Recast, Restage, Resist: Adaptations of the Spanish Golden Age in Hemispheric Theater and Performance

This dissertation studies how the canonical texts, characters, and myths of the Hispanic Golden Age are adapted in hemispheric contexts in ways that intervene in the contemporary moment and shape public consciousness around social and political issues. The four chapters are organized thematically around a set of adaptations that have arisen from the canonization of Golden Age texts and figures in the Americas, using them to intervene on the foundational mythologies of the Hemisphere in ways that help to rethink the hemispheric through the familiarity of canonical texts and the enjoyment, curiosity, catharsis, and discomfort elicited by altering them. The project understands the adaptative dramaturgies of the canon as both a product of colonial legacies and as a response to them, considering how disparate adaptations are linked through local, national, and hemispheric histories and how they are both constitutive of and challenging to these histories. 

Chapter 1 traces the transmission of Lope de Vega’s play Fuenteovejuna in this hemisphere, from the Spanish Civil War to the popular movements and dictatorships of the Cold War period, to the cementing of US dominance and intensifying border crisis toward the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. This play has proved its endurance as a potent model for staging contemporary narratives of authoritarian, imperialist, and capitalist domination, gendered and political violence, and collective resistance in diverse American contexts. I offer a study of two important antidictatorship adaptations, analyzing their paratextual materials, unpublished drafts, and other indicators of the adapturgical process. Chapter 2 analyzes the performance history of Calderón’s La vida es sueño over 50 years to explore how Chilean interpretations of the text have responded to changing cultural and political conditions and shifting ideas of individual and collective dreams. I analyze three adaptations from contemporary Chilean national and exilic contexts to map out a performance genealogy that continually engages issues of memory, dreaming, spectrality, and coloniality. From within the Hispanic canon, the play offers a widely adaptable allegory for liberation from tyranny, as well as an emblematic character through which multiple generations have explored dynamics of national and individual memory.

Chapter 3 investigates the Hemispheric permutations and interventions on Don Juan Tenorio, discussing a selection of plays and performances that reimagine the myth through its entanglement with histories of colonization and the ideas of racial and sexual purity that evolved in the triangular relationship between Africa, America, and Europe. I suggest that the Hemispheric Don Juan has served as a vehicle for male dramatists to negotiate their own identities as racialized, colonized, and displaced subjects, while the female characters and their bodies become violated symbols of colonial conquest or spiritual invocations of motherhood and indigeneity. Chapter 4 studies 21st century performances that excavate Sor Juana’s body and poetry as a multivalent cultural resource, engaging her status as both an icon of Mexican national identity and a quasi-saint of queer, Chicana, and other liminal identities. The artists studied in this chapter dialogue with public imaginaries of Sor Juana and intervene in how they are transmitted and transformed over time, using physical and sometimes digital embodiment to link these colonial texts and their author to enduring violences on queer, female, racialized and colonized bodies. The performances examined in this chapter and across the dissertation as a whole enact embodied re-encodings of colonial constructions gender, sexuality, nationality, and race through the adaptive vectors of the literary canon, excavating the texts and mythologies of the colonial past as raw material for imagining alternative and utopic visions of reality.