Postmodernism in Latin America

Postmodernism has had a lasting effect on the theatre of Latin America, particularly on the plays of Ricardo Monti.

While still in his twenties, the Argentinean dramatist penned his play An Evening with Mr. Magnus and Sons, which premiered in 1970. Most political theatre in Argentina at the time used Realism to draw attention to contemporary problems, but Monti's play was different. Its open theatricality pointed to a new way of performing political plays, and at the same time its ambivalent portrayal of revolutionary change marked a clear departure from simplistic propaganda plays. The audience is invited to loath the tyrannical Mr. Magnus of the title, but at the same time, his penchant for acting out melodramatic scenes prevents audiences from taking him entirely seriously.

The year after the premiere of An Evening with Mr. Magnus and Sons, Monti premiered a new play titled: A Biased History of the Argentinean Middle Class: About the Strange Events in Which Certain Public Figures Found Themselves Involved, the Complete Elucidation of These Events, and Other Scandalous Revelations. The play is filled with topical references to Argentinean politics, and Monti has asked that it not be translated out of Spanish because it is "too Argentine" for people in other countries to understand. The play is noteworthy, however, in that it was the first time Monti worked with the director Jaime Kogan. The two would go on to have numerous successful collaborations in the future, including on Monti's 1977 play Visit, and his 1980 drama Marathon. The latter play recapped the past 400 years or so of Argentine history in a dance marathon during the 1930s.

In 1989, Monti himself directed the premiere of a breakthrough new piece called A South American Passion Play. The piece deals with passion in more than one sense of the word. In it, a group of buffoons enact the story of a young woman who fell in love with a priest and tried to run away with him. The story is based on actual events in the nineteenth century that became familiar to Argentineans through versions of the romance that appeared in multiple media, including, plays, films, novels, and poems. The buffoons are performing for a Brigadier who, as people who have heard the story know, will have the two lovers executed. The piece, which is subtitled "A Mystery Cycle in One Act," resembles a medieval passion play telling the story of the death of Christ.

A South American Passion Play picks up on the myth-making of Marathon, using South America's past, both real and imagined, to talk about the present. The same is true of Monti's 1992 play Asunción, which is a sparse and focused one-act drama requiring only three performers, only one of whom speaks at length. Monti reworked many of its themes in a much longer and more sprawling play called The Obscurity of Reason, which premiered the following year, directed by Kogan. This reworking of the Orestes myth presents a contrast between Old World Enlightenment ideals of rationality and a native-born drive for righteous revenge on the old order. The Electra figure, Alma, whose name means soul, remains committed to darkness at the end of the play, even as the stage is being flooded with light.

One contemporary dramatist in Argentina who carries on Monti's tradition of creative and thought-provoking political drama is Lola Arias. In her play My Life After, Arias introduced characters based on the original actors in the drama, who tried to piece together what their parents' lives might have been like while living under a military dictatorship. Arias later constructed a similar play called The Year I Was Born using Chilean actors to explore issues related to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in that country. The Pinochet dictatorship was also the topic of reflection in Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden and Guillermo Calderón's drama Villa. In each case, closure is deliberately avoided, and the audience is invited to reflect on the possibility that certain things are fundamentally unknowable, a concern of many postmodern dramas.

In Brazil, the most important postmodern theatre artist was not a writer, but the director Augusto Boal. Deeply political, Boal founded a movement known as Theatre of the Oppressed, which sought to turn audiences from spectators into "spect-actors" who participated in the work they were watching. Boal invited audiences to rewrite the endings of plays and see them acted out in different ways to give the audience a sense of agency and empowerment. He also organized plays he called "invisible theatre" which took place in public spaces where onlookers did not know a play was being performed. It was sometimes not until the ends of these performances that audience members realized they were watching a play and not a real-life situation that was unfolding in front of them.

For political reasons, Boal had to flee Brazil for a while, and as he traveled throughout the Americas, his Theatre of the Oppressed spread to other countries, including the United States. Theatre in the 21st century has become increasingly global, with local movements inevitably having effects throughout the world. In the postmodern era, national bounderies no longer have the impact they used to possess. Theatre has always been able to teach people radical ways of experiencing empathy, imagining the situations of those quite unlike ourselves, even the situations of our enemies. As technology makes the world ever smaller, this aspect of theatre becomes ever more prominent.

The Impossibility of Justice

In a world in which torture and murder have become commonplace, is justice even possible?

