Abstract
Dos viejos pánicos (1968) from Vigilio Piñera (1912–1979) explores the violence inherent in the repetition of everyday existence by portraying a routine day in the life of a sixty-year-old married couple. The quotidian violence that characterizes the couple’s lives is provoked by fear. Piñera’s characters, Tota and Tabo, represent a domestic dispute that mirrors the spectacality of the political context that was taking place in Cuba offstage in the late 1960s. This violence is sparked by a fear that characterizes Tota and Tabo’s existence and comes between them and the outside world. Their fear is triggered by the knowledge that everything about them—including their intimate secrets—is known by another. This comprehensive fear is embodied in a planilla the couple is forced to confront in the second act. The planilla, in Dos viejos pánicos, is a governmental survey that becomes the personification of fear for the middle-aged couple. Their violence against one another and against the outside world can be witnessed in their struggle with, and attempted elimination of, this very planilla. The internal world of Tota and Tabo reflects the national context (that of Cuba in the late 1960s, but also the larger Latin American political and social context) and portrays a growing fear and the violence that it provokes. The small, claustrophobic existence that the couple describes is doubled by the political events that surround the writing of Dos viejos pánicos, a context in which the spectacularity is mirrored by Piñera’s work.
Tabo: Tota, ¿qué vamos a comer mañana?
Tota: Carne con miedo, mi amor, carne con miedo.
Virglio Piñera Dos viejos pánicos
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Notes
Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 98–99.
Julio Matas, “Theater and Cinematography,” Revolutionary Change in Cuba, ed. Carmelo Mesa-Lago (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971) 432.
Antoni Kapcia, Havana: The Making of the Cuban Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2005) 140.
Paul Christopher Smith, “Theatre and Political Criteria in Cuba: Casa de las Américas Awards, 1960–1983,” Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos 14.1 (1984): 43–47.
This speech took place in June of 1961 at the National Library in Havana. For the complete text, see http://www.min.cult.cu/historia/palabrasalosintelectuales. html. Hugh Thomas has a study of the importance of this speech for Cuba and Cuban intellectuals in Cuba, or, The Pursuit of Freedom (1465–1473). Chapter five of Marifeli Pérez-Stable’s book analyzes the political context in the decade of the 1960s and Roberto González Echevarría’s essay considers literature and its criticism in Revolutionary Cuba (Pérez-Stable 98–120; González Echevarría). Roberto González Echevarría, “Criticism and Literature in Revolutionary Cuba.” Cuba, Twenty-five Years of Revolution, 1959–1984, ed. Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985) 154–173.
Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or, The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998).
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, trans. Kenneth Hall (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994) 68–69.
Virgilio Piñera, Teatro completo, ed. Rine Leal (La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2002)
The most informative articles on these two points come from Dara Goldman and José Quiroga. Dara Goldman, “Los límites de la carne: Los cuerpos asediados de Virgilio Piñera,” Revista Iberoamericana 69 (2003): 1001–1015.
José Quiroga, “Fleshing Out Virgilio Piñera from the Cuban Closet,” ¿ntiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
José Quiroga, “Virgilio Piñera: On the Weight of the Insular Flesh,” Hispanisms and Homosexualities, ed. Silvia Molloy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
José Quiroga’s essay “Piñera inconcluso,” included in Rita Molinero’s collection on Piñera, provides a particularly useful account of the re-introduction of Piñera’s work after his death. Rita Molinero, ed., Virgilio Piñera: La memoria del cuerpo (San Juan, PR: Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2002).
Ana García Chichester, “Virgilio Piñera and the Formulation of a National Literature,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2.2 (2002): 235.
Raquel Carrió Mendía, “Estudio en blanco y negro: Teatro de Virgilio Piñera” Revista Iberoamericana 56 (1990): 878.
Antonin Artaud, El teatro y su doble, trans. Enrique Alonso and Francisco Abelenda (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1978)
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1973).
Zalacaín 15–60; Aguilú 35–62. Raquel Aguilú de Murphy, Los textos dramáticos de Virgilio Piñera y el teatro del absurdo (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1989).
Daniel Zalacaín, El teatro absurdista hispanoamericano (Valencia, España: Ediciones Albatros Hispanófila, 1985).
Woodyard; Palls; Martin. Eleanor Jean Martin, “Dos viejos pánicos: A Political Interpretation of the Cuban Theater of the Absurd,” Revista/Review Iberoamericana 9 (1979): 50–56.
Terry L. Palls, “El teatro del absurdo en Cuba: El compromiso artístico frente al compromiso político,” Latin American Theatre Review 11.2 (1978): 25–32.
George Woodyard, “The Theatre of the Absurd in Spanish America,” Comparative Drama 111.3 (1969): 183–192.
Diana Taylor, Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1991) 9.
As quoted in Matías Montes Huidobro’s study of Cuban theater. Montes Huidobro, Matías, Persona, vida y máscara en el teatro cubano (Miami: Ediciones Universales, 1973) 212.
Piñera’s theater often plays with names to make a deeper suggestion about the characters and the play’s arguments. This employment can also be seen in José Triana’s landmark La noche de los asesinos (1965), where the grown siblings are named Cuca, Beba, and Lalo—an act that emphasizes their status as children and their desire to emancipate themselves from their parents. Triana, José, La noche de los asesinos (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001).
José Corrales, “Los acosados, Tabo, Tota, Montes Huidobro y Piñera.” Círculo: Revista de cultura 29 (2000): 122.
Corrales 120. Similarly, Forster’s article details the connection between Arrabal and Piñera in a footnote. Merlin H. Forster, “Games and Endgames in Virgilio Piñera’s Dos viejos pánicos,” In Retrospect: Essays on Latin American Literature, ed. Elizabeth S. Rogers and Timothy J. Rogers (South Carolina: Special Literary Publications, 1987) 113–114.
As quoted in Francisco Torres Monreal, “Introducción,” Teatro pánico, By Fernando Arrabal (Madrid: Cátedra, 1986) 15.
Severino João Albuquerque, Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991) 83.
See Katherine Ford, “El espectaculo revolucionario: El teatro cubano de la década de los sesenta,” Latin American Theatre Review 39 (2005): 95–114.
The use of light here remembers the use of light in Piñera’s “La isla en peso,” the essential poem that considers the effect of the island’s insularity on constructing the poet. In the poem, the light, seen in the dazzling sunlight of the day, like the water that surrounds the island, weighs heavy and overwhelming on the bodies that it takes in. Matías Montes Huidobro discusses the importance of light in Piñera’s work. He believes that it is at this moment that fear becomes another personality within the play and connects this with Piñera’s Electra Garrigó. Piñera, Vigilio, “La isla en peso,” La vida entera (La Habana: UNEAC, 1968) 25–42.
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© 2010 Katherine Ford
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Ford, K. (2010). Who’s Afraid of Virgilio Piñera? Violence and Fear in Dos viejos pánicos (1968). In: Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105225_2
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