Hacia una poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila (review)

Antonio Escobar Delgado begins the thoroughly researched Hacia una poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila by noting that, with the exception of a handful of Mexican playwrights that have achieved canonical status, there is a lack of integral, monographic studies that survey the body of work of individual Mexican dramatists. When conducting research in Latin American theater often one must be content with critical analyses that focus solely on individual works or themes common among various plays and playwrights. Therefore, it is refreshing to come across a scholarly book that delves into the career-long artistic trajectory of a playwright about whom relatively little has been written in comparison to his contemporaries of the generation of La Nueva Dramaturgia Mexicana.

While ambitious in scope, Escobar Delgado’s study of the theater of Jesús González Dávila follows a fairly simple format. After a brief chapter that surveys the theatrical landscape in Mexico at the beginning of González Dávila’s career, Escobar Delgado organizes the chapters by grouping, in mostly chronological order, plays that illustrate the various stages of the playwright’s artistic career. Each chapter begins with an overview of the theatrical field in Mexico at the time as well as salient points pertaining to González Dávila’s personal and professional life, followed by a synopsis and thorough literary analysis of the plays in question. Furthermore, the author provides and comments on the journalistic and critical reception the plays received when staged in Mexico City. In spite of this somewhat rigid format, the book reads easily as Escobar Delgado writes with clear, concise language and includes entertaining biographical anecdotes and glimpses into the politics, finances, and power players of Mexican theater in the last decades of the twentieth century.

The book closes powerfully with a chapter entitled “Hacia una poética del fracaso” in which Escobar Delgado synthesizes the common aspects explored earlier to find that the central element of González Dávila’s theater is “el fracaso.” Escobar Delgado avers that in González Dávila’s theater, characters act solely on impulse and passion in absolute social and communicative isolation to the point that they lose their essence of being. Unable to effect change, they have no chance at transcendence. According to Escobar Delgado, this worldview speaks to and on behalf of the daily reality of the vast majority of the population, which lives in a society defined by inequality.

At the end of the book, Escobar Delgado provides abundant supplementary material including an impressive bibliography that comprises academic writing as well as journalistic articles. This is followed by appendices that detail all of González Dávila’s plays staged in Mexico City and a thirty-page timeline that covers the life and work of the playwright as well as theatrical, cultural, and historic panoramas.

As shown in Hacia un poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila, the themes of the marginalized, a society in decline, the loss of individualism, social isolation, disappointment, and failure, while common in Mexican theater, are treated in a truly unique way in the hands of González Dávila. For this reason, the playwright’s works deserve more critical study. As such, Escobar Delgado’s book is a step in that direction and an important work of scholarship that would be of interest to those pursuing critical studies in contemporary Mexican theater.