American Calderón: A Prelude

AMERICAN CALDERÓN: A PRELUDE ANNE J. CRUZ In October, 1999, the Court Theatre on the University of Chicago campus staged Life's a Dream, a production in English of Calderón's La vida es sueño, under the inspired direction of JoAnne Akalaitis. A surprise hit, the play-which drew from the expertise of several calderonistas invited to take part in post-performance roundtables-awakened strong community interest in the Spanish comedia. With its swashbuckling prince, rapper gracioso , and stylized fan dances, the English version at times obscured the Spanish playwright's philosophical insights to highlight instead, at the director's cue, a postmodern spectacle overly reliant on her justified success with Shakespeare. If some dramatic significance was lost in the translation, however, there were many aesthetic, formal, and cultural aciertos: actor John Reeger's profoundly moving portrayal of King Basilio, at once cerebral and emotional; a stunning astrological backdrop, and the fortuitous inclusion of a haunting ballad by Rosaura. These and other felicitous elements helped restore the familiar Calderonian resonances of oedipal rivalry and life as dream. It is a truism that any refundición of canonical plays, on stage or on film, to attract contemporary audiences risks the critics' derision (despite his previous accomplishments in filming Shakespeare, for example, Kenneth Branagh's recent musical revamping of Love's Labour's Lost has come severely under attack ). Nonetheless, Akalaitis's willingness to direct the Golden Age comedids most canonical play merits our cultural gratitude as much as our critical pique. Since the year following the Court's run also marked the 400th anniversary of Calderón's 10BCom, Vol. 53, No. 1 (2001) birth, I thought it timely to evoke the American production by organizing, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in April 2000, a symposium called, appropriately, "American Calderón." The play was not the only reason I wished to draw attention to the symposium's "Americanness." The setting, an urban university in a city that is itself the pulsating center ofAmerica's heartland , provided an ideal location for the participants, most of whom teach at universities across the Great Plains. A consummate showtown, Chicago has long supported many theatrical forms: performance art, serious drama, historical plays, musical comedy, ethnic repertories, satire, and comedy shows. A quick count in no way gives the sum total of Chicago's professional stages: Steppenwolf, the Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, Goodman Theater, Ivanhoe Theater, Bailiwick Repertory, Black Ensemble Theater, Victory Gardens, the Athenaeum, and the Royal George Theater. Renovating the tradition of great American music halls, the Chicago, Orient, and Auditorium theaters fill seasonally to capacity. Experimental works debut off-Loop and in the North, South, and Western neighborhoods, while schools of drama rehearse at the Columbia College for the Arts, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, the Theater of the Art Institute, the University of Illinois, and DePaul University's Merle Riskin Theater. In light of Chicago's theatrical tradition, it was altogether fitting that a meeting honoring one of early modern Spain's most prolific playwrights-whose vast production of religious, historical , and mythological themes for autos, tragedies, tragicomedies, and comedies was intended as much for public consumption in the corrales and the streets as for elite palace showings-should take place in this, the most American of American cities. What better venue, then, for a gathering that, in honoring the Golden Age playwright, proposed to feature the sort of critical work that characterizes American scholarship? American students of the Spanish comedia, while trained in the best tradition of British Hispanism, Spanish philology, and continental stylistics, have devised an increasingly eclectic brand of criticism that productively incorporates recent analytical theories and revisionary views of early modern history. The contributors to this issue, whose essays were first presented as papers at the American Calderón symposium, are rep- CruzU resentatives of a "school" with no theoretical or ideological borders , yet recognizable precisely because of its openness. To this "school" belong the postmodern proponents of deconstruction and feminism, of psychoanalytical and "queer" theories, of new historicism, speech-act and performance theories, as well as of research utilizing the latest technology. This sort of criticism has maintained its edge for some time...