Griselda Gámbaro’s Theatre of Violence
By Joanne Pottlitzer
PAJ (A Journal of Performance and Art), published by MIT Press: Winter 2004
Griselda Gámbaro (b. 1928) is one of Latin America’s major writers. Her prolific work-twenty-eight plays, ten novels, many short stories, and children’s books--is the subject of extensive
dramatic and literary criticism in this country and abroad. Her plays appear in numerous anthologies
and are regularly produced throughout Latin America and in much of Europe. All of her plays have
been produced and published in Argentina since El desatino (The Blunder), which opened in 1965
at the legendary Instituto di Tella, known in the sixties for its avant-garde arts programs, to her most
recent, a dramatic monologue adapted from Chekhov’s short story The Darling, which opened in
Buenos Aires on August 8, 2003. Many of her plays have been translated into English; several have
been published in the United States, yet few have been produced here.
Argentina has a tradition of novelists and poets who are women, going back to the
nineteenth century, but only a few women write plays. Several years ago Gámbaro told me,
“Theatre writing is more direct than prose. I believe that all acts of writing are impudent, shameless,
but drama especially, because you know that you are going to be on the stage through the actors.
That’s why theatre is more aggressive. It shows more. It is immodest.”
Gámbaro’s work is deeply rooted in Argentina, where political events have often influenced,
not only the content of the plays, but their structure and their expression. All of her plays are strong
and penetrating abstract commentaries on passivity in the face of oppression and destruction,
themes that have played out in her country since the mid-nineteenth century. Her plays deal
“aggressively” and “immodestly” with themes of violence and power. Her style, often mistakenly
identified as absurdist, is in fact an outgrowth of an Argentine theatre genre known as el grotesco
criollo, created in the early 1920s by Armando Discépolo (1887-1971), a Neapolitan who came to
Argentina at the turn of the last century, before he was twenty. Discépolo’s exaggerated, distorted
kind of black comedy has influenced many of Argentina’s important contemporary playwrights,
especially the generation that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, including Gámbaro who
has said: “I don’t see a connection between our theatre and Ionesco or Artaud. Our theatre is much
more connected with a social element, and our plays deal directly with political and social content.
All of our theatre is more or less political, and we are all political writers in one way or another.
There is always implicit or explicit political content in our work, though it is not a goal.”
Since 1930, Argentina has been governed by a series of military dictatorships alternating
with elected “caudillo” civilians. In 1976, when the military took Isabel Perón out of office, General
Jorge Rafael Videla assumed the presidency and launched the vicious “dirty war” against the
opposition. During Videla’s time, which lasted until 1983, it is estimated that 30,000 people
“disappeared” in Argentina. One of Gámbaro’s best-known plays, El campo (1967), written one
year after a devastating military coup, is set in a space that could be a neo-Nazi concentration camp.
(In Spanish, the word “campo” means both “camp” and “countryside.”) Here, she explores the
effects of torture and a recurrent theme regarding people who unwittingly allow themselves to
become victims of authoritarian regimes or of their fellow man, and those who lack the assertion in
their own nature to stand up for themselves and take action. Such characters seem to come straight
out of Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 1960s on passivity and obedience to authority.
Gámbaro was one of many artists forced into self-imposed exile during Argentina’s climate
of terror in the 1970s. Because she feared possible reprisals to her family, she withheld permission
to produce her play Information for Foreigners (1971-1973) in Argentina, or anywhere in the
world. (That play and others was later published in the U. S. by Northwestern University Press, in a
volume edited and translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz, entitled Information for Foreigners: 3
Plays.) In 1977, Gámbaro’s novel Ganarse la Muerte (Conquering Death) was banned by
presidential decree. A prohibition by Executive Power was especially dangerous. Gámbaro at once
became a suspected person and, as a result, could not open a new play, was denied interviews or
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publicity of any kind. Her channels of communication cut off, she left for Spain with her husband
and two children and stayed for three years.
