Ventriloquist Theatre and the Omniscient Narrator: Gatz and El pasado es un animal grotesco

By replacing dialogue with narration, ventriloquist theatre raises central questions about its ethical and political costs, while challenging our understanding of the limits between drama and narrative. In very different ways, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz (first performed 2006) and Mariano Pensotti’s El pasado es un animal grotesco [The Past Is a Grotesque Animal] (2010) redraw the boundaries between literary modes, putting characters onstage but replacing their dialogue with narrated text. Staging narration allows us to reconsider literary mechanisms to which we have largely become inured. Rendering the invisible narrator as a presence on the stage lays bare both the arbitrariness of narrative authority and its costs.