VIRGILIO PIÑERA (CUBA, 1948) Translated by Margaret Carson
When this brazen but baffling play debuted, an esteemed director who was in the audience walked out and denounced it as a ‘spitball thrown at Olympus.’ Piñera transplants the classic Greek tragedy to modern-day Havana, where King Agamemnon becomes a beer-guzzling bourgeois patriarch, the Chorus sings its verses to the tune of ‘Guatanamera,’ and the faithful servant of Sophocles’s tragedy is a Tutor—no normal man but a centaur who urges his apt pupil Electra to ‘stop making speeches and make a Revolution instead.’In the words of its quixotic author, Electra Garrigó is a modern drama for a nation that is ‘tragic and comic at the same time.’