That's a question asked by a number of plays from Latin America in recent decades. Perhaps the most famous of these plays is Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden. Though Dorfman was born in Argentina, he grew up in Chile. A cultural advisor to President Salvador Allende, he had to flee Chile after the coup. He lived in exile in the United States, and after the dictatorship fell, he wrote Death and the Maiden in English, only later translating it into Spanish.

Dorfman's Death and the Maiden tells the story of Paulina, a woman who was brutally tortured under her country's dictatorship. Now that democracy has been restored, her husband is put on a special commission that will account for those who were murdered by the old regime. Those who were raped and tortured but not killed will fall outside the jurisdiction of the commission, and it seems apparent that even the murderers will not be put on trial as the nation tries to preserve a fragile truce with the military.

Things change when Paulina's husband Gerardo gets a flat tire and is helped by a strange man named Roberto. Gerardo invites this Good Samaritan to his house, but Paulina is sure she recognizes his voice as that of a man who tortured her. When the man stays over for the night, Paulina ties him up and plans to force him to confess.

True justice might be impossible, but if she can get details down on tape, and then have him write out a confession and sign it, then she will be satisfied. Of course, if the confession is coerced, it might not be real, but this does not seem to concern Paulina.

Gerardo tells the stranger details of his wife's captivity and begs him to confess in order to save his own life. Eventually he does, admitting he was the one who tortured Paulina and providing the details related to him by Gerardo. Though the man thinks he will now be freed, Paulina informs him that she will now take justice by killing him. He says the confession was phony, the facts all related to him by her husband. Paulina is ready for this, however. She made certain changes to the story she told her husband, and Roberto has told the true story, thus proving he really is the torturer.

This would be a great twist if Dorfman were writing a thriller, but he's aiming at something different. Roberto tries to explain away the discrepancies, claiming he only changed the facts here and there to be more logical, and that he isn't the torturer after all. Preparing to shoot Roberto, Paulina calls out: "If only to do justice in one case, just one. What do we lose? What do we lose by killing one of them?"

But Dorfman's stage direction calls not for a gunshot but for the last, calm movement of Mozart's Dissonant Quartet. Did she kill him or not? The final scene does not answer the question. Instead, it shows Paulina and Gerardo at a concert where she sees Roberto. If she did not kill him, then she is going to have to live with the fact that her torturer is still at large, roaming free and attending the same cultural and social gatherings as she is. And if she did kill him, there is someone just like him still alive. Could she have killed the wrong man after all? Is the real torturer still out there?

Either way, justice has not been served. Paulina's question, "What do we lose?" remains hanging in the air. Perhaps by killing just one person, the victims lose quite a bit. Perhaps they lose their bearings entirely on the world around them, lost in a sea of moral uncertainty.

Just a few years after Dorfman penned Death and the Maiden, the Argentine playwright Ricardo Monti wrote another play as his own country was adjusting to its emergence from dictatorship. Monti's The Obscurity of Reason draws upon Greek tragedy to show a brother and sister who overthrow the violent and corrupt regime of their mother and stepfather. Though the brother, Mariano, is horrified by the deed he commits against the tyrants, his sister Alma rejoices in it, comparing her mother's blood to "red champagne."

Nor does Alma's thirst for justice end with a couple of deaths. She wishes to kill all the henchmen of the old regime, demanding "A knife / for the knifed, / jail / for the jailed." Alma's lust for blood seems unquenchable, and the play is only resolved by a dues ex machina bringing peace and showering Mariano with light. Heaven could be a substitute for earthly justice, but Alma rejects such an easy solution, choosing to remain a "dark ray" as the world is enveloped in "ever-growing light." Again, any attempt at justice fails.

Guillermo Calderon made the impossibility of justice a central theme of his 2011 play Villa. The play depicts three women, all named Alejandra, arguing over what to do with an old villa that was used as a torture camp in Chile. The villa could be preserved, but that would amount to a sort of Torture Disneyland. It could be replaced with a computer-filled museum, but a sterile museum would also be an affront to the real pain that happened there. The villa could be replaced with an empty field, essentially doing nothing in response to the tragedy, but this seems to be the worst solution of all.

In the end, the horror of what happened under the dictatorship is too great for any act to be the "right thing" to do. No justice can ever be possible. Villa does, however, offer one small consolation. Though the three Alejandras are unable to come to a decision, they do come to understand each other a bit more. Justice might be impossible, but community is not.