Posted by Margaret Carson on April 13, 192003 at 19:16:38:
We first experience “Potestad” as a benign psychodrama. In its opening moments we hear the meditations of a 50ish man who ruminates wistfully on his youth and presents a portrait of a marriage at its sputtering midlife. The Man is humiliated, emasculated. His exquisite vanity has been deeply offended. When he played rugby at age 25, his wife’s vociferous cheers and idolizing gaze reaffirmed his masculinity. Now, in his 50s, his knees and back hurt, and he can barely get up out of a chair without pain. His wife doesn’t even look at him anymore, much less massage his ego. She studies English through a set of headphones for hours every day. He describes the position of his wife’s legs as she sits in a chair and concludes, “The story of the tightly closed knees is also the story of our couple.” Their sex life has come to an end (with the suggestion that she’s the withholding one). His bright spot is his daughter, who restores his diminishing sense of virility with her affection and adulation, hinting at a disturbingly close relationship.
However, this middle-class psychodrama suddenly changes course. State-sponsored terrorism, responsible for disappearances, torture, and extra-judicial killings in Argentina during the Dirty War, enters through their front door. We now experience The Man’s re-enactment of the Saturday afternoon when his daughter was taken away for questioning, never to be heard from again. The play suddenly moves away from “What can be done to save this marriage?” towards “How could this happen here?” and “How do we explain it to ourselves?” “What was it like to experience a knock on the door and then see loved ones (in this case, a child) taken away from their home?” In re-enacting the trauma on stage, in a production that dates from 1987, only a few years after the end of the Dirty War, Pavlovsky forces the audience to look back confront their own, still-fresh memories of this time. (In contrast,“Information for Foreigners,” written in 1972, was a warning siren anticipating the brutalities to come.) The Man’s devastation over the disappearance and loss of his daughter was no doubt familiar to many in the audience. This scene probably provoked tears and cries of recognition in the theater:
“They stole her from me, Tita! They stole here from me with lies! With clever lies that only those people are capable of fabricating, turning good into evil, justice into injustice! When their calumnies began to spread, nothing can stop them! All values are reversed! I always thought evil was an abstraction. A theory. But when I see it incarnated in people of flesh and blood, in people who shout, laugh, gesticulate, insult and persecute, Tita. As if they were born for no other reason that that: to persecute! [Then I revolt! I’m enraged!]*** I feel so alone, Tita. . .it’s difficult to tell you, Tita, the inexpressible emptiness I feel. %%%
Yet in a surprise ending, we learn that this victim of a state crime had himself been a player in the corrupt, terrorizing system, if not as an agent of death then an ancillary member (a doctor at the scene of a crime at the service of the anti-terrorist squad who killed Adriana’s parents). The Man who was a baby-snatcher ironically has this baby, now a young woman, snatched from him. Do we still have the same pity for him when we learn of his past? All of the desperate words of longing for Adriana, we realize, could have been spoken by the relatives of Adriana’s parents, who never knew what happened to the baby that disappeared after her parents were brutally killed. (She presumably had grandparents, aunts and uncles who should have brought her up and must have mourned her disappearance.) With this unveiling of The Man’s past, the play becomes dangerously destabilized for me. Perhaps this was a frightening moment for the audience too -- could they still see the tragedy through his eyes? One might identify, however guiltily and reluctantly, with his passivity in front of the state agents who took his daughter away, with his feelings of humiliation and social ostracism, but once his sordid past was revealed (with its fascistic overtures, with blood streaming down his face to signify his murderous complicity %%%), was the shocked audience supposed to think, “yes, that’s us, too, there’s a murderous fascist inside everyone”?
There were other troublesome aspects of this play for me. Who was Tita? The Man’s confessional begins with her entrance, but what is her relationship with The Man? During his monologue, he addresses her repeatedly, “Tita!” “Tita!” as if to call her attention. She withholds her gaze from him. They make motions to touch each other but never do so. She has two brief lines, both of which are like primal screams.
In the end, the female character whose silence I noticed the most was Adriana. She was “earned” by The Man as a baby and brought up in total ignorance of her birth family. She is the ultimate victim in this tragedy.
Note: why are there significant differences between the Spanish original and the English translation? Why were they seen as necessary in the U.S. production?
*** passage inserted in English translation that isn’t present in the original
%%% in the original Spanish but not included in the English translation.