Writing the Performance: Stage Directions and the Staging of Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa

As comedia critics and theater professionals explore the relationship between text and performance, the semiotic function of the stage directions in classical Hispanic dramatic texts—specifically, the ways that playscripts dictate performance—merits a closer look. The first part of this essay addresses the function of the didascalia in Golden Age drama; the second part relates staging information to a representative text, Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa. Because the number and nature of Sor Juana's staging cues in Los empeños are representative of those found in countless other comedias, a clearer understanding of its stage directions can help to bridge the gap between readings and stagings of the play. Sor Juana's drama underscores the reader's role in creating a potential performance text that combines diverse elements: explicit stage directions, implicit staging information found in the dialogue, comparisons of and contrasts between the stated and the unstated, between text and context. Despite the relative scarcity of explicit stage directions in Los empeños, the entire amalgam of staging clues found in the play can aid the contemporary reader in translating the play's substance into enactment and in examining the entire process of reading texts written for the stage.