Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama (review)

Stevens, Camilla. Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama. Gainesville, Florida: UP of Florida, 2004. 271 pp. Camilla Stevens identifies that many critical studies focus on the importance of literature in the formation of Latin American national identity but that the role of theater and performance in this process is often overlooked. Her book, Family and Identity in Contemporary Cuban and Puerto Rican Drama, furthers scholarship in this area by exploring how the image of the family in theatrical works from these Caribbean islands “relates the struggle for national and cultural self-definition” (1-2). Using the family as a metaphor for national community, Stevens divides the book into two “Acts” in which she analyzes eight plays from each country that date from important periods of the twentieth century in order to draw attention to the formation of cultural identity. In addition to investigating the themes represented in these family/national dramas , the author also takes a closer look at the theatrical space constructed in each play as a key element in “theater’s distinct style of imagining the nation” (5). Her analysis is theoretically informed by important theater critics such as Diana Taylor, Marvin Carlson and Bertold Brecht, as well as literary and cultural critics such as Doris Sommers, Michel Foucault and Efraín Barradas. In Act 1, Stevens focuses on four plays from Puerto Rico and four from Cuba, in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In the first section of the chapter, “Four Failed Puerto Rican Family Romances,” the author looks at texts by Francisco Arriví, René Marqués and Myrna Casas as their plays reflect the polemic national politics of the era and the on-going discussion of what “constitutes puertorriquenidad” (17). To this end, Stevens traces the rise of the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) and the island’s cultural baggage with Antonio Pedreira’s essay Insularismo and René Marquéz’s El puertorriqueño dócil. Through onstage romantic and family unions (and disunions) between people of different races and social standing, Arriví, Marqués and Casas attempt to negotiate their nation’s identity in the face of their neo-colonial status. In the second part of Act 1, Stevens examines Cuba’s transition from Republic to Revolution in the streets and on the stage. Using the process of cubanía and Cuba’s translational aesthetic as defined by Gustavo Pérez-Firmat , the author demonstrates how pre-1959 family dramas by Rolando Ferrer and Virgilio Piñera and post-1959 dramas by Abelardo Estorino and José Triana perform children attempting to rebel against the stifling traditions of their parents mirroring the desire for change associated with the Revolution. While Aire frío and Lila, la mariposa criticize the stagnation of the Republican period , El robo del cochino and La noche de los asesinos comment upon the immediate needs, and perhaps shortcomings, of the Revolution. In Act 2, Stevens summarizes two decades of Puerto Rican literary and political history while focusing on the emergence of the Nueva Dramaturgia Reseñas 107 Puertorriqueña in the late 1960s which completely revitalized the island’s theater by taking a more postmodern approach to the ontological questions with which the previous generation grappled. The author analyzes texts from Antonio García del Toro, Roberto Ramos-Perea, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Myrna Casas as representative of the manner in which playwrights attempt to come to terms with Puerto Rican national identity in the 1980s and 1990s. After a long absence, the family returns to the stage in Hotel Melancolía and Callando amores as the authors nostalgically return to the past to criticize former representations of the family. In Quíntuples and El gran circo eukraniano Stevens notes that the family has moved from a closed home space to an open metatheatrical venue to suggest a dynamic Puerto Rican identity beyond the typical colonial and paternalistic discourses of the past. In the second part of Act 2, Stevens selects plays by Roberto Orihuela and Abelardo Estorino that attempt to help create a new socialist society by defining the role of the family in Cuba’s Revolutionary project. Basing her analysis on essays by...