Maruxa Vilalta

• Born: September 23, 1932
• Birthplace: Barcelona, Spain
• Died: August 18, 2014
• Place of death: Mexico City, Mexico

Other Literary Forms

Although Maruxa Vilalta is known primarily as a playwright, she is the author of three novels and one collection of short stories.

Achievements

Maruxa Vilalta is known at home and abroad as an experimentalist, a playwright who with every new work further explores the possibilities of the theatrical medium. Her plays have been showcases for significant theatrical innovations since the mid-twentieth century, and they have been associated with names such as Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Bertolt Brecht. Vilalta has been concerned with the most pressing issues of the twentieth century, such as the loss of direction in a seemingly absurd world, humankind’s horrifying capacity for cruelty, and the corrupting allure of power. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that Vilalta’s plays are themselves often violent and shocking and that her characters are dehumanized grotesques.

Vilalta’s work, like much experimental theater since the 1960’s, means to assault rather than comfort audiences, and has a definite political intent while not being allied with any specific ideology. Instead, it makes a statement with a broad application, regardless of geography or culture. As a result, Vilalta has won audiences throughout Latin America, in the United States, Canada, and numerous European countries. In Mexico itself, Vilalta has three times received that country’s most prestigious drama award, the Alarcón Prize of the Mexican Critics Association—for Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, and The Story of Him. Number 9 was selected for publication in the United States as one of the best short plays of 1973. Vilalta’s major plays have been published in English as well as in French, Italian, Catalan, and Czech.

Vilalta won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz award for best play in 1976 for Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor. That same year, she was awarded the El Fígaro award for best play for The Story of Him. In 1991, she received the award for best play for A Voice in the Wilderness: The Life of Saint Jerome from the Agrupación de Periodistas Teatrales. The drama also won the Claridades award for best play of the year. The Asociación Mexicana de Críticos de Teatro gave the drama Francis of Assisi its award for the best creative research.

Biography

Maruxa Vilalta was born in Barcelona, Spain, on September 23, 1932. Her family, exiled from the Spanish Civil War, emigrated in 1939 to Mexico, where Vilalta has continued to reside. After completing her primary and secondary education at the Liceo Franco Mexicano in Mexico City, Vilalta studied Spanish literature at the college of philosophy and letters of the Autonomous National University of Mexico. She was married in 1951 and has two children.

Vilalta began her writing career as a novelist in 1957, with El castigo (the punishment). When, in 1959, she adapted her second published novel, Los desorientados (1958; the disoriented ones), for the stage, Vilalta was so impressed by the immediacy of the theatrical medium and the concrete life it gave to her characters that she dedicated herself thereafter almost exclusively to playwriting. While her early plays, especially Number 9, won for her considerable critical attention, it was in 1970, with Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, that she really established herself as one of Mexico’s leading experimental dramatists. This was the first of three plays that would win for her the coveted Alarcón Prize for the best play of the year; in 1978, The Story of Him won that prize on a unanimous vote, something rather rare in the award’s history.

In 1975, with the prizewinning Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, Vilalta began directing her own plays, and as a director, she has been closely associated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, which is considered the major focus for experimental play production in Mexico. Vilalta is also a noted essayist and theater critic for Mexico’s leading daily newspaper, Excelsior.

Analysis

Maruxa Vilalta’s playwriting fits within a universalist trend in Latin American theater, and for this reason, her plays are not peculiarly Mexican, either in their language, their characters, or their setting. This goes hand in hand with Vilalta’s rejection of more realistic stage conventions, which she considers too much associated with a local theater of customs or manners, what in Spanish is called costumbrismo. Instead, Vilalta usually prefers a nonrepresentational theater, whose characters belong to no specific country. When she does place them geographically, as in Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, it is in Manhattan, New York, and not in Mexico City.

Vilalta’s conscious effort to avoid things typically Mexican clearly places her on one side of a long-standing debate among fellow playwrights about how indigenous their art should be and the degree to which it should be valued based on international appeal. A similar debate has been waged by artists in most Latin American countries, who recognize the necessity to deal with their own reality but also do not want to be potentially isolated from world audiences. Many have chosen the same solution as Vilalta, which is to write plays that can be read as allegories. Thus, while on one level they may not have anything overtly Mexican about them, the issues with which they deal—the dehumanization of the labor force, the cruelty individuals inflict on one another, the institutionalization of violence—most certainly do. It is by indirection, then, that Vilalta makes a powerful commentary on the specific world in which she lives, while not actually having to place her characters there.

