Introduction: The Comedia Under Siege

Abstract

This introduction engages with the meaning and socio-cultural impact of a variety of artistic contributions within the realm of Hispanic theater that have been carried out in the Spanish-speaking world in order to keep production of the comedia afloat during the confinement due to COVID-19. It discusses what this implies for an inherently live medium such as the theater and, ultimately, introduces the content of the rest of the volume.

Keywords:

• Comedia
• performance
• confinement
• fifth wall
• crisis

Constructing the Fifth Wall

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we could never have even dreamed that we would be fifteen months into a pandemic, with little end in sight. Although those of us who are fortunate enough to live in the United States might feel that COVID-19 is finally coming into focus in the rearview mirror, in many other parts of the world the disparities of for-profit health care are still reverberating.¹ Still, there is a light at the end of the tunnel—a tunnel that has run much darker and longer than any of us expected. For our colleagues and creators in much of the Spanish-speaking world, however, the pandemic is still very much present, and the effect on their work is palpable.

Despite—and in some cases because of—the stay-at-home orders, the desire to protect each other,² and personal struggles with the effects of quarantine, theatrical artists adapted and quickly began to produce digital content to reach out to their audiences. This was done in a very decentralized way, particularly for smaller, independent companies who rely heavily on grants, touring, and audience buy-in to stay afloat. Within a month of the shutdowns in March 2020, companies were sharing recordings of previous work, as well as live streaming from their living rooms and balconies via platforms like Facebook and YouTube. From there, they quickly adapted to new digital formats and tools, but almost as fast came the questions of what this new method of dissemination is and whether it constitutes theater. Is a performance over videoconference, with audience cameras and microphones turned off, really theater? How can performers connect and interact with an audience that is not in the same room? Live theater has grappled for years with the Fourth Wall, now there is another filtering layer, one that is both connecting and disconnecting. The screen—this time literal—and all the wires and WiFi connections that have entangled us over Zoom calls, virtual conferences, classrooms, and meetings, synchronously and asynchronously make up a Fifth Wall, particularly when coupled with theatrical performance.

Although the Fourth Wall was not established theoretically until the eighteenth century, we have clear evidence of its use in early modern theater from around the world. The stock gracioso character of the comedia frequently can be found breaking the Fourth Wall to share information with the audience while maintaining a façade with other characters. Even when not directly interacting with the audience, actors will often discuss the energy and feedback they receive from a live audience. The Fifth Wall, however, is paradoxically more difficult to break—the advent of the internet and social media gives an illusion of interconnectedness at a higher level than ever before, while simultaneously allowing for us to live fully separate lives. Even twenty years ago, the pace and degree with which we were able to go fully remote and “socially distanced” would have seemed an impossible task. Social media sites allow us to pick and choose the content we confront, effectively creating silos along political lines, and allowing for the dissemination of false narratives into echo chambers.

Although the need to mute audience microphones removes audible queues of audience reaction, there are ways for the Fifth Wall to be broken down, slowly but surely, as we start to become more accustomed to this new format. Many platforms now have instant reaction buttons that allow viewers to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, applaud (silently) or share an emoji demoting contentedness, confusion, sadness, anger, and much more. Some artists have directly incorporated these and other components such as comment boxes to get audience feedback in the moment, while others have gone even more tech-heavy, using multiple platforms to connect with the audience in more profound ways.

The digital divide is harder to bridge, but as we will see in the articles herein, it did not stop companies, big and small, from producing theater. It is perhaps not the theater we are used to, but it is in many ways a more egalitarian production. Audience members can come from all over the world and watch livestreams and recordings from the comfort of their own homes. Theatrical artists can connect with their audiences and get direct answers via texting apps, which can allow for a much more intimate relationship. Those of us who study early modern theater and adaptations could do so without having to travel thousands of miles during specific seasons. Those who are a part of a smaller troupe without the means to travel or perform in larger auditoriums were given an opportunity to expand their reach infinitely.

Dramatic Lessons from a Pandemic

Most likely, many of our readers were surprised the first time they were asked what they had learned from working remotely in confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and what could be salvaged and implemented from such experiences as we return to our ‘normal' working mode. At first glance, this kind of professional self-analysis might seem unethical: What can we learn from a global pandemic that has caused so much human and economic havoc? Are we even prepared for this question when we are just emerging from this collective trauma? Don’t we all want to forget about Zoom, breakout rooms and other remote modes of working to return to a normality that we had taken for granted for so long and, as we write this introduction, still feels utopian?

