Physical Imagery in the Works of Griselda Gámbaro

Physical Imagery in the Works of Griselda Gambaro SANDRA MESSINGER CYPESS • ONE OF LATIN AMERICA'S more prominent dramatists is Griselda Gambaro of Argentina. Her reputation is well established in her own country and she has begun to gain recognition in the United States as her plays have become more readily available. Her dramatic world has been compared to the Theatre of the Absurd in general.! In addition, Tamara Holzapfel has already stated her belief that Gambaro fulfills the "basic requisites of the theatre as envisioned by Artaud by using non-rhetorical language integrated with gestures and all kinds of sound, by incorporating psychological cruelty and physical violence, and by assigning primary importance to the mise-en-scene."2 It is the purpose of this paper to offer a detailed examination of the four available plays of Gambaro in relation to the Artaudian theories on the importance ofphysical imagery on stage.3 Martin Esslin has observed that Artaud "wanted to restore the language of gesture and movement, to make inanimate things play their part in the action, and to relegate dialogue ... to the background."4 Artaud, of course, was not the first to emphasize the importance of objects on stage, for Jean Cocteau had already referred to a special kind of poetic language for the stage in the preface to Les Maries de fa Tour Eiffel.5 Nevertheless, it was Artaud who seriously proposed a movement away from a purely verbal theatre to one which incorporated "movements, shapes, colors, vibrations, attitudes, screams."6 Artaud did not wish to suppress speech in theatre, but rather to change its role, reducing its position . To do this, he advocated that the dramatist make use of "everything 357 358 SANDRA MESSINGER CYPESS in the theatre that is special and significant in the concrete domain."7 Although Artaud's own theatrical endeavors may have ended in failure, his theories continue to influence other dramatists. Gambaro acknowledges her familiarity with The Theatre and Its Double;8 her plays - The Walls (Las paredes, 1963), The Blunder (EI desatino, 1965), The Siamese Twins (Los siameses, 1967), and The Camp (EI campo, 1967), indicate that she has assimilated his theories and integrated them into her own theatrical art. The importance of physical space and its manipulation for thematic purposes is graphically demonstrated in The Walls.9 The title itself refers to the significant role of the walls in the action. In this playa young man finds himself detained against his will for offenses unknown to him, very much like the protagonist of Kafka's The Trial. Unlike K., however, the young man finds himself in a strange room which becomes his limited world from that moment on. Gambaro's character is manipulatedby his two adversaries so that at the end he is more like a mindless automaton than a human being. This character transformation is reflected in a parallel diminution of the physical surroundings. That is, as the youth loses his dignity and honor as a gentleman, the initial well-appointed room where he was first brought becomes progressively less comfortable, with fewer furnishings, and always smaller in space. The youth's impression is not that he is being moved to different rooms, as is suggested at the end, but that somehow the same room has become frighteningly smaller as the walls close in on him. For the youth, his ever-decreasing living space becomes an active opponent in a threatening world; for the spectator, the diminishing physical space of the stage has come alive with dramatic meamng. Objects also playa part in the action of The Walls. The youth's watch, a gift from his father, is taken from him as an indication that he has been robbed of his past and denied the right to count on time as a present or future possibility. Just as his room is stripped bare ofits accessories , so, too, is he dispossessed of his right to be called a gentleman (caballero). A statue brought to him from the outside world assumes a role parallel to the youth's - in a sense his double - for at the end, the two are equally incapable ofindependent action. In The Blunder objects again have an...