Vilalta often expresses her thematic concerns through the theatrical metaphor of game playing. Usually she keeps the number of players at two or three, and the intensity of the games may well explain her preference for one-act plays. The rules for the games her characters play are not always easy to follow, because they do not necessarily adhere to everyday logic. Their logic resides in the games themselves, which should be interpreted as metaphors and not concrete depictions of reality offstage.

Vilalta represents a considerable presence in Mexican experimental drama, and her plays show the clear influence of many major theater innovators of the twentieth century. Vilalta is not merely derivative, however, for she adapts these influences to her own ends. The result is a very personal theater, one that is not particularly Mexican in any obvious way but that still manages to make an indirect commentary on the social and political realities of Mexican culture. Moreover, although the vision of humankind that Vilalta paints is bleak in the extreme, critical and audience enthusiasm for her plays, both in Mexico and abroad, would seem to indicate playgoers’ recognition that, by emphasizing the negative, Vilalta ultimately hopes to provoke change for the better.

Number 9

Vilalta’s first important play, Number 9, takes place in a small yard behind a large factory. Everything there, which is not much—a wall, a bench, a trash can, some barbed wire—is a depressing, prisonlike gray color; the workers, themselves dressed in dull gray overalls, are the inmates of this dehumanized workplace. The game here is an unevenly matched one—the powerful forces of capitalism against the ordinary men and women who keep its machinery running. The violence done to them is camouflaged behind a smokescreen of cleanliness, order, and paternalism. The workers for Sunshine of Your Life, Ltd., labor with the most modern conveniences and under employers who care about their well-being, or so they are constantly told by a throaty female voice blaring at them over the loudspeaker in the yard. They supposedly have a spotless cafeteria, immaculate working areas, a complaints bureau—everything a labor force could ask for.

What this disembodied voice fails to mention, however, is that the workers to whom and of whom she speaks have no names, only numbers; they have become automatons, indistinguishable from the machines they operate, and their lives are as anesthetized as the colorless surroundings at the factory. The workers are cogs in a superefficient system that does not even stop to mourn the death of Number 9, who, in desperation to assert his individuality, has allowed himself to be mangled to death by the very machine that made his life intolerable. Only then does Number 9 regain an identity and his name—José.

In writing this play, Vilalta certainly felt the influence of the Theater of the Absurd, which gained popularity in the early 1960’s. The dominant mood of Number 9, with its often disjointed dialogue, sense of a repetitive action leading nowhere, schematic characters, and the gloomy picture painted of a pointless existence, is that of absurdism, but with one fundamental difference. Unlike the European variety, absurdism here is not an ontological or existential dilemma but a specifically socioeconomic one instead. Number 9 and his fellow workers are the playthings not of a disinterested or irrational god but rather of the cruel demigods of exploitative capitalism. Vilalta’s adaptation of the Theater of the Absurd was not an unusual one among Latin American playwrights of the period, many of whom emulated the movement’s theatrical innovations while not necessarily embracing its philosophical premises.

Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much

This same kind of adaptation takes place in Vilalta’s next important play, Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, except that in this case the game playing is a much more salient motif, and her mastery of the stage is more evident. Whereas Number 9 sometimes seems safe and unimaginative, with its obvious, if not clichéd, symbolism (the gray walls, the characters’ mechanical movements and speech patterns, Number 9’s suicide), here Vilalta is far bolder and more innovative. The principal characters in this play, Rosalía and Casimiro (also referred to as Her and Him), are a vicious old couple who have barricaded themselves behind the walls of their filthy apartment, where they delight in playing a humiliating game of one-upmanship. They cackle with glee as they debase each other, all the while congratulating themselves on the love they share and on their generous hearts, an ironic self-appraisal that explains the play’s title and that is reinforced by the way Rosalía and Casimiro refuse to aid a dying neighbor and by the nearly erotic pleasure they take in reading all the bad news about what is going on in the real world outside of their wretched little apartment.

