La Casa De Los Espíritus (The House of the Spirits) by Caridad Svich (review)

Based on Isabel Allende’s first and most celebrated novel, published in 1982, the GALA Hispanic Theatre production of Las Casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits) leveraged theatre as a means of asserting the diasporic Latina/o voice in the representation of Latin American history. GALA’s production was the latest rendering of the adaptation in a five-year collaboration between Obie Award–winning playwright Caridad Svich and ACE Award–winning director José Zayas. Their collaboration celebrated Allende’s novel as a major text of Latin American letters. Svich’s way into the novel emphasized the experience of “los desaparecidos” (“the disappeared”), the term for the thousands of civilians who were secretly detained by military regimes across South America during the 1970s and ’80s. Victims were tortured and murdered by agents of the regimes, which received tactical support from the United States, such as Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. In Svich’s adaptation, Alba Trueba narrates the play’s episodes from what, in an interview, Zayas called “a moment of pain” as she is tortured at the hands of a military officer, Colonel Esteban García. Trauma is often defined as a violent, unspeakable experience that victims can only enunciate after significant temporal and psychological distance. Yet, articulating both the spoken and the written word from within the traumatic event was posited as a necessity for survival. The director’s staging depicted the trauma that Alba suffered mimetically through realism, while the text, projection design, and mise en scène estranged the play’s action. Mimetic and epic theatrical registers were continuously in tension with each other throughout the performance, and allowing this tension to remain unresolved produced a spectatorship that implicated the bodies of the audience in the retelling of history. Svich and Zayas’s refashioned the convention of the passive spectator into one that was both a witness, through estrangement, and an accomplice, through proximity and silence.

Spanning fifty years in the history of an unnamed Latin American country, Svich’s adaptation unpacks Allende’s family saga through the perspective of its women. Alba survives her forced detainment and torture through a spiritual connection with her grandmother, Clara—a clairvoyant and spiritualist. This metaphysical connection, which is the spine of the play, stages a space and time shared by the family’s women that is alternative to the violent history of colonialism and patriarchy. Moving in and out of this metaphysical space, Alba inscribes the testimony of her torture, a testimony that is contiguous with her family’s history that unfolds through the play’s episodic structure. The play soon introduces its antihero, Esteban Trueba, Alba’s grandfather. Throughout the action, Trueba makes his fortune after taking over his family’s ranch estate, gets married, and has a family. He becomes involved in politics, supports a military coup, and ends up withered, isolated, powerless, and penniless. Placing Alba and her matrilineal ancestors—Nivea, Rosa, Clara, and Blanca—at the center, Svich reexamines the enigmatic patriarch, unveiling the role that the violence inflicted by Trueba plays in the destiny of his family and country.

Multitemporal exchanges of thought among the women propound spiritualism as a technology of testimony and historiography. Projections, designed by Alex Koch, aided in the storytelling of these multitemporal bridges, while estranging the brutally mimetic scenes of torture that frame the family saga. In the opening scene, Alba (played by Natalia Miranda-Guzmán) sat on a stool, exhausted, blindfolded, her hands tied, while García (Carlos Castillo) shouted at her. García’s interrogation quickly digressed as he pushed Alba to her feet and groped her. He then began to force himself on her when a swirling sea of projected graphemic inscriptions enveloped the scene. The lights changed and Alba remained alone onstage. The projected images of handwritten script returned, this time...