Conclusion: Transforming Spectacles

Abstract

This project studied how violence and violent acts were portrayed from 1968 to 1974 in Cuba and Argentina in four canonical plays by Virgilio Piñera, Abelardo Estorino, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Griselda Gambaro. These years were defined by official violence that originated with the state against its people and by an extra-official violence that came from the non-governing groups as a way to contest conditions or provoke change. The violence defined movements on both the left and the right of the political spectrum and came to be a fundamental part of global events as we see in such diverse settings as Paris and Havana. This study showed how theater answered this real, quotidian violence by placing it onstage in order to highlight the central role it has in everyday lives and the depth of its control over our lives. As shown here, these plays do not necessarily advocate an end to violence or didactically teach the spectators how to eradicate violence from their lives. Similarly, this project does not propose a list of plays that look at the topic of violence, but studies how violence has been understood through the stage. Piñera, Estorino, Pavlovsky, and Gambaro underline the presence of violence in the definitions of everyday life in an attempt to understand its role. While this can appear to be a simple act, the varying levels of censorship that the plays have experienced testify to the radical interventions that this highlighting of violence proposes.

The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence.

René Girard, Violence and the Sacred