STRANGER INFORMATION:
A project based on Griselda Gambaro's Information for Foreigners
By Lián Amaris Sifuentes
"Gambaro's theatre is testimony to the fact that even in democracy there is room and demand for politically conscious theatre."
-Anne Witte, Guiding the Plot: Politics and Feminism in the work of Women Playwrights from Spain and Argentina
*** To stage a play, a director should be familiar with past productions. After searching books, periodicals and the Internet in both English and Spanish, I was unable to find any production history of this play because, apparently, Information for Foreigners has never been formally produced beyond student productions or staged readings. The "Acknowledgements" in my translation of the play stated, "Information for Foreigners received its first public performance- sixteen years after its composition- at the instigation of Alberto Miner, then director of the theater department at the Americas Society, in New York City" (Gambaro, p. vii) but did not offer any more information. A footnote in the book, Exorcising History: Argentine Theater Under Dictatorship, published in 2000, stated that Information for Foreigners has "never [been] staged in its entirety in keeping with the playwright's wishes" (Jones, p. 202), but did not elaborate beyond that statement. Maguerite Feitlowitz wrote in the introduction to Information,
"Written in the period 1971-73, the play prophetically foretold an era of government-sponsored terrorism not only against persons whose activities were deemed subversive but also against those whose thoughts were grounds for kidnapping, torture, and death. Gambaro hid the play in her house, then smuggled it out when she fled into exile. For years, the play circulated in samizdat among theater people in Europe, but when companies offered productions, Gambaro refused permission, fearing repercussions against family members still in Argentina... [Information] was published in Buenos Aires in 1987 but it has not been produced there, nor are the prospects very good. Its only performances have been at English language workshops and readings in the United States" (Gambaro, pp.5-6)Also included in Exorcising History was the production history of all of the plays produced in Argentina from the 1970s through the early 1990s; while most of Gambaro's plays were included, Information for Foreigners was nowhere on that list. In her article entitled, "Space and Spectator in the Theatre of Griselda Gambaro," Rosalea Postma states, " Gambaro's Información para extranjeros, written in the early 1970's and not yet performed or published, represents the coalescence of the dramatist's experimentation with the use of theatre as space..." (Postma, p.36). Not one of the publications elaborated beyond those aforementioned statements.
***
My journey toward this project began in Spring 2001, when I read the play Information for Foreigners by Griselda Gambaro in a Latin American Theater class. In 2002, I dedicated a semester to researching and analyzing this play in depth. This prior research has given me the dramaturgical foundation on which to build this site. I am grateful to be revisiting my exploration of the play within the context of Diana Taylor's Performance and Politics class, as many of her publications were crucial references for me in my early research. I am also excited to reevaluate the play in this political moment, informed by the issues and concerns raised in our class. Within the context of this Performance and Politics class, one of our many goals was to create some type of activist performance- I was immediately reminded of Information for Foreigners and began building this project. We in the class had hoped to create a (web)site of intervention and this project is precisely that- a gesture of intervention. The following is a brief analysis of the play, which includes a historical contextualization of the play within Argentina's Dirty War. I examine how the play can resonate at this specific moment and how it can be useful within a U.S. (rather than only an Argentine) consciousness. I have deliberately chosen not to discuss specific scenes or plot trajectories within this context because I would rather let the performance stand on its own. Instead I have focused on the theme of "cruelty" within "civilized" society.
***
ON THEATER, CRUELTY, AND CULTURE
In her discussion of Latin American theater in the U.S., scholar Diana Taylor states, "... rather than looking beyond the apparent similarities and analyzing the original uses to which these acquired models are put, critics trained in Western drama too often conclude that Latino theatre is amateurish or that Latin American theatre is derivative and undeserving of further attention. (Negotiating, Taylor, p. 10)." The work of European playwrights is often as "international" as study of plays in the United States seems to get. The problem that seems to permeate the canon here in the United States is that "...while we all know Shakespeare and Ibsen, our populations can seldom name our own playwrights, let alone other Latino or Latin American ones" (Negotiating, Taylor, p. 10). The reason so often given in high school English classes or in college theater classes is that the plays in the canon are "universal." While I would not begin to argue that the Argentine experience, especially during the years of the "dirty war," is universal, I would say that the play Information for Foreigners particularly accessible within U.S. culture at this moment of vanishing civil rights and pointing fingers.
In her article on Gambaro, Myriam Jehenson made the connection between Victor Turner's theories of theater and Gambaro's plays. Jehenson stated,
"examination of the link between politics and art also led anthropologist Victor Turner to his conviction that theater is the site where the relationship [between politics and art] becomes especially relevant. As he saw it, a playwright's conscious art exposes both the overt mechanisms at work in a society and the unconscious and culturally-produced ideologies at work in its psyche" (Jehenson, pp. 85-86).If the art of the playwright exposes the unconscious and culturally-produced ideologies of society, than certainly that can also be said of the director of a theater piece. The desire to produce a play such as Information means that there is a desire to expose some element of our society that we deny. If a director or an audience in the U.S. can connect to this material filled with violence, cruelty, sexism and blatant barbarism then the correlations between that violence and U.S. culture is exposed. Grotowski states in his Towards a Poor Theatre,"In order that the spectator may be stimulated into self-analysis when confronted with the actor, there must be some common ground already existing in both of them, something they can either dismiss in one gesture or jointly worship. Therefore the theatre must attack what might be called the collective complexes of society, the core of the collective subconscious or perhaps superconscious, the myths which are... inherited- through one's blood, religion, culture and climate" (Grotowski, p. 42).This connection to the text, to the performers, to the scenes that we as an audience could watch when we enter the world of Information, is what makes this play so frightening. Information certainly attacks the collective complexes of society. Participating in the experience of Information means exposing the collective subconscious that both Turner and Grotowski believed to exist in theater. I propose that one element of the collective subconscious exposed in Information is cruelty.
