Novel theatre: Egon Wolff's<i>Los invasores</i>and the idea of the new in Latin-American drama

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Diana Taylor, Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1991), ix; 12. Jean Franco, Spanish American Literature since Independence (London: Benn, 1973), 289. José Miguel Oviedo, ‘Notas a una (deprimente) lectura del teatro hispanoamericano’, Revista Iberoamericana, 37 (1971), 754–62 (p. 755). Donald L. Shaw, Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981), 224. As is well known, Shaw's reputation as a literary critic extends far beyond his field-shaping work on Spanish-American narrative. He was also one of the first UK critics to do serious work on the theatre of the subcontinent. With regard to the play under consideration here, he actually had some practical involvement with it, as did I, in 1981–82 not long after we first met: I, a young graduate student then, played the part of China in a production of the play, while Donald, then Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, produced the programme notes. It is not the intention of this article to rehearse a history of modern Latin-American theatre, but it should be noted that the development of drama in Latin America is obviously a fuller and broader process than that hinted at here. There is, for example, in the time period alluded to, the emergence of a movement known as Nuevo Teatro which emerged in the late 1950s and came to a degree of prominence on the back of small independent theatre groups in the sixties and seventies. However, the so-called New Theatre is not the same as the New Narrative: though the term is, in practice, used extremely loosely, it has come to be associated with the notion of ‘popular’ theatre and even collective authorship and production values. Diana Taylor, Theatre of Crisis, 22–63, offers a useful account of the making of modern theatre in Latin America. Egon Wolff was born in Chile in 1926 and won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1970. He has written a number of plays, and his Flores de papel (1968) became one of the best-known canonized works of drama to come from Latin America. Los invasoreswas first staged in 1963 in a theatre of the Universidad de Chile and directed by Víctor Jara. Shaw, Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, 225. Egon Wolff, Los invasores, in El teatro hispanoamericano contemporáneo, ed. Carlos Solórzano, 2 vols (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), I, 124–90 (p. 132). Leon F. Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores: A Play within a Dream’, Latin American Theatre Review, VI:1 (1972), 19–26 (p. 19). Robin Fiddian has suggested to me that the name Lucas Meyer may also have a Jewish ring to it. Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores’. Diana Taylor notes the importance of a Theatre of Revolution in relation to New Theatre. Theatre of Revolution is linked to the example of the Cuban Revolution but also a worldwide revolutionary discourse. Taylor's essential argument is that such theatre gives way between 1965 and 1970 to a so-called Theatre of Crisis following loss of faith in the Revolution. See Taylor, Theatre of Crisis, 45–51. Teatro chileno contemporáneo, ed. Julio Durán-Cerda (Mexico: M. Aguilar, 1970), 38. Diana Taylor judges Wolff more harshly: see Chapter 6 of Taylor, Theatre of Crisis. Hernán Vidal, ‘Los invasores: Egon Wolff y la responsabilidad social del artista católico’, Hispanófila, 50 (1975), 87–97; and Joseph Chrzanowski, ‘Theme, Characterization and Structure in Los invasores’, Latin American Theatre Review, XI:2 (1978), 5–10. Another possible (and less kind) reading would be to view the play as an illustration of the limits of liberalism, seeing it as an expression of anxiety about radical change. Though it does not espouse such a view, a relatively recent study of fear in Los invasores by Álvaro Vergara-Mery hints at the prophetic quality of the play with regard to the election of Salvador Allende in 1970: ‘El miedo en Los invasores de Egon Wolff’, Hispanófila, 127 (1999), 67–79 (p.72). Chrzanowski, ‘Theme, Characterization and Structure in Los invasores’, 7 ff. Taylor, Theatre of Crisis, 207. Egon Wolff, Flores de papel, in Nueve dramaturgos hispanoamericanos, ed. Frank Dauster, Leon Lyday and George Woodyard, 2 vols (Ottawa: Girol, 1979), II, 145–221 (p. 187). Incidentally, the obvious gender implications of Merluza's relationship to Eva are considered by Diana Taylor in Chapter 6 of Theatre of Crisis. Iván Carrasco, ‘Flores de papel de Egon Wolff: la crisis de la identidad’, Revista Chilena de Literatura, XX (1982), 113–32 (p. 117). Iván Carrasco, ‘Flores de papel de Egon Wolff: la crisis de la identidad’, Revista Chilena de Literatura, XX (1982), 119. Margaret Sayers Peden, ‘The Theater of Egon Wolff’, in Dramatists in Revolt: The New Latin American Theater, ed. Leon F. Lyday and George W. Woodyard (Austin: Texas U. P., 1976), 190–201 (p. 198). Wolff, Flores de papel, 171. See Daniel López, ‘Ambiguity in Flores de papel’, Latin American Theatre Review, XII:1 (1978), 43–50. Carrasco, ‘Flores de papel de Egon Wolff’, 127. Carrasco, ‘Flores de papel de Egon Wolff’, 121. Wolff, Flores de papel, 220. John W. Kronik, ‘Usigli's El gesticuladorand the Fiction of Truth’, Latin American Theatre Review, XII:1 (1977), 5–16 (p. 12). John W. Kronik, ‘Usigli's El gesticuladorand the Fiction of Truth’, Latin American Theatre Review, XII:1 (1977), 5–16 (p. 13). Shaw, Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, 218. Carrasco, ‘Flores de papel de Egon Wolff’, 116. Philip Swanson, ‘Una entrevista con José Donoso’, Revista Iberoamericana, 141 (1987), 995–98 (p. 995). This tendency is typical of much of Donoso's writing as a whole. Another work which echoes Los invasores is the novella Los habitantes de una ruina inconclusa from Cuatro para Delfina (1982). Fidel Sepúlveda Llanos, ‘Apertura-clausura-insularidad en El obsceno pájaro de la noche de José Donoso’, in Aproximación estética a la literatura chilena (Santiago: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, nd), 5–29 (p. 7). Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores’, 19–26. See Shaw, Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, and, for example, Borges’ Narrative Strategy (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1992), passim. Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores’, 25. Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores’, 20. Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores’, 19. Lyday, ‘Egon Wolff's Los invasores’, 25. D. L. Shaw, ‘American-ness in Spanish American Literature’, Comparative Criticism, VIII (1986), 213–27 (p. 225). See, for example, Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1998). Marina Gálvez Acero, ‘El teatro’, in Juan José Amate Blanco and Marina Gálvez Acero, Poesía y teatro de Hispanoamérica en el siglo XX (Madrid: Cincel, 1981), 49–79 (p. 74). See Shaw's account of the main features of the new narrative in Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana, 211–25.

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