Routledge Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater: Upstaging Dictatorship (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)

Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory. Each chapter focuses on one contemporary playwright (or one collaborative team, in the case of Brazil) from each of four Southern Cone countries and compares the playwrights’ aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship: Carlos Manuel Varela (memory in Uruguay), Juan Radrigán (testimony in Chile), Augusto Boal and his co-author Gianfrancesco Guarnieri (historical allegory in Brazil), Griselda Gambaro (abstract allegory in Argentina). Review 'Surveying recent productions of the plays in Italy, Argentina, Chile and the US, she persuasively demonstrates how culturally aware theatre practitioners imaginatively avoid folkloric and dehistoricized productions, and instead challenge non-Latin American audiences to think more politically about this region' – Theatre Research International 'In addition to the wealth of details that emerge from close reading, the specific performance details that emerge from her individual interviews are especially valuable' – Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Theatre Review About the Author Ana Elena Puga teachs in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University and recently published an anthology of translations of works by the Chilean playwright Juan Radrigán, Finished from the Start and Other Plays.