In Together Tonight, Loving Each Other So Much, Vilalta once again writes the kind of illogical, sometimes quirky dialogue that is associated with the Theater of the Absurd. In many ways, Rosalía and Casimiro are rather nastier versions of the old couple in Eugène Ionesco’s Les Chaises (pr. 1952; The Chairs, 1957), but they are also reminiscent of two other famous absurdist couples. Like Didi and Gogo in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954), Rosalía and Casimiro live a routinized life of waiting. She spends her days knitting and he smoking his pipe, always in anticipation of a dinner hour that never comes. Like George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (pr., pb. 1962), Vilalta’s husband and wife fill their time with cruel and maiming verbal games.

As in Number 9, however, Vilalta molds aspects of the Theater of the Absurd to her own purposes. In this instance, she combines them with multimedia techniques and methods that were popularized by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in the creation of his so-called epic theater. A notable example of this is when Vilalta has Rosalía and Casimiro read the newspaper, while other characters appear onstage—a General, a Dictator, a Hangman—at the same time that slides depicting real events having to do with war, famine, torture, and repression are projected onto a screen. In this way, Vilalta is able to connect her characters’ private, domestic horror with the public horrors of twentieth century life, without ever having to verbalize it.

Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor

In Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, the theatrical kinship is closer to the English dramatist Harold Pinter, who writes seemingly realistic plays that are in fact quite strange and offbeat. The stage set in this Vilalta play is meant to be a realistic depiction of an elegant apartment in Manhattan. The three characters—Max, Stella, and Jerome—are not such obvious abstractions as Number 9 or Him and Her. Jerome, a young electrician, is called to the apartment by Max, who has actually tampered with the electrical systems in order to lure him there. Max insults Jerome because of his working-class background and then bullies him into having sex with his live-in prostitute, Stella. During the following months, Stella shares her favors with both men and their ménage à trois becomes a power struggle with shifting roles of dominance. At first, Jerome is repulsed by the game, but he finds that he cannot resist the allure of sex, power, and material goods with which Max and Stella entice him. By the end of the play, he is no different from his tormentors, and it is only then, with the three characters equally matched, that they can play their games for even higher stakes.

While there is nothing obviously unrealistic about this play, the subtle undercurrents in its mood signal that these characters are not quite what they appear to be. Vilalta manages to create this mood mostly through the dialogue, which sounds very ordinary but which, on closer inspection, proves to be too loaded with double meanings, sinister innuendos, ambiguities, and symbolism to be simple, everyday talk. Characterization is also deceptive, for although the characters at first seem the sort to be readily defined by their surface, there is something not quite concrete about them. This is especially true of the woman, who changes her name from Jane to Stella to Samantha, depending on her male partner, and is actually more a product of masculine wishful thinking than a real person, rather like Ruth in Pinter’s The Homecoming (pr., pb. 1965). Similarly, the characters in Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor, despite superficial touches of realism, are more (and less) than they appear to be. The play is not a psychological exploration of the sexual games that a few people play; the characters represent what could become of all human society. As one of them says, “Three on the sixteenth floor, or a million all over the world.”

The Story of Him

The Story of Him marks a notable change in both the form and content of Vilalta’s plays. The story it tells is of a lowly bank clerk named simply Él (Him) and his rise through the world of finance into the political arena and, ultimately, the highest office of an unspecified country. In the process, he leaves behind a trail of broken hearts and bodies, only to end up a hollow shell of a man, a twisted tyrant who blabbers about revolution while tyrannizing his people.

Because this is such a familiar tale in Latin American history, The Story of Him is easily Vilalta’s most overtly political play and marks the first time that she makes repeated reference or allusion to Mexico. Whereas before she relied on a single setting and casts of two or three, here there are eighty-seven characters and at least thirteen different settings in seventeen different scenes that are given continuity by one character—The Reader—who functions as a narrator and commentator. The rapid set changes and broadly sketched characters give the play a cartoonlike quality that is very effective in ridiculing the madness of power politics without ever trivializing it. In fact, even though he is a caricature, the central character has an emotional depth that makes him the most human and pathetic of Vilalta’s creations and The Story of Him the most satisfying of her plays.

