The Precariousness of the Autobiographical on Stage

• In Event: Theatre of the Real on the Latin American Stage (Part 2: Chile)

Abstract

With an expanded work of plays, Argentine playwright Lola Arias has become a star of the new documentary theatre in Latin America. Her plays: Mi vida después (2009), El Año en que nací (2011), and Melancolía y manifestaciones (2013) form a trilogy where the precariousness of the autobiographical makes way for a new way of telling stories on stage. Blending fact and fiction, actors and non-actors retell their family stories, tucked in with political turmoil of dictatorships and disappearances, through photographs, letters, cassette tapes, old clothing, anecdotes, and elusive recollections. This new focus on documentary theater explores issues of memory, postmemory, and trauma by exposing the fragmentation of memory, both from a generational distance (now the younger generations of both the disappeared and the ones who survived the last dictatorships in Argentina and Chile) and from a temporal distance (four decades after the return to democracy). Questions of the role of the real on stage, the effect of the personal stories retold live, and the international magnitude that Arias’s works has had are key issues in the reception and influence of these plays on other young playwrights. In this regard, El año en que nací, which premiered in Santiago a Mil in 2011 exemplifies one key factor of how the use of documentary techniques have changed the Latin American stage.

Author

• Paola S Hernandez, University of Wisconsin/Madison