The Fantasy of Gender and the Allure of the Real in Romina Paula’s Fauna

• In Event: Theatre of the Real on the Latin American Stage (Part 1)

Abstract

Premiered in 2013, Romina Paula’s play Fauna is about the making of a film that will never take place, a film that brings together a daughter, a son, a female actor, and a director in the attempt to tell the story of Fauna, a wild, educated, otherworldly being who over the course of her life transforms into Fauno. Highly intertextual, reflexive, and subtly ironic, the play contemplates how to tell the story of one’s life, how to capture what is true and real, and how to decipher where reality ends and fiction begins. Paula’s play explores the ways in which the real manifests itself without breaking out of the theatrical frame, which distinguishes her work from contemporary trends in documentary theater and Biodrama. While works by Vivi Tellas, Lola Arias, Mariano Pensotti, Federico León and others seek opportunities for the real to insert itself into the theatrical frame, Paula’s Fauna offers a poetic reflection on what this slippage between the real and the fictional means, and indeed what it means to aspire toward capturing the real through performance. In dialogue with Butler, Žižek, and Lacan, I will analyze the relationship between gender and the real in this play to argue that Paula’s play forces us to think more critically about the real and how it is constituted, what is valued or disavowed as real, and to what extent the real, as it is privileged in contemporary theater, may also hold limitations in its normativity.

Author

• Brenda G Werth, American University