Desiring Scenarios of Change in Abel Zamora’s Theater

Un hotel. Dotze persones en un procés forçat de canvi. Set contes de ciutat que s’entrecreuen en uns llargs passadissos plens de portes. Cada porta una historia.

[One hotel. Twelve characters in a forced process of change. Seven city stories crossing each other in long hallways filled with doors. Each door has a story.]

-Sergio Caballero, Stage Director of Temporada baja[1]

Drawn to this description in the playbill on the crisscrossing of stories in times of forced change (s’entrecreuen), I am led to wonder about missed encounters occurring at a given time and place shared by contemporaries. Conveyed in the verb entrecreuar in Valencian language is the crossing of paths, or an encounter of sorts—in this context, among dramatic characters in their scenes of contact and exchange in the play—but not necessarily their entanglement in each other’s stories. In a word choice consistent with the dramatic action in Temporada baja, each scene of encounter develops the possibility of having the characters’ stories entwine into each other, before they turn awry, frustrated and unrealized. The play provides a dystopian portrait of isolation, solitude spent in the company of others, and only fleeting moments of connection between the characters, returned to atomization or departure. In this sense, the missed encounter I refer to here is not one of two parties that never meet, nor an untimely arrival as one would miss a train. Nor is it of contingency or failure that somehow proves productive, if by chance. Rather, their “missed” quality resides in perceiving how the exchanges are underpinned by desires for substantive change held in abeyance, which bear the kernel of unfulfilled possibilities for the characters.

Whereas Nophoto’s El último verano assembles contradictory ways of perceiving loss that piece together a collective crisis, Abel Zamora’s Temporada baja stages induced change for characters unable to implicate themselves reciprocally in each others’ crises, conditioned in different ways by the existing structures of power in which they participate. They experience a similar isolation from each other during their stay at a modern urban hotel amid tourism’s off-season, conveyed in the title of the play as both a gloomy “low season” and a space whose norms serve to regulate, in part, the exchanges among visitors. One of Zamora’s signatures as a playwright is his extensive catalog of popular cultural references to Spanish television, celebrities, commercial brands, and hit songs since from the 1960s to present, woven into dialog, which situate the spectator’s points of reference within a fiction shaped by its allusions to the contemporary. Of the real, it is likewise against the underlying social circumstance of the crisis in Temporada baja—in its mention of unemployment, wage cuts, precarity, improvised measures to secure food and income, and so on—in which the dramatic action transpires in conspicuous differences between the struggling and privileged characters that in one way or another, share in a similar vulnerable condition. In a point I should like to bring out here, these missed encounters can perhaps nuance some of the possibilities of forging connections laid out in the previous section, when their failure to reshape the scenario at hand, at least for these actors, is in question. To do so, I pay particular attention to the ways in which these encounters are scenes of mediation, more often than not incapable of producing desired change.

Zamora crafts specific worlds inside the rooms of his imagined hotel, each one distinct in its own theatrical, even cinematic, genre. Behind different doors, viewers find the comedy of a failed blind date, the conflictive drama of a couple in a damaging relationship, the thriller of a serial murderer who cannibalizes his victim, the family tragedy of an awaited death by suicide, a slapstick brawl between two girlfriend “frenemies,” and the choreographed grand finale of a musical theater production, among others. In this sense, the performance accomplishes a different kind of assemblage work than addressed previously. Developing a range of colorful scenarios and contrasting moods transpiring in separate rooms, each space (and within it, each scene) is made identifiable to the audience for its familiar borrowings from different recognizable genres in film and drama: romantic comedy, musical theater, thriller and suspense, tragedy, slapstick, and so on, pieced together in crisscrossing stories.

Within this dynamic patchwork of scenes, the space of the hotel room proves key to the dramatic action in the encounter. Each scenario transpires largely unbeknownst to the other occupants compartmentalized into the private spaces of their own dramas unfolding in each one. If the distinct genre of the rooms tends toward accentuation, perhaps even exaggeration, for viewers it has the effect of reinforcing the compartmentalized character of each world pigeon-holed within the private, separate spaces of the hotel, calling attention to the walls between these spaces and the characters among them. If one keeps in mind that during the play’s run at Valencia’s Teatre Rialto, the two-story set had no walls to partition the adjacent rooms on stage, then the augmented dramatic genre of each scene tends to reinforce the separation between these worlds as an imaginary, constructed boundary (i.e., one of distinct genre). The distribution of segmented spaces has viewers note the invisible quality of these walls, that is, in lieu of their physical separation, the powerful forces in each scene that partition the characters into their own individual dramas. These partitions in Zamora’s work will be one of my lines of questioning here. What structures of relational powers constitute the “invisible walls” that keep the characters from undergoing transformation, on the one hand, and from implicating themselves in each others’ stories (i.e., only to crisscross each other), on the other? In times of induced change, what forces folded within speech and action in the encounters, shape the characters’ desires against their will?  

