Greek Tragedy Revisited

N.b. The text has been translated by Erika Valdivieso. The original Spanish version can be found here: Tragedia Griega Revisitada

This is a co-written post. Francisco Gutiérrez Silva holds a BA in Linguistics and Literature from the University of Chile, as well as a certificate in Language and Communication Teaching from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is a master’s student in Literature at the University of Chile, writing a thesis on the reception of tragedy in twenty-first century Latin American theater. He is currently a Language and Literature teacher in Maipú, Santiago.

Brenda López Saiz is an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Chile. Her teaching and research focus on Greek tragedy and its reception in modern and contemporary literature, with special emphasis in Latin American drama. She is the author of Nación católica y tradición clásica en obras de Leopoldo Marechal (Corregidor, 2016), and has written several book chapters and articles.

 

Greek Tragedy Revisited: The Plays of Contemporary Dramaturgas

Francisco Gutiérrez Silva and Brenda López Saiz

The work of female playwrights has been one of the most exciting sources of renewal for 21^st-century Latin American theatre. This literary genre, long closed to women, first began to open up during the second half of the 20^th century, when the first playwrights began to pave the way for the next generation. A significant number of 21^st-century plays from Latin America take their characters and plots from ancient Greek drama, which raises the question: why would new works, which introduce new perspectives on gender, turn to Greek tragedy? What do these contemporary female playwrights see in plays from ancient Athens? The answer lies in two major themes which, in our opinion, are tied to reception: 1) the socio-political problems related to violence and the exercise of power and 2) the experience of living in a patriarchal society.

In relation to the first theme, contemporary female playwrights build upon the traditions of 20^th-century Latin American theatre when they also return to Greek tragedy – the Antigone in particular – to address current issues: national identity, social injustice, and the violation of human rights under dictatorial regimes. In some works, like Yamila Grandi’s Antígona ¡no! (2003), Sophocles’ play serves to explore the lack of justice and the absence of reparations after the Argentinian dictatorship. Others turn to the Antigone to confront sexist violence and violence related to guerilla warfare and drug trafficking. In these contexts, the characters from Greek tragedy are used to represent the search for the bodies of missing relatives amid extreme social violence. In some of these plays, women exercise their right to resist the passive acquiescence of institutions and society as a whole by keeping the memory of their loved ones alive and by demanding justice. An echo of this sentiment appears in Sara Uribe’s Antígona Gónzález (2012): “Name them all, as if to say, this body could be mine. This could be the body of one of mine. We cannot forget that all the nameless bodies are our lost bodies.”

Some plays explore these experiences with an eye toward gender solidarity. In Carolina Vivas’ Donde se descomponen las colas de los burros (2008), a mother searches for the body of her son, a “false positive” murdered by agents of the state; after finding him, but being unable to bury the body, she throws him back into the river so that another mother like her may find comfort in recovering his corpse. Finally, women are agents of resistance through the representation of suffering, through dramatic resources that emphasise the affective bond with the victims, such as the apostrophe to an absent loved one or the evocation of that person out of pain and despair, expressive modes that reconfigure the female tragic lament.

In relation to the second theme, we find the staging of problems such as sexual abuse, objectification of the body, repression of desire, and the destructive potential of gender roles, relationships and stereotypes.

In Casandra iluminada (2014), Noemí Frenkel turns to Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess who rejected the god Apollo and was cursed to utter prophecies that no one believed, to raise the difficulty of talking about the trauma of sexual abuse and the doubts that hover over the testimonies of the victims. In Ximena Escalante’s Electra despierta (2009), Fedra y otras griegas (2002) and Andrómaca real (2006), and in Isidora Stevenson’s Little Medea (2006), one finds an exploration of the interrelation between gender identities, desire and violence within socially regulated and constructed love and family relationships. Finally, to close with one last example from a long list, in Verónica Maldonado’s Juego de la Gorgona (2020), the imminent sacrifice of Polyxena is reworked to denounce violence against women and its persistence today. Thus, the work of female Latin American playwrights in the 21st century constitutes a new space for dialogue with Greek tragedies, to reflect from a gendered perspective on issues raised in antiquity but which continue to be suggestive and productive for the current day.