Dreaming a Post-Colonial Calderón: José Rivera's Sueño

In 1998, the Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera wrote an adaptation of Calderón's La vida es sueño. The play, entitled simply Sueño, represents a post-colonialist re-imagining of the celebrated Spanish comedia. While ostensibly adhering to the original plot "moment by moment," Rivera nevertheless transforms the tone and language of the source in order to offer a critique of imperialist policies, both historic and modern. In addition, Sueño dramatizes the challenges and rewards of adapting a prestigious literary model, a process that Rivera identifies as "Oedipal." The contemporary play invites a dialectical, intertextual approach, and it would be difficult to appreciate its full import without the counterpoint provided by the progenitor text. This article examines the manner in which a modern playwright with a clear ideological agenda confronts the canonicity and authority of the seventeenth-century masterpiece.