Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina (review)

Brenda Werth’s Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina (2010) is a very valuable contribution to late twentieth and twenty-first century studies of theater and performance in this River Plate nation. Its worth lies in two main thrusts: first, it re-conceives canonical texts by dramatists like Gorostiza, Pavlovsky, Cossa, and Gambaro under the new and contemporary rubric of memory politics and human rights, and secondly, this book provides a fresh look at emerging performance artists/activists and theatrical pieces that are laying the foundation for a new direction in the dramatic arts in Argentina. This mix allows Werth to contextualize and anchor her discussion within the well-worn path of dictatorship and post-dictatorship studies, but also gives her the freedom to present us with new readings and innovative strategies for understanding the transition to democracy, the years of the crísis, and beyond. The plays and performances studied span the years from roughly 1982–2009. Her approach can be summed up in three basic avenues of analysis which center around: 1) the “vulnerabilities of the human body” as they pertain to the post-dictatorship in Argentina, but also in global economic, human rights, and legal systems, 2) the process of “mourning and the reconstruction of community” within the discourse of national reconciliation, especially in the context of a “tabula rasa approach,” and 3) the ways in which theater “complements and contests legal and political performances staged outside a conventional theatrical framework” (2–3).

The book is comprised of six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. All of the chapters are marked with a level of detail to research that is seldom found. Most impressive is Werth’s injection of a wide-variety of Argentine criticism into the more traditional North American and European references she uses to frame her arguments. The introduction sets up the themes of post-memory, trauma, impunity, reconciliation, international law, and global human rights. These topics are then couched within the historical context of the Argentine dictatorship and post-dictatorship period through brief accounts of events and performances. The first chapter, “Transition and the Performance of Retroactive Justice,” focuses on the Argentine commission’s 1984 Nunca más report along with the trial of the generals, to which Werth juxtaposes Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa (1986) as a theatrical tool for recuperating agency through witnessing. In her second chapter, “From Antigone to Orpheus: Alternative Myths and Figures of Mourning,” she traces the various theatrical incarnations of the Antigone figure in plays about mothers and mourning, written by Gambaro and others, but she also introduces the figure of Orpheus and other plays to include men in the spectacle of mourning during and after the dictatorship. The third chapter, “Performing Confessions Onstage and on the Stand,” looks at how Pavlovsky, like Gambaro, needed to respond to the new realities and national psyche of the post-dictatorship, but shows how his methodology differed. His discourses of confession foreshadow the 1990s’ onslaught of televised and published confessions by those involved in crimes against humanity during the dictatorship who thought they were protected by President Carlos Saúl Menem’s pardons. However, these amnesties were beginning to be questioned by new international laws. Chapter four, “Argentina’s Postdictatorial Stages: Resting Places and Places of Unrest,” discusses the polemic figure of Rosas during the 1982 staging of La malasangre, the uprising it caused in the wake of the dictatorship and just after the defeat of the Malvinas War, and the impact of the nineteenth-century persona during Menem’s repatriation and burial of Rosas’ body just as he took office. Just as Menem was laying to rest the nation’s past through Rosas’ reburial and his pardoning of the dictatorship’s generals, Monti’s 1989 Una pasión sudamericana resuscitated the legacy and cast irony over the official rhetoric of amnesia that was pervasive under the new administration. In chapter five, “Argentina’s Middle Class: Paradigm of Crisis and Renewal,” Werth looks at the effects of Menem’s...