A Woman, Two Men, and a Gunshot

The broad brushstrokes used to render the cast of characters in The Story of Him become even broader in A Woman, Two Men, and a Gunshot and A Little Tale of Horror (and Unbridled Love), where Vilalta tries her hand at humor. A Woman, Two Men, and a Gunshot consists of four brief one-acts that parody certain theatrical styles: melodrama, Theater of the Absurd, Surrealism, and Broadway musicals. Because Vilalta herself has used some of these styles, she is also poking fun at herself; one of these playlets, “In Manhattan That Night,” is in many ways a humorous rendition of Nothing Like the Sixteenth Floor.

A Little Tale of Horror (and Unbridled Love)

A Little Tale of Horror (and Unbridled Love) is more farce than parody and revolves around mistaken identities, gender confusions, a murder, and the inevitable sinister butler. With these plays, Vilalta explores new territory without leaving behind her usual thematic concerns, although these do seem secondary to her preoccupation with humorous effect—a shift in emphasis that might explain why these plays have not received the degree of critical success that her others have enjoyed.

Francis of Assisi

In her play about Saint Francis of Assisi, Vilalta searched for authenticity in her depiction of the legendary saint. She sought to demystify his image and reveal him as a man who followed the teaching of the Gospel as steps guiding him toward consciousness of God. Vilalta researched historical records for years in order to approach her topic as accurately as possible with documented sources. The dramatic action results in a fascinating biographical study of a complex figure.

A Voice in the Wilderness

Saint Jerome’s internal conflicts are explored in A Voice in the Wilderness: The Life of Saint Jerome. The drama reconstructs the visionary world of the saint as it blends history with fiction. The biographical study takes shape as a journey that gradually reveals the mysteries of a life devoted to the quest for wisdom.

En blanco y negro

In En blanco y negro: Ignacio y los jesuitas (in black and white, Saint Ignatius and the Jesuits), the last segment of her trilogy devoted to the lives of saints, Saint Ignatius of Loyola exemplifies the contradictions of the Catholic Church. The play dramatizes the conflicts among Jesuits as Saint Ignatius embodies the condition of Jesuits in contemporary Latin America. Vilalta’s play examines the Theology of Liberation in action and the negative repercussions of its practice. The plot dramatizes the reality of priests murdered for defending the rights of minorities and supporting others who fight for liberty and human dignity.

1910

1910won Vilalta critical acclaim. The epic dramatizes the commoners’ experience of the Mexican Revolution. As director as well as playwright, she intended to demonstrate how theater was the perfect medium for the Mexican Revolution, which played out as the history of passions. Vilalta’s 168 characters portray anonymous townspeople and farmers, not famous military or governmental figures. She intended to demythicize the revolution. Rather than political heroics or the official story of history, 1910 portrays child soldiers, women guerrilleras fighting among the men, violence inflicted by the campesinos on themselves, and thoughtless yet pure acts of heroism. Vilalta’s Mexico reveals the realities of all wars.

Like most of Vilalta’s plays, 1910 exposes sociopolitical problems that extend beyond Mexico. She denounces governments that practice dictatorial abuses behind a facade of democracy while they dehumanize their citizens. Power in interpersonal relations is examined in all its facets and degrees, from the abuser to the abused.

Bibliography

Bearse, Grace, and Lorraine E. Roses. “Maruxa Vilalta: Social Dramatist.” Revista de estudios hispánicos 43 (October, 1984): 399-406. An analysis of Vilalta’s role as a social dramatist.

Cajiao Salas, Teresa, and Margarita Vargas. Women Writing Women: An Anthology of Spanish American Theater of the 1980’s. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. The authors analyze Vilalta’s dramaturgy and provide detailed bibliographical information. They include an English translation by Kirsten F. Nigro of A Woman, Two Men, and a Gunshot.

Gladhart, Amalia. The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. This study explores contemporary controversial playwrights with sociopolitical messages. Gladhart examines several of Vilalta’s plays.

“Maruxa Vilalta.” In Dictionary of Mexican Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. A concise biographical treatment of Vilalta.