Role-playing game (Cuba)
Role-playing, in the sense we are using, means that the characters consciously and deliberately play at being “others.” That is, the performance is expressed in the characters' awareness, not in a reincarnation of other selves, as in the previous case. There is a migration of roles, not of characters. This is the case in Two Old Panics (1967) by the Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1968. In absurdist language, the author presents us with an elderly couple trapped in the panic that the decline of old age produces in both of them. During a game of opposites, of mirrors, in which the same character is both one and the other, this couple dares to speak the great truths they never communicated when they were young. They have deprived themselves of their vital masks, even their character armor. Split and alienated, they remain throughout the play in a spherical, circular situation, unable to escape the absurdity of non-communication. Rine Leal, a Cuban researcher, attributes Sartrean influence to this playwright.
“This spherical world, this hell of company, these non-gods, this condemnation of man, this freedom to choose destiny even though we cannot select another, this eternal return to a dead-end situation, this lack of communication due to the unknowability of the world, these gratuitous acts that do not correspond to a causal, rational logic of the world.”
In this line of role-playing games, one could mention: (Argentina) Pericones (1987) by Mauricio Kartum; (Peru, Sd) Crossing over Niagara by Alonso Alegría.
Games of Over-Illusion (Argentina)
This is a playful variation of the previous form. But the playwright uses the theatrical device of theater within theater. As Patrice Pavis notes, citing Hamlet as an emblematic example:
“By representing and mocking illusion, the playwright achieves his truth, like Hamlet when he 'absorbs' the king's consciousness in the mirror-work he creates.”
In this playful, ritualistic vein of illusion or theater within theater, we find the Argentine play Saverio the Cruel (1936) by Roberto Arlt (1900-1940). A group of bourgeois youths choose Saverio, a butter-smuggling runner, as the protagonist of a joke for their own amusement. All in agreement, they pretend that Susana, one of the group, is insane.
Susana dramatizes her delusion in a dialogue with Juan, hoping to rid Saverio of his madness. In her delusion, she hints that she is Queen Bragatiana, dethroned by the injustices of a colonel. During the dialogue, she asks Juan to find the colonel and slit his throat. Pedro, posing as Susana's doctor, tells Saverio, after he has witnessed the dialogue, that the medical procedure to save her from madness is to play along with the charade. Through a cruel game of manipulation, they invite Saverio to help save Susana by playing the role of the colonel. At first, he resists, but in the end, he agrees. This game, besides suggesting psychological implications, also contains political allusions to Latin American dictatorships, represented in this case by the character of Saverio.
Another Latin American play that falls within this category and deserves recognition is The Night of the Assassins (1966) by Cuban author José Triana. It is one of the most successful Latin American plays in terms of audiences and performances outside of Cuba.
There are many examples of playfulness in Latin American theater, in a search for the Latin American being to find itself and to activate the deep roots of Latin American identity, in which the exploration of the mask is also involved.
