In Desconcierto (1981, Disconcerted), written and staged during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, a pianist, Irene della Porta, is paid handsomely to play Beethoven’s Patetique on a piano that emits no sound. The audience buys tickets to watch Irene wrench sounds out of nothingness. “It is as if the woman and the audience, although knowing that the Beethoven Sonata cannot be heard, were mysteriously capable of composing ‘this other non-existent concert’” reads the opening stage directions. At the end of the play, the piano regains its sound as if by magic. But after so many silent concerts, Irene della Porta no longer knows how to make “real” music. Desensitized fingers produce harsh, discordant notes. Shocked and defeated by her ultimate failure as an artist, she rejoices when the piano once again becomes mute. (In Raznovich, Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes. Ed. D. Taylor and V. Martínez, Bucknell U.P.) Image  |  Image 1 | Video 1 | Video 2

Efectos personales   Introduction by Diana Taylor  | Read the transcript  |  Image

Jardin de otoño (1983, Inner Gardens) depicts the constraining systems of gender and sexual formation to the telenovela or soap opera so popular in Latin America. The two main characters of the play— two middle aged women who have lived together for twenty years named Griselda and Rosalia— spend every afternoon in front of the television passionately involved in the ups and downs of their adored hero, Marcelo-the-mechanic.  Image 1  |  Image 2  |  Image 3  |  Image 4  |  Image 5  |  Image 6  |  Image 7  |  Image 8

Casa Matriz (1991, MaTRIX, Inc.), a full length one-act play, depicts a “30 year old woman, Gloria, who hires a “mother” from an agency specializing in that service. The two women rehearse a series of roles. They range from the traditional long-suffering mother so popular in Latin American literature, to the professional mother who travels around the world; from the cold, rejecting mother, to the transgressive one who vies with her daughter for the lesbian lover. Each “mother,” of course, elicits a different “daughter,” and Gloria undergoes a series of transformations as she pouts, demands satisfaction, cries, begs for love, and orders the substitute mother to give her money back. Read the transcript  |  Lea la transcripción  |  View the video  |  Image  |  Image 1  |  Image 2  |  Image 3  |  Image 4  |  Image 5  |  Image 6

De atrás para adelante (1995, Rear Entry) is a three-act comedy about a wealthy Jewish business man, Simon Goldberg, who comes on hard times as his bathroom and plumbing industry goes bankrupt. Everyone is in a tizzy--—the young wife, the married daughter, the son-in-law, —as the business and the fortune seem, literally, to be going down the drain. Mariana, the daughter, insists they contact Javier, her wealthy brother whom Simon threw out of the house a decade ago when he found him in bed with Mariana’s fiancé. Onstage comes the lovely Dolly, previously Javier, now a gorgeous and loving woman with a husband and three daughters.

De la cintura para abajo (1999) | Read the transcript  |  Image

A Luxury Death (2007) | Read the transcript

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