State of agony: theater and politics in Griselda Gambaro and Jorge Diaz

Abstract

The Argentinean Griselda Gambaro (1928) and the Chilean Jorge Diaz (1930-2007), are on the list of the most celebrated playwrights of the twentieth-century Spanish-American theater. Both began their trajectories in the 1960s, and each in its own way deals with issues related such as violence and contradictions stemming from social inequality in its most perverse aspects. This project intends to study how these themes are elaborated in the respective dramaturgies, also seeking to establish points of contact, from the relation of his work with the historical context of production. We think of two historical-temporal cutbacks: the 1960s as a cultural milestone of a new Latin American thought from the Cuban revolution, and the 1980s as a decade of drafting the traumas around military regimes in the 1970s. Selecting, for each author, a play written and staged in the 1960s and one of the 1980s, aiming to analyze comparatively how both poetic dialogues with their historical contemporaneity and what relations can be established between them. (AU)