This Bitch: Self-Fashioning and Social Media in an Adaptation of El perro del hortelano

Abstract

This article examines how self-representational practices in the online sphere have been interpreted in an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s play El perro del hortelano (1618). This Bitch: Esta Sangre Quiero, written by playwright Adrienne Dawes and performed on Zoom as part of the University of Arkansas virtual ArkType Festival in January 2021, reimagines the role of honor and honra in the early modern court as analogous to the clout or status of influencers which dominant social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The delicate balancing act that nobles in comedia must master to navigate between desire and reputation is reflected in Dawes’s adaptation in the juxtaposition of the private selves and the performative selves which influencers display for followers to consume. This article thus explores how this recent adaptation engages with performative identities/identity as performance as a natural through line between the social context of the original play and the self-fashioning practices of today’s rich and (internet) famous. In this version of Lope’s story, the countess Diana becomes a Pilates instructor and pansexual goddess, while the secretary Teodoro is reimagined as her talented, but unknown, social media manager. Although this adaptation was imagined for performance on a traditional theater stage, the social commentary became so much more pointed when examined through the meta-layer of online performance: as we examine the lives of people who mediate their identity via screens using the Zoom screen itself, the audience becomes complicit in the self-fashioning strategies of the characters.

Keywords:

• comedia studies
• adaptation
• self-fashioning
• social media
• virtual theater

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to playwright Adrienne Dawes for providing access to the play text as well as granting permission to reproduce screenshots from the ArkType Festival performance of This Bitch.

Notes

1 Though I will refer to the characters using the gender of the performers who appeared in the ArkType Festival reading, it is useful to note here that the playscript describes each character in such a way that they could be played by individuals across the gender spectrum. As an example, Diana Bianca is described as “+DIANA: (20s, Latina/x F or femme person),” with the + indicating a bilingual character.

2 The promo video as produced for the January 2021 Zoom performance was reminiscent of the promotional materials for the infamously ill-planned Fyre Festival, which ended with disastrous financial consequences for the Bahamians who were involved in preparing for that event. Much like its real-life counterparts, the play text highlights the attraction of such festivals in the exclusivity and intimacy of access to the “featured guests,” although Dawes firmly stakes her political engagement with this kind of influencer tourism in the touch-in-cheek reference to “sustainable settler colonialism.”

3 All textual citations of the play This Bitch: Esta Sangre Quiero are from a working manuscript, generously provided by the playwright.

4 The play also incorporates celebrities of this nature in the often referred to but never seen musician Riqui Tiquismiquis (modeled after internationally renowned performer Bad Bunny), whose following of 400 million makes even rumored association with him a sure way to garner social mobility in this sphere.

5 Inda Craig Galvan’s recent adaptation of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Los empeños de un engaño, entitled What We Pay for Likes (performed at the Hispanic Classical Theater Festival LA Escena 2020), also mines the world of celebrity for a comparison to early modern nobility. In her adaptation, which explores the sphere of celebrities who are famous for being famous modeled after the Kardashian-Jenner clan, a cross-promotional wedding opportunity is in fact the driving force for maintaining relationships based on falsehoods.

6 In an example of life imitating art, the real Jojo Siwa posted about being part of the LGBTQ+ community on the social media platforms TikTok and Instagram approximately one week before this play’s inaugural reading over Zoom, a fact much commented upon in the YouTube livestream of the performance.