massacres of Indigenous peoples, all of which incited a more widespread feeling of discontent with government across the continent. Social protest and dissent met with repression, including assassinations and disappearances. Playwrights and other theater artists have come to figure prominently as agents of social and political protest, combining aesthetics with what Paulo Friere called conscientizaçao, or “conscienticization.” Building on the political theater writings of , certain playwrights led a movement collectively known as “Theatre of Revolt.” So effective has this movement been in challenging oppression that theater has become the art form of those most frequently harassed by military governments. Playwrights have been censored, arrested, and tortured; theaters have been closed or even burned down by government forces. Around 1973, the year of the military coup in Chile and widespread continental unrest, theater in Latin America suffered a near-paralysis, which in some places persisted for years. Yet certain playwrights’ works have managed to persist in these horrifying periods.

Socially conscious theater has flourished in Chile since the 1970s in the work of several outstanding playwrights. Among the forerunners in this century are María Asunción Requena and , who have written about women’s struggles, of relations between White and Indigenous peoples, and of class conflict; and the poet , with his Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (pr. 1967; Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta, 1972), a re-creation of the tragic life of Chilean prospectors in the California gold rush. Since the 1950s, audiences have seen Egon Raúl Wolff’s carefully choreographed invasions of the bourgeoisie’s comfortable space by threatening creatures from the wrong side of town in Los invasores (pr. 1964; the invaders) and in Flores de papel (pr. 1970; Paper Flowers, 1971); Jorge Díaz Gutiérrez’s neoexistentialist critiques of modern alienation, such as Réquiem para una girasol (pr. 1961; requiem for a sunflower), followed by a powerful piece on the miners of Chile, El nudo ciego (pr. 1965; the blind knot), and by the ferocious satire Topografía de un desnudo (pr. 1967; the topography of a nude), about the 1963 massacre of Brazilian peasants; and Alejandro Sievking’s critical view of political oppression in Chile in Pequeños animales abatidos (pr. 1975; small downcast animals).

Social and political themes have been presented by equally sophisticated writers in other countries, especially Argentina, which has produced some of the continent’s leading playwrights. Three excellent examples are Osvaldo Dragún, Andrés Lizárraga, and Griselda Gambaro, whose works prove the possibility of achieving universal appeal while conveying very specific messages about history, social relations, and economic questions.

Dragún, active since the mid-1950s in popular theater, has dealt with some of his country’s (and Latin America’s) most difficult themes: class relations and the malaise of youth in Y nos dijeron que éramos inmortales (pb. 1962; and they told us we were immortal); the tendency to rely on formulaic ideas to solve problems that require an original solution in Heroica de Buenos Aires (pr. 1966); and the power of economic pressures that can turn one into a watchdog for hire, let one die of an abscessed tooth, or kill hundreds of Africans with tainted meat for the sake of a multinational corporation’s profits in Historias para ser contadas (pr. 1957; Stories for the Theatre, 1976). Dragún has also handled a historical figure that has become a favorite of the Latin American stage, the Inca Tupac Amaru, who led a major rebellion against the Spaniards in the eighteenth century; in Tupac Amaru (pr. 1957), the tormentor is ultimately driven mad by the spiritual resistance of the physically broken and defeated hero.

Lizárraga has criticized the narrowness of provincial life, the hypocrisy of Argentina’s social system, and the sentimentalization of history as a tool of social control. Some of his best work is contained in his trilogy about the wars of independence; one play in this trilogy, Santa Juana de América (pr. 1960), is an award-winning portrait of a female revolutionary figure presented in a Brechtian style.

Griselda Gambaro’s work is sometimes labeled Theater of Cruelty or Theater of the Absurd because of its formal and structural similarity to European and North American works of those genres. Yet, it is profoundly rooted in Argentine reality. Despite its possibilities as an art that dissects the most perverse aspects of human relationships, it points to the larger picture: that of a society whose collective psyche was already torn by the mid-1960s between “Cains,” who took pleasure in asserting their power and their cruelty, and “Abels,” who suffered passively, and sometimes foolishly, through deceit and betrayal. A good example is her Los Siameses (pr. 1967; The Siamese Twins, 1967).

