Griselda Gambaro's Theatre of Violence

Griselda Gámbaro (b. 1928) is one of Latin America's major writers. Her prolific work—twenty-eight plays, ten novels, many short stories, and children's books—is the subject of extensive dramatic and literary criticism in this country and abroad. Her plays appear in numerous anthologies and are regularly produced throughout Latin America and in much of Europe. All of her plays have been produced and published in Argentina from El desatino (The Blunder), which opened in 1965 at the legendary Instituto di Tella, known in the sixties for its avant-garde arts programs, up to her most recent, a dramatic monologue adapted from Chekhov's short story The Darling, which opened in Buenos Aires on August 8, 2003. Many of her plays have been translated into English and several have been published in the U.S., yet few have been produced here.

Argentina has a tradition of novelists and poets who are women, going back to the nineteenth century, but only a few women write plays. Several years ago Gámbaro told me, "Theatre writing is more direct than prose. I believe that all acts of writing are impudent, shameless, but drama especially, because you know that you are going to be on the stage through the actors. That's why theatre is more aggressive. It shows more. It is immodest." Gámbaro's work is deeply rooted in Argentina, where political events have often influenced the content of the plays as well as their structure and their expression. All of her plays are strong and penetrating abstract commentaries on passivity in the face of oppression and destruction, themes that have played out in her country since the mid-nineteenth century. Her plays deal "aggressively" and "immodestly" with themes of violence and power. Her style, often mistakenly identified as absurdist, is in fact an outgrowth of an Argentine theatre genre known as el grotesco criollo, created in the early 1920s by Armando Discépolo (1887-1971), a Neapolitan who came to Argentina at the turn of the last century, before he was twenty. Discépolo's exaggerated, distorted kind of black comedy has influenced many of Argentina's important contemporary playwrights, especially the generation that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, including Gámbaro who has said: "I don't see a connection between our theatre and Ionesco or Artaud. Our theatre is much more connected with a social element, and our plays deal directly with political and social content. All of our theatre is more or less political, and we are all political writers in one way or another. There is always implicit or explicit political content in our work, though it is not a goal."

Since 1930, Argentina has been governed by a series of military dictatorships alternating with elected "caudillo" civilians. In 1976, when the military took Isabel Perón out of office, General Jorge Rafael Videla assumed the presidency and launched the vicious "dirty war" against the opposition. During Videla's time, which lasted until 1983, it is estimated that 30,000 people "disappeared" in Argentina. One of Gámbaro's best-known plays, El campo (1967), written one year after a devastating military coup, is set in a space that could be a neo-Nazi concentration camp. (In Spanish,the word "campo" means both "camp" and "countryside.") Here, she explores the effects of torture and a recurrent theme regarding people who unwittingly allow themselves to become victims of authoritarian regimes or of their fellow man, and those who lack the assertion in their own nature to stand up for themselves and take action. Such characters seem to come straight out of Stanley Milgram's experiments in the 1960s on passivity and obedience to authority.

Gámbaro was one of many artists forced into self-imposed exile during Argentina's climate of terror in the 1970s. Because she feared possible reprisals to her family, she withheld...