Tres Tristes Teresas

The tagline on publicity for the recent biographical play of the life of Teresa of Ávila, God’s Gypsy, reads “Before she was a saint, she was a woman.”¹ However, after she was a woman, but before she was a saint, she was a text. Of course, we can only know figures of the sixteenth century through their textual legacy, but in Teresa’s case we are more easily misled into thinking we know the true Teresa because among her writings is a first-person account of her spiritual development. The very title of that text—el Libro de la vida—invites us to speculate as to the relationship between life and life-story, and indeed, Teresa’s life has been a frequent subject of dramatic representation. It should come as no surprise, given the Baroque penchant for theater, that Teresa’s life should have been the subject of comedias de santos during the seventeenth century, but modern playwrights continue to return to Teresa. The past five years have seen at least three new productions that place Teresa on stage: the aforementioned God’s Gypsy, Jesús Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos, and a 2014 Almagro production titled Escrito por Santa Teresa de Ávila. These works—a full-ensemble American production adapted from Barbara Mujica’s historical novel Sister Teresa, a two-person imagined dialogue between Teresa and an unnamed Inquisitor, with much of the dialogue drawn from the Vida, and a one-woman show with a script composed entirely of Teresa’s own writings—reflect the diversity of dramatic approaches to the relationship between Teresa and her words. To adapt Alison Weber’s observation that Teresa’s Life had “three lives” in her own times,² we might say that these three plays represent not so much three divergent dramatic approaches to Teresa’s life as three divergent approaches to the relationship between her life and her Life.

I propose to examine these traditions,³ not for the purpose of judging their theatrical merits or historical accuracy, but because the divergent approaches shed light on the nature of the original work and original Teresa, and on the nature of the relation between those two. At first glance, the adaptation of an autobiography to theater would seem a simple reversal of the initial autobiographic process; writing an autobiography converts a life into a text, adapting the text to the stage would re-embody the text, re-creating the life. However, lives are not large files that can be compressed and then unzipped to their original state. And, of course, theater is not life; while stage may restore image and sound to the written word and flesh to the speaking subject, the space of the stage and the time of the play are not the space and time of life. This article considers three paradigmatic productions that diverge in the linguistic and performative strategies chosen to bring Teresa to life: Lope de Vega’s Santa Teresa de Jesús (1622), José María Rodríguez Méndez’s Teresa de Ávila (1982), and Jesús Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos (2009). The comparison is useful because the theatrical choices can reflect back and give more insight into the text itself and the life it purports to tell/be.

The theatrical adaptations of Teresa’s life began shortly after her death, when Lope de Vega wrote Santa Teresa de Jesús for her canonization.⁴ Lope’s play is loosely based on Teresa’s life, most likely drawn from the Church accounts prepared in the canonization process and not the Vida itself, which is never quoted in the play. Lope overlays the historically documented facets of his subject’s life with the elements of two distinct generic traditions: the comedia de enredos, and hagiography. The comedia overlay dominates the first Act, with two rival lovers competing for Teresa’s hand. This plot is entirely fictitious, an elaboration on a few scant mentions in the Vida that Teresa was attracted to a cousin and distracted by “vanidades.” The biographical truth of the first act lies in the representation of Teresa’s doubts...