Challenging Theater in the Special Period

Katherine Ford (bio)

A review of White, Bretton. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba. U of Florida P, 2020.

Given the country’s unique history and connections with the United States, especially since 1959, Cuba and its theater hold a singular interest for Western scholars, particularly those in the United States. Within Cuban studies, queerness and identities that challenge traditional definitions have occupied more and more space in the arts produced and analyzed on the island and beyond, although these spaces have been contested within official discourse. Bretton White’s Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba situates itself at these crossroads, adding to art and scholarship that seeks to understand the role and portrayal of the body and queer theory in Cuban theater at a particularly difficult historical moment: the Special Period in Times of Peace, an extended and extensive economic crisis beginning in 1991 as a direct result of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union. The Special Period restricted financial aid to the island nation, and was perhaps the most serious challenge to the Revolution. For the theater that White examines, the body—in particular, reproducing the physical discomfort and difficulties associated with life in Cuba at that time— takes center stage in order to highlight what defines and distinguishes Cuba during the Special Period, often posing direct challenges to official definitions from the state. While there are other studies of the arts in the Special Period and of Cuban theater since the Revolution, White’s Staging Discomfort is a welcome and necessary addition given its attention to queer studies within performance. These two areas need further scholarly exploration and will benefit Cuban studies and theater studies alike.

Physical discomfort is central to the theater White analyzes. White focuses on five theatrical works that foreground the bodies of actors and even spectators: Carlos Díaz’s 2007 production of the German play Las relaciones de Clara (Dea Loher, Klaras Verhältnisse, 2002); Baños públicos, S. A., by Esther Suárez Durán (written in 1994, published in 1996, awarded the UNEAC prize in 1998, and staged in 1999); El Ciervo Encantado’s production of Pájaros de la playa (2004); Chamaco, by Abel González Melo (read in 2005, published in 2006, and staged in Havana in 2006); and Perros que jamás ladraron (2012), written and directed by Rogelio Orizondo. Attention to the body is important in these plays because physical discomfort was a central, quotidian reality of the Special Period. Given the scarcity of food, clothing, and other goods, the body and its needs occupy much if not all thought of the Cuban people during this time. This reality is conveyed in the performance of these plays through the portrayal of sex workers who exchange sexual favors for gifts or food, for example, or is experienced by the audience in the lack of air-conditioning in the theater in which the play is staged. White’s analysis focuses on challenges to dominant definitions of identity and sexuality from the Revolution, showing that the body is central to these challenges. Her emphasis on same-sex intimacies reveals what she calls “an aesthetics of differentiation rather than assimilation” (21).

Staging Discomfort considers the role that queerness plays in theater performance in Cuba’s Special Period. As White underlines, theater, unlike other aspects of the Cuban art world, “is art by Cubans and for Cubans” (213). Theater is not a genre in Cuba for tourists or passers-through. This can be limiting for the theater community because engaging with the international art world can offer economic opportunity. On the other hand, an examination of Cuban theater allows scholars to see an art world created by and for Cubans. Scholars approaching this work from outside Cuban studies will thus benefit from the comprehensive contextualization that White presents to help understand and situate these works. Staging Discomfort positions the role of theater within the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and after, underlining the official incorporation of the arts into the definition and consolidation of the Revolution. Theater, or course, was one of the genres that contributed to defining the Revolution for the public, though it has its own history. As was the case with the other arts produced during the Revolution, theater was subjected to restriction and censorship, particularly at the end of the 1960s and through much of the 1970s. Following the presentation of this historical context, White turns to the Special Period in Times of Peace; the performances she analyzes were staged in the waning years of the Special Period (though, as White rightly points out, the Special Period does not have a definitive end). The Special Period was widely defined by want and lack—economic and otherwise. There was a profound shortage of everything: food, clothes, and paper, among other essential and nonessential goods. Restrictions resulting from both economic shortages and state censorship became pronounced in Cuban theater during the Special Period due to the financial cost of staging a play (starting with the need for a physical space to rehearse and produce a play) and intensified by limited international exposure, and therefore revenue and investment, for Cuban theater.