To a certain extent, these questions are rhetorical and point the reader to an expected answer; indeed, working in the midst of the pandemic has led us to uncover lessons that we may not have considered in less critical circumstances. Theater, both artistically and economically, has been one of the arenas that has been most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, but the spirit of survival shown by this art has changed its history forever. As we had examined in the first part of the introduction, the digital stage has emerged as a powerful alternative to the traditional stage. Although technology has been present since the seventeenth century in the theatrical field as a spectacular additive, during the crisis it has become a survival mechanism that is as indispensable as the actor or the director.

Some resourceful companies have exploited the power of technology by transforming the plays produced during the pandemic into sophisticated digital projects close to cinema, video games or virtual reality. This is the case of Dream, a Royal Shakespeare Company project, based on the Bard’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where actors with motion sensors interacted with their surroundings and the audience at home.³ However, the pieces to which this special issue alludes and which we are interested in highlighting resort to digitalization in a more artisanal way, laying bare the artistic struggle for survival. These are the initiatives that this collection is interested in assessing and celebrating. For us, this is the true theater, born from and for the pandemic: a courageous, experimental, creative theater that does not hide its struggles, its deficits, or its imperfections, but on the contrary, transforms them into what we could referred to as ‘another new art of making comedies’ in our time, evoking Lope de Vega’s revolutionary dramatic treatise.

Let us add that Spanish Golden Age theater has had an even more difficult time than contemporary productions in coping with the artistic shock resulting from the pandemic due to the weight of tradition that the classics carry. If theater in general has heavily been besieged by the pandemic, the works of the seventeenth-century authors have been doubly affected. For this reason, to see these plays reemerge reinvented is an act of true artistic heroism to which we must take off our hats. We will even go so far as to state that the fewer means a company had at its disposal, the more meritorious is this revival of the classics under the extreme conditions and hardships to which they were subjected.

Theater in general and Golden Age drama—a subgenre to which we have dedicated this dossier—have managed to successfully transmit their human essence and poetry through the artificiality of an anachronistic computer screen while, at the same time, approaching more diverse audiences that perhaps, did not have the chance to be involved with classical theater prior to the pandemic. Early modern drama in the time of COVID-19 has reached a surprising conviviality through a groundbreaking game of windows (and screens) through which thousands of spectators have been connected on a global level. An illustrative example of this specific and sublime connection is the one exemplified by the play Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte (2020), directed by Carlota Gaviño and Iara Solano and based on texts by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This multiplatform project, as analyzed in the article by Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas, directly involves the spectator through the computer screen to reflect on the importance of the concept of the window as a threshold of global communication and freedom. The voice of one of the actresses encourages the spectators to show their windows through their Zoom cameras simultaneously and to connect digitally through a baroque game of quadrants. The audience breaks with their anonymity and participates in a communal ritual, innately sharing their impulse for interaction and conviviality, two major concepts at the heart of the theatrical experience.

While we all hope for a rapid and triumphant return to the stage, we also cannot help but wonder what innovations will remain in place. Although we were (and still are, to an extent) distanced, sometimes even by whole oceans, we were also able to connect in ways we never would have imagined otherwise. For Antonin Artaud, the connections and innovations that converged for theater practitioners during COVID19 would probably not be so surprising, as he posits that theater and plagues work in similar ways:

…the action of theater, like that of plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter, which invades even the clearest testimony of the senses; and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it. (31–32)

Although “beneficial” might seem like a strong word, given what so many of us have endured, but we still have learned a lot from this pandemic—about ourselves, our relationships, our ways of working and connecting, and yes, even about theater—and although we may be anxious to put it behind us, we should not forget how we adapted to survive, and even thrive, behind the Fifth Wall.

In This Volume

The present special issue—The Comedia Under Siege—examines a variety of theatrical proposals that were carried out in the Spanish-speaking world in order to keep the comedia afloat during a rigorous confinement, and to evaluate the contributions of these innovative and spontaneous creations. The first article, “The Comedia Unbound” by Barbara Fuchs, argues that despite the restrictions imposed by confinement the theatrical productions created during this time show how alive and well this theatrical form is. The essay explores how companies addressed new challenges to create theater through different types of media, stresses what new technologies bring to theater, and highlights that the Spanish comedia is far from bound.

