Out of Place: Space as Trope in Recent Argentine Theatre

Although any performance we see necessarily affects how we read and interpret the play or performance text, scholarly critics seldom address this aspect of theatre and how the choices made during the course of production refigure or enhance textual elements and impact the construction of meaning. Focusing specifically on the deployment of scenic space as a generator of meaning and developing on the premises of Ubersfeld and McAuley, this essay examines three twenty-first-century productions of Argentine plays: Eduardo Rovner's Lejana tierra mía, Patricia Suárez's "La Varsovia," and Griselda Gambaro's La señora Macbeth and argues that space, literal and figurative, metaphoric and metonymic, is far more important in theatre than we have often acknowledged and has too seldom been afforded the serious critical attention it deserves.