[Comedias] Diversifying the Classical Canon

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Diversifying the Classical Canon

*Posted in Cafe Onda April 2, 2016 by Barbara Fuchs. This post taken from
HowlRound. *

Why should this seem so hard? In part, because Shakespeare has been granted
exceptional powers—what other playwright could stave off the invading
hordes, as Shakespeareans at the turn of the twentieth century promised, or
suture together the nation, as the more recent NEA projects to present
Shakespeare in all fifty states
<http://www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org/> optimistically imply?
Despite the fact that the Shakespeare-US connection is a willed fantasy,
and that the playwright is certainly no more native than any other European
in the New World, Shakespeare is treated as a national property and a given
for US audiences.In recent years, theatres across the United States have
announced a strong commitment to greater diversity in their personnel. More
people of color on stage and behind the scenes—this is all for the good.
Yet there has been no corresponding diversification of the plays we turn to
when we want the *classic*, the tried and true. Instead, we have a largely
undiluted diet of Shakespeare, Shakespeare, and more Shakespeare, with the
occasional nod to the Greeks. Particularly given the US population today,
could we not envision instead a turn to the vibrant tradition of Hispanic
classical theatre? The lively *comedia*—the theatrical corpus developed on
both sides of the Atlantic by playwrights such as Spaniards Félix Lope de
Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, or Mexicans Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—should not remain in the wings. As it moves
center stage, it could show not just Latino audiences but all theatregoers
that the classics come in different flavors.

Meanwhile, even four hundred years after the time of Shakespeare and
Cervantes, Spain is still considered somehow different. Exotic, too
religious, obsessed with honor—isn’t Spain, and particularly the Spain of
the Golden Age, all of those things? Well, yes and no: around a thousand
Hispanic classical plays survive, over four hundred by Lope de Vega alone
(compare to Shax’s thirty-eight, or, better yet, don’t compare, just go
read some). This makes it very difficult to categorize them all as any one
thing. But generations of Anglo-American critics knew what they were
looking for in Spanish theatre, and, no great surprise, found exactly what
they expected to find: plots obsessed with honor and the defense of sexual
virtue, plays in which wives were murdered to preserve their husbands’
reputations even if they had done nothing wrong. Great theatre, to be sure,
but neither exactly uplifting nor in line with current mores. The otherness
of Calderón’s “wife-murder plays,” as they are known, might well give a
director pause. A play such as Lope de Vega’s *Fuenteovejuna*, for its
part, involves villagers avenging the sexual wrongs done by their
overlords, and so speaks more readily to contemporary audiences, but even
its relative popularity is the exception that proves the rule.

When one steps back from the Anglo-wish-fulfillment canon of honor and
violence, however, it turns out that many Spanish *comedias* are witty,
urbane, self-aware, and intensely concerned with the theatricality of life
in the big city. These were plays for the people: performances took place
in open-air theatres, where audiences of all classes and both sexes
commingled. Many *comedias* are sophisticated urban dramas, offering
pointed reflections on the constructed nature of class and gender as well
as the social role-playing required by life in the city. They often feature
women on top, and include fantastic female roles. Consumed with the problem
of how to represent oneself to the best advantage, *comedias* are skeptical
about essences or absolutes. As in Cervantes’s masterful interlude, *El
retablo de las maravillas/The Marvelous Puppet Show*, they peer behind the
arature of the system and cry, “The emperor has no honor!”

READ THE ENTIRE POST AT
http://howlround.com/diversifying-the-classical-canon#sthash.yzXKc06G.dpuf
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