In El campo (pr. 1968; The Camp, 1970), Gambaro creates a brilliant piece of ambiguity (despite its almost mechanical workings): The title translates as “the countryside” (where the main protagonist, who controls the events, insists that the action is taking place) or as “the camp,” that is, a military camp or a concentration camp, an interpretation suggested by most of the signs (the physical appearance of the main character in his uniform, the brutal behavior by guards toward the “guests,” and the cries of pain). The irony of the play is that while its main referent is the Nazi experience of the 1930s and 1940s (with its possible relevance to Argentina, where so many Nazis fled after the war), its ideological structure is not entirely alien to Argentina The climate of the “liberal democracy” shifted radically in the 1960s, and the polarization resulted in the excesses of the 1970s, when such concentration camps became a reality, and when the entire society began to function in ambiguous codes—the authorities denying their actions (much like the play’s protagonist), and the victims (society at large) accepting the authorities’ definition of reality.

In 1977, Gambaro’s novel Ganarse la muerte (To Earn One’s Death) was banned, and Gambaro left Argentina to live in Spain and France, returning in 1980 and continuing her work as a playwright. Gambaro received a great deal of global attention with her 1973 play Información para extranjeros (wr. 1971; Information for Foreigners, 1992), which, for many critics, captures the spirit of “postmodernism” perfectly. The play, about incidents of state violence in Argentina, forces its audience to engage with the staged theater compellingly. The play is staged in a house, with the audience broken into small groups, each with a “guide.” The guide moves the groups through the house, opening doors and witnessing scenes within rooms. As the groups progress, the boundaries between “performance” and “reality” blur until the audience must question its role in both and come to grips with its culpability for allowing state violence to continue.

Among this generation of good writers, one should also include Eduardo Pavlovsky, a psychiatrist by profession, whose characters’ psychological makeup (often one of twisted and perverse cruelty) is usually explored in a sociopolitical context, such as the Caribbean dictatorships of François Duvalier (Papa Doc) and Rafael Trujillo, as an allegory relevant to any country.

Strong social protest and revisions of history and myth are central to the works of the Colombian Enrique Buenaventura, whose plays can be a vicious indictment of class oppression and whose Los papeles del infierno (pr. 1968; The Papers of Hell) documents the terrible period of modern Colombian history known as “La Violencia” through a series of short plays about ordinary human beings caught in the whirlwind of political violence and repression.

In Venezuela, José Ignacio Cabrujas and Román Chalbaud have been leading contemporary authors who see the stage as a vehicle for questioning history and politics. Cabrujas’s work is more clearly one of protest, not merely against the corruption inherent in institutions but also against the mechanisms that corrupt pure individuals who attain power. Although Cabrujas writes in the style of Brecht, Chalbaud has played with the soap opera, with games and rituals, and with eroticism and thus resists any easy label as a “protest” writer.

Sebastián Salazar Bondy of Peru wrote a series of social dramas, moving on in the early 1960s, immediately before his death, to a unique dramatic style filled with irony and elements of farce and popular comedy. Manuel Galich of Guatemala, an exiled member of the Arbenz government deposed in the 1953 coup, persisted in a straight theater of denunciation tempered only by sardonic humor. Galich’s works are among the few that deal specifically with the involvement of the United States in Latin America.

Cuban theater has always been among the most active and progressive in the Americas, with many distinguished writers and directors. Individual playwrights such as Virgilio Piñera, José Triana, Manuel Reguera Saumell, and Carlos Felipe are typical of the best. They all treat social themes through fairly solid texts and (with the exception of Triana) largely conventional techniques.

These four authors span the period immediately before and after the revolution's triumph in 1959. Their main concerns are social, and their main focus is the individual’s interaction with their environment (family, a slum, the effects of the revolution, institutional corruption under Fulgencio Batista), and one even finds, in Felipe’s Réquiem por Yarini (pr. 1960), a powerful portrait of a famous pimp.

Triana’s works reflect society in a critical light. His chief works were created on the eve of the 1959 revolution. They presented darkly satiric visions of “sacred” institutions such as the Church and the family, using mythical allusion and ritual devices that sometimes make his work very reminiscent of French playwright Jean Genet. His award-winning La noche de los asesinos (pr. 1966; The Criminals, 1967), in which three young people enact their parents’ murder, bears a strong resemblance to Genet’s Les Bonnes (pr. 1947; The Maids, 1954).

