Preface : understanding the place of theater in Spanish America -- Introduction: Difficult times : considering dramatic violence -- Who's afraid of Virgilio Piñera? : violence and fear in Dos viejos pánicos (1968) -- Cbwebs of memory : history made with violence in Abelardo Estorino's La dolorosa historia del amor secreto de don José Jacinto Milanés (1974) -- Filming the bourgeoisie : defining identity with violence in Eduardo Pavlovsky's La mueca -- Disorderly conduct: the violence of spectatorship in Griselda Gambaro's Información para extranjeros (1973) -- Conclusion: Transforming spectacles
Summary
This book examines how violence was used as a spectacle in Cuban and Argentine theater in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a reflection of and a dialogue with the violence occurring in the public arena. Using the international affair of the Caso Padilla as a way to appreciate how the notion of revolutionary spectacle pertains to culture, Ford deftly examines the use of violence in four plays from Cuba and Argentina to understand how simulated violence was used as a tool to address the very real violence that was taking place offstage
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-213) and index
