Notes from the Ivory Labyrinth of Solitude

When I was asked to contribute a personal essay to this forum, I was very much tempted to take the charge literally and open with a personals ad, something like, "Desperately seeking colleagues in theatre studies to share long discursive walks through Our América. . . ." As you can see, I wasn't completely successful in fighting down that temptation, because, in truth, when I'm not feeling like an unrequited lover, I'm feeling at the very least like I am missing something my colleagues in Euro-American theatre can enjoy more regularly. So, this essay is a reflection on some of the factors that keep my dearest friends and colleagues and me from having meaningful conversations, in our own disciplinary home, about Latin American theatre in all its manifestations—from pre-Columbian indigenous drama through the high modernism of its national stages to the present rich and internationally oriented moment.

Perhaps the first and most obvious factor is that of language. As one of my graduate students recently shared with me, having grown up in Arizona, she had been conditioned to think of Spanish as an inferior language not suited to erudition. I would argue that this view is shared by theatre history studies, which originally cared more for the languages of antiquity, and later for drama and theory generated in England, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia, than it ever has for work from Spain (or Portugal, or all the West African and Asian countries that contributed to the current demography of Latin America). This is not for lack of English translations of Latin American plays available—the number is growing and they speak to a great diversity of themes and approaches. But I still haven't been able to answer to my own satisfaction why it is that Chekhov in translation is such an easier sell than almost any Latin American playwright one might propose staging in the university theatre season.

And that brings me to another point: to the extent that US theatre departments offer training programs and training programs are often tied either to commercial theatres or to the norms and expectations they create, we in theatre departments will always be fighting for a place at the table until the professional US theatre recognizes Latin American theatre in a more consistently meaningful way. I have been encouraged recently to see an unprecedented number of theatre departments advertising for specialists in some configuration of theatre of the Americas, but I remain concerned about how difficult it remains to actually produce this kind of theatre. As Patricia Ybarra commented after reading an earlier draft of this essay, this difficulty makes Latin American theatre a site of exotic and fundable inquiry, but not one that can be rendered familiar through performance. (Unless you make your way over to departments of Spanish and Portuguese, where students and faculty are staging wonderful works—but not in English . . . .) And to the extent that theatre productions are, as they should be, integrated with curricula, the serious study of Latin American theatre in theatre departments is marginalized academically as well. Only with the latest edition of Brockett and Hildy does Latin America appear at all, and then only after European contact.

This brings me to another point, about theatre historiography generally and the provisions it does and doesn't make for Latin American theatre specifically. Several years ago my husband brought home a treasure from a used book store: the winter 1970 issue of TDR which, like this issue of Theatre Journal, was devoted to Latin American theatre. In her introduction, editor Erika Munk called attention to the divergent viewpoints of two of its principal contributors:

Despite the difficulties created by imperialism and repression, the theatre [Joanne Pottlitzer] describes is growing; it is relevant to its society and aesthetically worth the attention of ours. In the Latin America Richard Schechner visited, there is no theatre. There are some dead shapes moving about on proscenium stages, but all we North Americans need to know about Latin America is what we've done to it, and all they need to know is who they...