In 1981, her play Decir Sí (Saying Yes), written in 1974, was produced in Buenos Aires as
part of a two-month presentation of short plays by El Teatro Abierto (The Open Theatre), a
movement organized by a group of well-known Argentine playwrights, actors and directors to
recapture the identity and vitality of Argentine theatre, so often negated since the military took
power, in 1976. El Teatro Abierto was formed at a time when it was clear that the military
government had deteriorated and was on its way out. Still, it was risky to produce plays dealing
with the issues of the times by playwrights known to be in opposition to the government. During
The Process of National Reorganization (the name given by the military to its regime), or “The
Process,” an entire group of important Argentine playwrights was never performed at the federally
funded Teatro Municipal San Martín. Roberto Cossa, Carlos Gorostiza, Alberto Adellach, Osvaldo
Dragún and Gámbaro were among the prohibited playwrights. They were also organizers of El
Teatro Abierto.
According to Osvaldo Dragún, the late Argentine playwright credited with the idea of the
movement, “I think that the profound objective was to look ourselves in the face again, without
shame. To shave those faces without fear of cutting ourselves out of shame. To smell ourselves
again. To recognize ourselves in the skin and breath of others. And when more than a hundred
people showed up at our first meeting, and the people of the Picadero Theatre agreed to stand with
us, and we were in their theatre, I felt that we had crossed over the space of fear.” For the first time
in five years, theatre people got together to talk more or less freely, and the audience response was
tremendous. El Teatro Abierto had three more seasons before it closed in 1985, but none so
important as its first.
Opening night was July 28, 1981. One week later, in the middle of the night, the
paramilitary police firebombed the Picadero Theatre, which burned to the ground. But the festival
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had already created a need in the people, who by then had lost their fear. Other theatres offered their
spaces, and the plays, among them Saying Yes, resumed their run at the Tabarís, a commercial
theatre, on August 18. In Saying Yes, Gámbaro’s themes of passivity, fear and alienation are
dramatized in a comedic form that borders on the ridiculous, until the play’s bloody, tragic end. The
active apprehension, insecurity and fear of the Man is expressed in contrast to the inaction of the
other character, the Barber, who represents power, or perhaps someone to whom power is
attributed. The Man subjugates himself and loses his freedom in useless and trivial ways that end
tragically. “The castration of the individual/public is shown as subjected to absurd exercises of
power. The Barber-dictatorship-”disappeared” relationship is easily perceived by the spectator, even
today,” writes Miguel Angel Giella in his essay, “Dramaturgia y sociedad en Teatro Abierto 1981,”
which appears on a website devoted to Teatro Abierto.
(http://www.teatrodelpueblo.org.ar/dramaturgia/giella001.htm)
Gámbaro consistently warns that we must learn to see violence in its many guises and
recognize our complicit role in maintaining it. For her, theatre performs the function of enabling the
audience, who has lost its capacity to see reality, to see again, an audience to whom war means
nothing, for whom the dead are merely numbers, statistics. She calls on the aesthetic act to wake us
up from the anesthetizing misinformation and emotional deformation, in order to preserve the ideas
that are the very bases of our society. In a recent conversation with me, Gámbaro admitted,
“Perhaps, with age, I’ve become less cruel to my characters, I show them more mercy.” That subtle
mellowing notwithstanding, hers is a body of work that can serve as a model to playwrights in this
country while so many of us passively stand by in the face of our country’s escalating violence and
authoritarianism.
JOANNE POTTLITZER, a freelance playwright and theatre director, has produced many Latin
American plays in New York and is the winner of two Obie Awards. Her translations have been
produced in New York and throughout the country. Her articles have appeared in the New York
Times, The Drama Review, American Theatre, Yale University’s Theater and Review. She is
currently writing a book, Symbols of Resistance: A Chilean Legacy, about the influence of artists on
the political process.
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