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  • Echoes of Strindberg in Contemporary Chile
  • Miriam Felton-Dansky (bio)

El Pelícano (The Pelican), by August Strindberg, directed by Muriel Miranda, Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile, July 2008; Las Huachas (The Bastards), written and directed by Alexis Moreno, Universidad Católica, Santiago, Chile, July 2008.

Once in a while, an obscure play has its moment: a time when, after languishing in libraries and on university syllabi, it makes an unlikely reappearance and touches a cultural nerve. Santiago, Chile—a noisy, smoggy city sandwiched between the towering Andes and the sea—might seem like a less-than-obvious place to stage August Strindberg’s post-inferno chamber plays of the early-twentieth century. And The Pelican, a domestic drama with apocalyptic overtones, is certainly a less-than-obvious selection from his works. But in July 2008, a century after it was written and half-way across the world from Strindberg’s native Sweden, two productions—one an adaptation of The Pelican, the other a new play on similar themes—remade that play as an allegory for cultural forces long at work in Chilean society, revealing historical shifts and condensing social fears.

The Pelican, Strindberg’s final chamber play, and one of his last works, is a fevered, vicious parable of inter-generational sabotage. Magnifying nineteenth-century social Darwinist fears about hereditary disease and the fate of the middle classes into paranoid symbolist nightmare, the play chronicles the revenge of a brother and sister on their abusive, inheritance-obsessed mother. This matriarch—the last in a succession of vampires to haunt Strindberg’s dramatic imagination—searches for her dead husband’s account books while starving her children of nutrition (and any hope of a future). As the malnourished siblings marshal their wills to confront her, a strain of alchemical imagery courses through the play, culminating in a scene of physical and spiritual apotheosis: the immolation of the old world in a fire that consumes the family and house together.

El Pelícano—a new Spanish-language adaptation of Strindberg’s text by the young Chilean company Maleza (their name means “Weeds”)—opened at Centro Cultural Matucana 100, a theatre center in northwest Santiago, in July [End Page 83] 2008. Meanwhile, Las Huachas (“The Bastards”)—the newest work by playwright and director Alexis Moreno—exorcised similar paranoias in the theatre of Santiago’s Catholic University. Playing across the city from each other, the two productions channeled preoccupations with impotence, consumption, and generational conflict. Both obliquely summoned the specters of Chile’s own plagued past, suggesting a younger generation uneasy with its cultural and political inheritances, seeking nourishment or restitution from its parents, while it disavows the violent repression of earlier eras.

In Maleza’s El Pelícano, Strindberg’s poisoned home is an enormous dollhouse, and his embattled family is portrayed onstage by live actors, and on an upstage screen by their tiny doubles, clay figurines. A group of recent university graduates, led by director Muriel Miranda (in El Pelícano, she also plays the the daughter), Maleza has begun to make its name combining live theatre with stop-motion animation, a style that becomes potent when used to illuminate a netherworld as bleak and violent as Strindberg’s. The Pelican’s story is filtered through the distorted consciousness of its febrile younger generation, and the company’s choice of medium establishes its fidelity to this child’s-eye view, even as its charming effigies undermine Strindberg’s congenital pessimism. The result is, by turns, innocuous and brutal: internecine bloodletting, Wallace and Gromit-style.

If Strindberg’s vision was apocalyptic and totalizing, Maleza’s fits snugly into its animated frame, a compression that doesn’t diminish the play so much as create room for the spectator to stay outside it, reading the production’s unstated social and political surround. This contraction is accomplished both through physical scale and through a literal approach to the theme of childhood: Maleza turns everything onstage into a toy. The audience enters to the tinkling strains of a music box, playing on a loop that slows almost to silence, then grudgingly repeats itself. The lights go down on a miniature house center stage, complete with clapboard...

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