Performing Invisibilities: Conjuring the Ghosts of the Forgotten and Ignored on the Stage

Abstract

The dictatorial tendency to define society through absolute binaries often continues into the discourse of remembrance; the work of transition, then, is the struggle to overcome these reductive dichotomies and capture the fuller complexity of the situation, thereby indeed opening up other spaces for understanding and memory. It is this task that will be undertaken by the plays examined here, as they strive to call attention to those other forgotten and ignored spaces beyond the dominant dichotomous tendencies of (post)dictatorial memory narratives. This process will occur through the implementation of various strategies of visibility and invisibility. The first chapter, “Total Onstage Invisibility,” will explore the use and significance of invisible characters through an analysis of Uruguayan playwright Ricardo Prieto’s 1977 play, El huésped vacío (The Hollow Guest) and Spanish playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo’s 1979 play, Jueces en la noche (Judges in the Night). Both plays employ the figure of an invisible wife, married to the representative of governmental power, in order to draw attention to blind spots in societal and historical perception. Through an examination of Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Rayner’s theories on theatrical ghosting, I will explore how placing a blank space on a stage can force both the audience and characters to rethink their perspectives. This visual field is inverted in the second chapter, “Reverse Visibility,” in which I study the re-centering of marginalized voices in Raquel Diana’s Cuentos de hadas (Fairy Tales, Uruguay, 1998) and Marco Antonio de la Parra’s La secreta obscenidad de cada día (Everyday Secret Obscenities, Chile, 1983). By studying the connotations of the terms public and private, this chapter elucidates the significance of reversing the visual field to privilege marginalized perspectives: domestic women in Fairy Tales and forced collaborators in Everyday Secret Obscenities. This inversion of visibility creates an inversion of power dynamics and simultaneously calls attention to the constructed nature of hierarchies of visibility. In the third chapter, invisibility turns inwards, as I examine “The Invisible Self”: the internal rupture suffered by post-dictatorial generations as they struggle to define a personal identity in the shadow of a barely-remembered societal trauma, using this frame to interpret Andrea Moro Winslow’s No soy la novia (I Am Not the Bride, Chile, 2003) and Sergi Belbel’s Elsa Schneider (Spain, 1987). In these plays, the trauma of the dictatorship itself has become invisible; while they do not explicitly address post-dictatorial society, they demonstrate a preoccupation with trauma as inheritance that allows them to be interpreted as symbolic commentaries on transgenerational trauma. Throughout this study I also explore the significance of the gendering of visibility and invisibility through portrayals of wives, mothers, and daughters.