Ancient Drama / New World

Hadestown, a new stage musical opening on Broadway in 2019, sets the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in post-apocalyptic Depression-era New Orleans, a far-away half-mythological world with uncanny similarities to today’s America. This paper will focus on one song from the musical – “Why We Build the Wall” – which has taken on political resonance since the election of 2016 and President Donald Trump’s proposal to build a wall between the United States and Mexico.

(Please note: I have obtained Luis Alfaro’s approval to submit this abstract based on his unpublished script. He will be giving a lecture at the upcoming SCS.)

José Watanabe’s Antígona (Perú, 2000) is an exercise in memory, not only in its subject matter but also notably in its innovative form and in its relationship to Sophocles’ tragedy. In this paper I propose a reading that foregrounds the play’s formal, multi-layered engagements with memory as a poetic device. My focus on textual aspects aims to raise fresh questions about how we understand reception and the relationship of texts to performance.

In Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa, the title character undergoes multiple transformations: Antígona becomes a voice for her brother Polinices and for the on-stage effigy of Creonte; she becomes the site of the battle between Polinices and Eteocles; she becomes both Hamlet and Ophelia. In every manifestation, she operates as a representative for Asociación Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, an Argentine organization that, since 1977, has protested the disappearances of their relatives in the Dirty War of 1976-1983.