Puerto Rican drama has found its finest expression in the works of several authors since the 1950s. Francisco Arriví tackled such difficult subjects as racism, the role of the intellectual (at a time when intellectuals were highly vulnerable because of their pro-independence views), and the complexes that beset the Puerto Rican psyche. Arriví’s best-known work, perhaps, is his trilogy that includes Vejigantes (pr. 1957; mummers). René Marqués pursued political themes more aggressively, always obsessed with the nature of Puerto Rican identity as a culture and as a nation. His La Carreta (pr. 1952; The Oxcart, 1969) has become a classic portrayal of the migration of Puerto Ricans from the country to San Juan to New York and a life of continued economic hardship compounded by social problems such as drugs and prostitution.

Modern Genres and Themes

The great majority of theatergoers in Latin America continue to flock to lighter fare, comedy, and musicals. The tradition of the género chico is uninterrupted: The comedy of social customs, the farce, and the musical comedy or review have always been the mainstay. In the traveling carpa (tents) of Mexico and the southwestern United States and in the sainete criollo (Argentine version of the Spanish sainete, with tangos and social types from Buenos Aires), in the prolific production of the Alhambra Theatre of Havana (where some of Cuba’s best playwrights and musicians exercised their profession), and of other locales around the continent where vaudeville coexisted with good, solid comic drama, and in far more reputable playhouses, such as the San Martín municipal theater of Buenos Aires, literally thousands of scripted plays have entertained millions. Many of the best playwrights still work in that style, while a great many also combine elements of this popular tradition with European conventions à la or (adapted to Latin American culture). Even in revolutionary Cuba, the comedia musical has thrived through the pen of such good playwrights as Héctor Quintero and José Brene.

Among authors who have worked on psychological drama or fantasy, certain popular names stand out: Conrado Nalé Roxlo and Carlos Gorostiza of Argentina; Celestino Gorostiza, Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo, Carlos Solórzano, Elena Garro, Maruxa Vilalta, Luisa Josefina Hernández, and Rafael Solana of Mexico; Isaac Chocrón of Venezuela; and Elena Portocarrero and Julio Ortega of Peru. Many, influenced by and , have sought to create characters of great psychological complexity, while others have created outright fantasies in which the characters play in dreamworlds.

Collective Creations and Political Performance

The 1960s brought with its revolutionary politics a corresponding movement in the theater. Much as the workers’ theater of the 1930s and 1940s and the popular theater (the products of the Mexican revolution in the 1910s and Fray Mocho in Argentina in the 1950s) had gone out in search of their audience, many of the young actors, directors, and writers in the 1960s chose to place their craft at the service of the revolution.

Following the example of Fray Mocho and Augusto Boal in Brazil and Enrique Buenaventura and Santiago García in Colombia, dozens of theater groups established themselves in strategic relationships with the communities that they wished to serve and to “conscientize” (educate toward liberation). Each group's internal process was revolutionized, with collective sharing of responsibilities and collective creation becoming the most significant single change in playwriting in centuries.

Buenaventura, for example, gave up individual playwriting to become an equal member of the collective he had founded in Cali. Several groups (such as El Aleph of Chile, Libre Teatro Libre of Argentina, and Grupo Escambray of Cuba) produced quality plays through this method. In a few cases, groups of playwrights collaborated on a single play, the most famous example perhaps being El avión negro (pr. 1970), a satire about Juan Perón’s return to Argentina, coauthored by Roberto Cossa, Carlos Somigliana, Ricardo Talesnik, and Germán Rozenmacher, all distinguished Argentine playwrights. Collective creation caught on, particularly in the community-based theater groups, whose interest was mostly in theater as an instrument of education and social change; Latino theater groups in the United States (particularly in the Chicano groups through their association TENAZ) have been active promoters of the process to this day. However, its limitations have been amply demonstrated in the quality of the texts produced, and it has become clear that a good, strong playwright is necessary to produce the end product of a collective process.

Augusto Boal is another of the “Three Bs” of Latin American Theater (along with Brecht and Buenaventura). Boal has explored the relationship between politics and performance possibly more intimately than any other contemporary theorist. In 1971, Boal was arrested, tortured, and exiled. Even during his imprisonment, he continued writing, and his play Torquemada (pb. 1972) is an autobiographical account of those events, in which he compares his torturers to those who participated in the Spanish Inquisition. Boal’s book Teatro del oprimado y otras poéticas políticas (1974; The Theatre of the Oppressed, 1979) is now included as standard reading for most advanced theater theorists. As a director, Boal engaged in various experiments to create the revolutionary theater he envisioned. These experiments blurred fantasy and reality, creating unexpected theater in unusual places, such as restaurants, to demonstrate the individual's freedom.

