Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation eds. by Harley Erdman and Susan Paun de García (review)

Across four centuries, the stage history of the Comedia has been dominated by "freewheeling adaptation"—that is, by refundición (remaking), a theatrical term popularized in the eighteenth century. In their brief preface the editors of Remaking the Comedia acknowledge that for most Comedia scholars, refundición, which connotes the recasting of metal and the creation of a new object by adding other components, has implied an inferior version of an original work. This fine volume argues that "the stage history of the Comedia is very much a history of the plays-as-remakes," and its twenty-six contributors detail how such adaptations make the works accessible and meaningful for contemporary audiences (xvii).

The four essays of the volume's initial section, "Theorizing," explore concepts of appropriation as well as established and emerging theories of adaptation. The chapter by Catherine Larson illuminates the terms and concepts used in adaptation studies and discusses ongoing concerns, such as the degree of fidelity to the original text and huge variations in audience knowledge. Susan Fischer's essay summarizes the literary theory of adaptation, and notes that adaptation itself can be considered the furthestmost product "of the collaborative reworking that occurs in transposing or translating any playtext for the stage" (16; emphasis in original). The director Alejandro González Puche offers an illuminating discussion of cross-cultural adaptations, arguing that the inherited orality of some isolated Afro-Colombian populations lets them easily embrace early Spanish drama. In "Re-Make, Re-Mix, Re-Model," Laurence Boswell (who directed important Comedia festivals in Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon) ultimately proposes "the Anglo-Hispanic Re-model," an approach that experimentally mixes English and Spanish within the same performance.

The volume's second part, "Surveying," examines the social and political contexts of comedia adaptation both within historical periods and across today's globe. Jonathan Thacker, evaluating recent English-language stagings of three plays by Lope de Vega, argues that translation and adaptation do not lessen the original, but can in fact animate and elucidate otherwise inaccessible material, as when a translated phrase prompts an actor to discover a meaning left dormant in the original. In their jointly written essay, Valerie Hegstrom and Amy Williamsen document the recent performance history of works by seventeenth-century women playwrights. Elsewhere in the volume, their observations are supplemented by director Karen Berman's discussion of María de Zayas's Friendship Betrayed (La traición en la amistad) and by Barbara Mujica's comparison of the twenty-first-century heroines inside Hugo Medrano's Stripping Don Juan (Valor, agravio y mujer by Ana Caro) to the often fuller, more active and athletic roles of the original actresses.

"Spotlighting" (part 3) is aptly named, since its chapters usually focus on only one or two productions; thus allowing readers to experience the creative process and discover techniques for contemporizing scenes. According to David Johnston's analysis of Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger (El perro del hortelano), translation is a "hermeneutic process whose method is interpretative" (105), and a translation produces infinite variations of the same text, depending on the translator, director, and audience itself. He compares his two translations of Dog in the Manger (2004 and 2008) and sets them against an older version by Victor Dixon. For Johnston, his own choices are never final, but instead offer language that evolves from his written versions, the table reads, the director's vision, and the actors' own choices made in performance. Bruce Burning-ham's "Corpus Lorqui" studies a 2008 production of Lope's El caballero de Olmedo and the director's controversial decision to place it within a dramatic framework that referenced both Lorca's 1936 assassination and Lorca's own production of Olmedo. Burningham also uncovers an intertextual relationship between the 2008 Olmedo and Calderón's El gran...