Staging Discomfort complements this historical contextualization with the analysis of the plays using theories deriving from queer studies. The book is divided into five chapters, each focusing on a different play and its performance in Havana between 1999 and 2012, after the harshest years of the Special Period had ended (even as the Special Period itself carried on without end). The five plays White analyzes explore the body, sexuality, and definitions of identity in ways that challenge traditional norms, each with its own theoretical and temporal framing. In these thematic explorations, the body figures centrally, reflecting the community’s corporeal discomfort due to the very real scarcities of the time. As noted, this bodily discomfort is not limited to the actors’ bodies but also includes those of the audience members. These performances are not escapist theater; instead, the focus on the body in the plays accentuates discomfort and manipulation and mimics what was happening outside the theater walls. These plays, White writes, have “the effect of bringing the city—and the city’s problems—into the theater” (2). The city and the body—both strongly situated in the Havana of the Special Period-—are intertwined within the space of discomfort: “This book concentrates on how theatrical spaces connect bodies of actors and spectators while focusing on how spectator proximities can counteract pressures for imposed similarity” (2). While the role of the Cuban Revolution was to promote a universal identity, the Special Period—and the theater analyzed in Staging Discomfort—revealed that there was not one Cuban identity but many, and that these identities occupied a space of discomfort and fissure, proposing an alternate view of sexuality and the body. White’s exploration of Havana theater finds and highlights the cracks and dissimilarities in definitions of identity to promote otherness through theatrical expression. Staging Discomfort correctly highlights Cuban theater’s role in understanding the role of the body and of otherness in definitions of identity and sexuality. As White points out, theater in Cuba uses the body and discomfort to make connections through difference rather than assimilation—a direct challenge to the role of the Revolution since the very beginning.

In Carlos Díaz’s production of the German play Las relaciones de Clara, the body is both the problem and the solution, mimicking the early years of the Special Period when selling bodies, especially sexually, offered many Cubans a way to survive. Staging the play in various rooms throughout an old colonial house with no or limited air-conditioning, and making the spectators move to follow action that is often uncomfortably close, created a production where everyone on both sides of the fourth wall were very aware of their bodies and the physical discomfort that they could experience. Baños públicos, S. A., by Esther Suárez Durán, highlights access to and the use of public bathrooms in Cuba, connecting concepts of urination and gay sex as well as private enterprise and loyalty with revolutionary ideas. White’s third chapter on El Ciervo Encantado’s production of Pájaros de la playa (2004), based on the novel by Severo Sarduy, remembers the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s and the corporeal suffering and alienation that resulted. El Ciervo Encantado’s rendition for theater evokes rather than narrates, moving beyond language and centering on the body. This is done through auditory overload—the actors’ dialogue is often garbled, shouted, and without meaning. El Ciervo Encantado does not want to tell the spectator what is happening, and instead creates a corporeal sensation that implies the story recounted in the performance. Chamaco, by Abel González Melo, recounts the gritty side of Havana and is one of the more successful plays analyzed. In González Melo’s opinion, it is a story about greed during the Special Period, though White also highlights the way it talks about homosexuality at that time—recounting and making visible the invisible. Finally, Perros que jamás ladraron, written and directed by Rogelio Orizondo, is composed of monologues about life during the Special Period, though the silliness of the production contrasts with the seriousness of the material presented. White observes that “Perros takes these tensions . . . beyond mere juxtaposition in order to contemplate how we fail at both seeing or experiencing what is represented, or documented on stage” (186). Though most visible perhaps in this chapter, the juxtaposition of the visible and invisible is a central issue throughout Staging Discomfort.

After detailing the ways in which these five plays challenge the hegemonic cultural identity that the Revolution had been solidifying for decades, White’s conclusion narrates Cuba’s current political balancing act, where official discourse attempts to respond to the criticism that its definitions of identity are hegemonic with a new tolerance for difference. Her conclusion points to the advances in social freedoms that Mariela Castro has introduced while also acknowledging that, in Cuba, the state control of cultural production means that there is very limited freedom of expression, a reality felt even more acutely among the LGBTQ+ community and after the unrest in the summer of 2021.

In her conclusion, White underlines that the theater she analyzes—indeed Cuban theater more generally—is theater on the fringe. This is art that endeavors to look at and understand the Cuban experience from within, and for a domestic audience. For a readership not familiar with the contemporary, everyday realities of Cuba, this can make for a challenging presentation—and even reviewing this presentation poses its challenges. How can an author convey a reality that resonates with many and reminds readers of other historical and social contexts, but that remains singular and unique? How can an author portray the simultaneous lack, restriction, and opportunity of the Cuban theater world? In Staging Discomfort, White succeeds in addressing these questions by detailing the historical and social contexts that contribute to the everyday world of the playwrights, directors, theater groups, and audiences. She conveys the political past and the contemporary cultural reality that inform the works her book examines. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba does important and necessary work that allows us to understand and appreciate more about Cuban theater and culture, and about queer theory and culture in contexts outside of the United States. The monograph will serve many different audiences and widen our understanding of the fields it brings together.

Katherine Ford is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at East Carolina University. She specializes in Modern Latin American literature, concentrating on theater and performance of the twentieth century. She is the author of essays on Latin American and Latinx theater and of the books Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean (2017) and Politics and Violence in Cuba and Argentina (2010). She is currently looking at the connections between theater and film and the role of the humanities in community engagement.