The second article of this volume, “‘En otro reino extraño’ or, Lope de Vega and the Digital Stage” by Esther Fernández, is dedicated to En otro reino extraño, one of the first digital productions focused on Golden Age theater to be widely disseminated in social media. It argues that this adaptation exemplifies the ways in which the comedia can stand beyond the traditional stage and enter the realm of the digital age; by mixing classical and contemporary concepts that can effectively bring Lope de Vega’s texts in an unique way. That is, combining notions of utopia and dystopia that highlight confinement as a condition and circumstance lived by all. As the author explains, this play achieves its goal in a number of ways: combining real conversations among the actors mixed with disconnected love scenes; posting questions about the performativity of early modern plays; questioning how these texts conform to contemporary sensitivities; and showcasing scenes that bring up the cast’s experiences in confinement.

As the nature of theater has always been attached to the relationship between spectacle and spectator, the emergence of digital theater posits many doubts as to whether or not virtual plays can be considered as such: How can digital theater supersede the perceived limitations imposed by a piece transmitted through video conferencing? Is it possible for a digital play to create intimacy and recreate the experience of an in-person performance? The third article in this volume, “Grumelot & Escuela Nave 73: Defying Traditional Stage Presence through Digital Media” by Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas, answers these questions by analyzing the concept of social presence in Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte an interactive and multiplatform piece produced by the Spanish company Grumelot and directed by Carlota Gaviño and Iara Solano. It argues that despite traditional conceptions of live theater as the most legitimate mode of performing theater, there are other ways of creating rapport with the audience and immersing them in the spectacle by making them active participants of the spectacle.

As the second and third article in this volume center on two digital Spanish productions, the last two articles discuss productions that came out of the Americas, specifically Mexico and the U.S., proving that theatrical innovation within the realm of early modern Spanish theater went across borders and reached broader audiences, and that digital outlets have a lot to offer this artistic genre. Erin Cowling’s essay, “Confinement, COVID, and the Comedia in Mexico City,” brings into dialogue how Mexican theater companies responded to the limitations brought by confinement, what lessons were learned, and what these new adaptations will bring forward as the industry unfolds in new creative territories. In this case, Cowling discusses Teatro UNAM, which streamed performances and opened up virtual dialogues among academics, artists and journalists about the state and future of live theater in relation to its newly emerged counterpart, digital theater. On the other hand, the author highlights creative contributions by Novohispunk and EFE Tres Teatro, two smaller companies that experimented with new digital technologies and ways to interact directly with the spectators in order to make their performances more accessible and engaging for their audiences.

The fifth article in this volume, “‘This Bitch:’ Self-Fashioning and Social Media in an Adaptation of El perro del hortelano” by Laura Muñoz, discusses how self-representational practices in the social media domain were construe in a recent digital adaptation of Lope de Vega’s El perro del Hortelano titled, This Bitch: Esta Sangre Quiero by Latinx playwright Adrienne Dawes. It draws attention to how Dawes shifts the plot into a world more familiar to contemporary viewers: social media (Instagram and Twitter) and their popular influencers. Muñoz also highlights how this piece brings up social commentaries, turns the audience into complicit viewers and draws the spectator into a metatheatrical experience.

These articles discuss how many Hispanic artists in Spain, Mexico and the U.S. found new ways to see, conceive and represent theatrical experiences for viewers across the globe. The creativity and resourcefulness of these creators made possible plays produced in different digital platforms that break the fifth—or digital screen wall—to engage directly with the audience, and create a sense of intimacy. They prove that traditional conceptions of theater can be re-thought and re-designed. By reflecting on the true nature of theater these essays expose how some theater practitioners deconstruct what is traditionally perceived as staging of an early modern piece and leave the reader with one main question in mind: is the Spanish comedia really under siege?

Notes

1 Even as we write this introduction in June 2021, one of us is in Canada, where eligibility for second doses is just opening for the majority of the population, and another is in Spain, where under 40% of the population has been given even one dose. Many of our colleagues in Latin America have had even fewer opportunities to be vaccinated (Holder).

2 As is mentioned in the article by Erin Cowling, theater producers in Mexico were the first to decide to close their doors for the greater (public health) good, even before the official orders came from governments.

3 As reported by the BBC news: “The audience will be led by Puck, played by EM Williams, who takes them from the real world into the digital world, the RSC said, and can guide Puck through the forest at key points in the play.”