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The Duality ofPower in the Theater ofLuis Riaza HAZEL CAZORLA The year 1975 marked in Spain the end of an era: with the passing of the dictatorship, Spanish intellectuals and artists were about to taste a freedom unknown for forty years. Dramatists whose talents had necessarily been exercised under the constraints of censorship and the pressures of a dogmatic society were suddenly able to write with unaccustomed liberty. When comparing the arts in post-war Spain with those of the rest of Europe and the United States, critics had always taken into account the fact that Spaniards labored under the disadvantage of a peculiarly Spanish type of ultrapuritanical censorship imposed after the excesses of the Civil War. To be a writer under the Franco regime, especially in such a highly visible art as the theater, meant having to dupe the authorities, if possible, by exercising all sorts ofingenuity to get one's message through to a limited minority. Some writers, frustrated by the endless obstacle race, gave up the struggle to write creatively within their native country, choosing exile or silence.' Many others (and to them we owe the continuance of the Spanish theater) chose what came to be known as the way of "posibilismo," that is, of writing within the possibilities of the given situation, in the belief that to keep the theater alive it was necessary to find a way to publish and produce plays somehow. even if it meant outwardly complying with the censor's whims. Censored theater was better than no theater at all, they reasoned, and, ironically, some of the best features of their work resulted precisely from the necessity of having to cope with this difficulty.2 When, almost overnight, the political scene changed and the old repressive framework was no longer there, some critics began to wonder what Spanish writers would do with their new-found freedom. It may be too soon to say that we are entering a period of renewed vitality within the Spanish theater, but the signs visible since 1975 are encouraging. Aside from the almost adolescent delight in being able to shock which is discernible in the immediate widespread The Theater of Luis Riaza 37 appearance of stage nudity and obscenity (a rather predictable overreaction to so many years of puritanism and hypocrisy), there seems to be a new kind of excitement in the stage productions recently offered in Madrid and Barcelona. One playwrigbt in particular, Luis Riaza, seems likely to become an important figure in this new era. The recently founded Centro DramMico National chose for its 1978-79 season in Madrid the new play by Luis Riaza, Retrato de dama con perrito,3 giving the general public its first opportunity to see a work by Riaza in a conventional theater.4 The more discerning critics applauded, but the audience seemed somewhat disconcerted, overwhelmed, unable to assign this play to any familiar category. What was the average Spanish playgoer to make of a work where the characters are ambiguously both male and female at different points in the action? where certain pairs of characters seem to be interchangeable , and sbare tbe stage with a number of macabre rag dolls whose presence is as real, or as unreal, as their own? where haunting background music and lavish "belle-epoque" decor and costumes jarred, intentionally, with the grotesque and bizarre developments of tbe plot? For anyone wbo has read or seen other works by Riaza, this production is the fulfillment of a promise. In it, beautifully conceptualized, such a playgoer recognizes the deep themes of Riaza's work, present not only in Retrato de dama con perrito, but also in at least two other plays of his: EI deswin de los machos y el sotano de las hembras,5 and EI palacio de los monos.6 Theme and language in all three plays create a theatrical world of immense dimensions, new, yet having its origins in the "esperpento" of Valle-Inchln and the tragic poems of Lorca. As Riaza himself writes in his prologue to Retrato de dama con perrito: Siempre se escribe la misma obra. Los oscuros gusanos de cada dramaturgo siempre son los mismos ysiempre procura uno ]ibrarsedeelias...

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