Community-based groups continued to flourish in the 1980s despite political and economic difficulties. The movement has flourished in Cuba and Nicaragua in particular, where it receives considerable official support, with hundreds of amateur and semiprofessional groups from which talented individuals are routinely singled out for professional training.

Latino Theater in North America

Latino theater in the United States grew impressively during the last decades of the twentieth century, a result primarily of two factors: the immigration of large numbers of Cubans and Puerto Ricans to the New York area and the growth of community movements among the Chicano population. Many Cuban and Puerto Rican artists, actors, and writers moved to New York in the mid-1960s and assumed an active role in the cultural life of the city, founding theater groups and workshops and boosting the activity of such pioneering groups as the Puerto Rican Travelling Theatre. It became possible to attend different Spanish-language theater performances every night of the week in New York, ranging from Spanish classics to Latin American repertory to original works by local authors.

The Chicano movement in California in the 1960s grew out of the civil rights and the farmworkers’ movements. El Teatro Campesino sprang directly from agitprop work with César Chávez’s organization and from experience with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Teatro de la Esperanza and other community-based groups developed along similar lines. Teatro Nacional de Aztlán continues to exist, with more than one hundred member groups from across the United States, with links to Mexican theater. These links restored a relationship that had existed well into the twentieth century between the theaters of the United States and Mexico through the Mexican companies that toured the American Southwest and California.

The Chicano and other community theaters tend to use original material or adaptations of repertory and classics, and some individual authors, such as Luis Miguel Valdez, have moved into the mainstream with works that deal with the Mexican American experience and culture. The work of Valdez with El Teatro Campesino, stunningly visual and powerful, reaches back to the performance rituals of pre-Columbian Aztec cultures, thus ideologically and politically separating itself from the European conquerors. Additionally, his work clearly associates the Anglo-dominated U.S. government with the Spanish imperialists. The community theaters have established good working relationships with Chicano studies programs at various universities, through which Chicano theater has become legitimatized as a subject of research and scholarship.

Among the most popular modern Mexican American theater artists since the 1990s is Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a poet, playwright, actor, and regular commentator on National Public Radio (NPR). His work, along with Coco Fusco, emphasizes the multiple ethnicities of American culture and attempts to dissolve borders between identities. His performances use modern imagery of supersophisticated technology combined with ancient Aztec iconography, creating bizarre hybrid characters like El Mexterminator, Cyber-Vato, and El Naftazteca.

Theater festivals continue to bring groups, directors, writers, and critics together. These festivals are now held not only in Manizales, Colombia, Havana, Mexico, or Caracas but also in New York, Montreal, and other North American cities. Latin American theater has overcome the balkanization that plagued it for centuries, as it plagued all former Spanish colonies. Since the 1960s, writers and directors, companies, and scholars from different countries have met and shared their work and their experiences. The historical tie between the Latino culture of the United States and the cultures of Latin America is being restored, thanks in part to the theater.

Among the numerous influential Latin American playwrights and theater artists is Quiara Alegría Hudes, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize recipient in drama for her work Water by the Spoonful (2012), the second play of her Elliot Trilogy. The first in the trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue (2006) was a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the final play, The Happiest Song Plays Last (2013), was produced Off-Broadway. Other important figures in modern Latin American drama include Krysta Gonzales, a Black Mexican American playwright and author of Afro-Latinx theater; Marisela Treviño Orta, who writes Latino fairy tales with a grim undertone; and Cherríe Moraga, a feminist Latino playwright.

Bibliography

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Boffone, Trevor, et al. Seeking Common Ground: Latinx and Latin American Theatre and Performance. Methuen Drama, 2022.

Castro-Klarén, Sara, editor. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. John Wiley & Sons, 2022.

D'Argenio, Maria Chiara. Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema. Springer Nature, 2022.

Flores, David Salinas. "Theater in Latin America: Promoting Cerebral Internet in Jungle." Saudi Journal of Medicine, vol. 5, no. 1, 2020, pp. 42-49. doi:10.36348/sjm.2020.v05i01.009.

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