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Theory and Practice in Artaud and Carballido
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 1968
- pp. 132-142
- 10.1353/mdr.1968.0012
- Article
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THEORY AND PRACTICE IN ARTAUD AND CARBALLIDO EMILIO CARBALLIDO IS GENERALLY CONCEDED to be the best of the contemporary playwrights in Mexico. He is certainly among the most prolific, and he is the most productive in regard to imaginative, sound theatrical pieces. Also, his work is recognized and appreciated. Scarcely a year has passed in the last fifteen in which Carballido has not been awarded an academic or critical prize for his work. In addition to his productivity, Carballido stands alone in another aspect, in his variety and diversity. Mexican theater has generally been a staid, traditional theater. The large body of works since its emergence in the late twenties and thirties has been realistic-examinations of the emerging middle class, popular reviews of the music hall variety, and a militantly self-conscious social theater. There are striking exceptions of course, especially recently. Carlos Solorzano, for instance, has been experimenting with a theater that uses dance and music to create a poetic reality, and Elena Garro's theater is almost completely theater of fantasy. Nevertheless, the total picture remains traditional and realistic. The play which brought Carballido to public prominence is of this type, Rosalba y los Llaveros (Rosalba and the Llavero Family), 1950, a play about a 'modern' girl from Mexico City who revolutionizes the lives of her provincial relatives. As recently as May of this year, Rosalba ... was the one play cited, presumably as Carballido's best, or most typical, in the introduction to a Mexican anthology which contains one of his one-act plays.! Rosalba ... is not his most typical play, and certainly not his best. It is unfortunate that it seems to be his best known. What a number of commentators overlook, or choose to ignore, is that Carballido has also written a number of plays which are experiments in fantasy, in horror, investigations of the many planes and facets of reality. For a number of years Carballido swayed back and forth between two extremes, the realistic and the fantastic, with an occasional interesting combination of the two. In recent years, it appears that he is solidifying his style in the latter vein, plays which treat realistic subjects in a non-realistic way. Among these plays are the awards-winning j Silencio, pollos ! "E! censo," in I2 obras en un acto, edited by Wilberto Canton (Mexico: Ecuador 0°0'0", 1967) 132 1968 ARTAUD AND CARBALLIDO 133 p'elones~ ya les van echar su maiz!; El dia en que se soltaron los leones~3 and "Yo tambien hablo de la rosa."4 On the way to developing the fusion of realism and fantasy which has produced his best works, Carballido wrote four plays, published in one volume in 1948, which were unique in Mexican theater at the time of their writing, La hebra de oro (The Golden Thread), a three-act play, and a fantastic trilogy, El lugar y la hora (The Place and the Time), comprised of three one-acts, "EI amor muerto ," "EI Glacier," and "La Bodega" ("Dead Love," "The Glacier," and "The Wine Cellar"). These plays assault the senses. They are made of the poetry and mystery of theater. They are Total Theater, theater of the type proposed by Antonin Artaud. These four plays employ the language Artaud considered ideal, a physical language which consists of "everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words."5 Artaud states that this physical language permits the creation of a "poetry in space," a poetry which utilizes all means of expression "such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting and scenery."6 The Golden Thread is an experiment in the mingling of reality and the world of dreams. Interest in the oneiric is more apparent than conventional plot. Effect is more important than character. A door that is apparently nailed shut and covered by cobwebs is used for entrances and exits by some characters; when forced open by others, it reveals a brick wall. Mental telepathy, breakdown in the barrier between...