Human cruelty exists in forms of violence, war, torture, and even in everyday interactions between people. As Antonin Artaud states, there is a "...terrible cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall in on our heads. And the theatre had been created to teach us that first of all" (Artaud, p.86). Information exists in a world of cruelty and shows its audience that cruelty and violence cannot exist in a vacuum.
In its 20 scenes, Information for Foreigners reaches the depths of human cruelty. The audience is moved from scene to scene to act as witnesses to the violence. They watch as fellow "audience members"(played by actors) are pulled from the audience to inflict violence on the actors. They watch as "audience members" are pulled from the audience and never return. They watch people being tortured, raped, murdered. Watching and doing nothing to help, or stop, or comment on the action taking place around them becomes an integral part of the performance.
The U.S often claims to be outraged by the evil treatment inflicted upon the peoples of other countries (see Iraq). But the administration takes limited action regarding human rights violations and vigorous action regarding capitalist interests. While millions of Jews were murdered in Europe during World War II, the U.S. did nothing. During "ethnic cleansing" wars in Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa, the United States stays away unless financially impacted. In Latin America, various forms of paramilitary violence and even state-backed violence have plagued countries for decades while the U.S. continues to look away. These are but a few examples. Regarding Argentina, "In 1977, President Carter sent Patricia Derian, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, to investigate the accusations of human rights abuses; she estimated that 3,000 people had been executed and 5,000 disappeared. The United States cut military aid to Argentina and canceled $270 million in loans" (Negotiating, Taylor, p. 187) but somehow, the violence continued until its climax in 1979. The U.S. seems to acknowledge problems by cutting military aid and loans, but still violence continues. These conflicts of witnessing, complicity and responsibility are all exposed within Information for Foreigners which is why this text resonates outside of its specific historical and geographical context.
In the introduction to the play, the first guide warns the audience, "No obscenity or strong words. The play speaks to our way of life: Argentine, Western and Christian" (Gambaro, p. 71). This statement serves to outline the context of the piece and while "Argentine" does not necessarily apply to an audience within the United States, both "Western and Christian" certainly do. Western and Christian existence is undeniably filled with violence and cruelty from conquest to conversion, witch trials to slavery. In her article on Information, Rosalea Postma states, "contrary to the guideÕs statement, the play is full of violence and obscenities. These acts of cruelty and inhumanity are an ironic response to the culturally refined and altruistic lifestyle the guide supposedly means by the Argentine, Western, Christian way of life" (Postma, p. 39). I find this same irony in current rhetoric surrounding the "righteous" War on Terror. The U.S. maintains that it is culturally refined and altruistic while bombing civilians and historically significant sites. Throughout the play, symbols of refined culture such as poetry, music and theater are used to juxtapose the concept of civilization with barbarity. Gambaro's text reminds us that such symbols of civilization (poetry, music, theater) can exist within the same world as torture and rape. The beautiful and the horrendous can and do both exist within a "civilized society."
Information for Foreigners is filled with a kind of violence that most people do not want to see. A simple response to that violence is to dismiss it and to deny its existence within one's own cultural context. There are voices in this play that need to be heard because this play does not speak only to an Argentine way of life, but to a way of life that many cultures seem to live. Information for Foreigners "...in many ways foreshadow[s] the excesses committed under the military rule of the Proceso years, while they are, at the same time, universal parables of human cruelty" (Witte, p. 105). Information is not only accessible to an audience within the U.S., it is accessible to any audience that acknowledges the violence and cruelty that exists in the world; whether that violence is the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing or any kind of terrorism. Information exists in a theater of cruelty that is so real and so crucial to our understanding of "civilization" that not one person should be spared from this awareness. Artaud asserted that in the theater, "one does not separate the mind from the body nor the senses from intelligence, especially in a domain where the endlessly renewed fatigue of the organs requires intense and sudden shocks to revive our understanding" (Artaud, p. 86). We must revive our understanding. Information for Foreigners serves to do just that.
***
WORKS CITED
Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. tr. Mary Caroline Richards. New York, 1958.
Gambaro, Griselda. Information for Foreigners: Three Plays by Griselda Gambaro. Ed. and trans. Marguerite Feitlowitz. Evanston: Northwester UP, 1992.
Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne. Staging Cultural Violence: Griselda Gambaro and Argentina's 'Dirty War'. Mosaic-A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. March: 85-104. 1999 Canada.
Jones, Jean Graham. Exorcising History: Argentine Theater Under Dictatorship. London: Associated University Press. 2000.
Negotiating Performance. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, ed. Durham: Duke University Press. 1994.
Postma, Rosalea. Space and Spectator in the Theatre of Griselda Gambaro: Informacion para extranjeros. Latin American Theatre Review. Fall: 35-45. 1980 Lawrence, KS.
Witte, Ann. Guiding the Plot: Politics and Feminism in the work of Women Playwrights from Spain and Argentina. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 1996.
[the background]
Copyright © 2004 Lián Amaris Sifuentes [lianamaris.com] All rights reserved.
Lian Brennan