After a speed-dating event to meet other thirty-something singles, Dana (Cristina García) asks her chosen bachelor Ferrán (Xavo Giménez), “¿A qué te gustaría dedicarte?” in a question that supposes, from the outset, an aspiration to work in something other than his current employment. His response, which deflates Dana’s interest momentarily, expresses his contentment with his job as a city bus driver working long hours, which favors him to spend less time at home, he admits, ever since wage cuts required him to move in with his elderly mother and brother (48). Changing the subject quickly, Dana aims to maintain a romantic interest in Ferrán, which upstages her disappointment for his complacency, as he desires little else from his current situation. As the comedic dialog unfolds, it becomes apparent that Dana is searching in Ferrán for a form of identification with her own desire for something more from life. She encounters it in Ferrán’s confessed, “unusual” taste for theater instead of soccer matches—unlike most men, he remarks—which has him drink alone while imagining an interlocutor with whom he can comment on the plays he has seen (50). His solitude and sensitivity are read as an overture, as Dana then discloses an intimate secret to Ferrán. In successive relationships, she feels overpowered and controlled by men’s obsession for her sex and the pleasures she is capable of giving (her “superpowers,” as she elaborates for the audience), a matter she addresses with her therapist. All in all, Dana’s date with Ferrán promises to go well, amid clumsy remarks and nervous distractions, as both characters develop identification with the other’s solitude.

Fig. 1. Dana's encounter with Ferrán, incognizant of his machismo

In contrast to their mutual physical approach in the hotel room, Ferrán’s energetic monologue after sex stands in opposition to Dana’s hunched, seated position on the bed (Fig. 1). Disparagingly for her, Ferrán also ends up fascinated with Dana as an object of pleasure. He begs her not to leave in the second person plural (“No… os vayáis…” [59]), as she abandons him immediately, ashamed and blaming herself (i.e., “No es culpa tuya. Es mía, como siempre” [59]). Suggested in the objectionable “doubling” to which Ferrán refers, viewers might take note of how this encounter develops in mediation between characters through a form of double. Dana is looking to identify with another who, like herself, wishes for something more of life, which she locates in their mutual loneliness—the point in common capable of mediating her growing attraction to Ferrán. Whereas Ferrán’s mediation in their sexual union—his doubling of her, as Dana and her sex, which takes precedence over her person—subjects her to the very pattern of male objectification she desires to escape. Portrayed as entirely unobservant of Dana’s reaction, Ferrán in his inability to read her shame and self-blame, in body and speech, renders him oblivious to his machismo and lacking empathy about the damage he has done. While Zamora develops Dana’s character as the more dynamic of the two, here and in a later scene, Ferrán’s lack of intentions are shown to matter little, for his unawareness participates uncritically in a pattern of male subjection that renders him incapable of empathy.

After sex, there is little reciprocity in the dual mediation between Dana and Ferrán, which is why I have chosen to address this scene first, admittedly not the first in the play. Viewers will note that whereas Dana feels ashamed by the repeated machismo of her dating life and the implicit control it exerts over her, it is through Ferrán’s “unusual” interest in theater (i.e., “no creo que eso sea…sólo para gays” [50]), against a given social presumption about male heterosexual taste, in which the audience is led to believe, like Dana, that his behavior will be different from that of other men. The established genre of romantic comedy, here, lends itself to the readability of the scene, generating certain audience expectations about the presumed outcome, but which instead reveal presumptions about the normative constructs of gender when the story moves in a different direction. In this sense, much like the audience reads the scene’s familiar genre before it takes a turn, Dana reads the social attributes of gender decoded from a social construct of “normal” taste and behavior, in contrast to Ferrán who is entirely incapable of reading her feelings of subjugation, and his responsibility for them, at all. Reading norms and normalcy in the hotel is part and parcel of Zamora’s play. A sort of square-one for the exchanges to follow, the audience might perceive a certain precondition that frustrates this exchange, that is, a disposition to read one’s own potentially powerful role in the encounter (Ferrán) and the damage it can prove capable of doing to another.

Actions and speech, then, come to light as mediating gestures (i.e., in body and language) capable of opposing or reifying the ways in which prevailing power relations work on the characters in their encounters. As Ferrán expresses his complacency for the status quo against the deteriorating conditions of life (Dana’s initial deception), he also subjects Dana to the pattern of male dominance she wishes to escape (her repeated, involuntary submission). In his unwilling disposition to read his own role as a powerful agent within this premise, Ferrán is an incognizant interlocutor for Dana, unable to perceive the harm he has done, even when faced with her legible shame and self-blame. Constructed social norms of gender and sexuality, read in body and language (or, unread, misread, etc.) tend to encode the norms of the repeated, divisive forces forging the scenario for missed encounters in Zamora’s work. Here, the powers of male dominance are not given per se, but are revealed to the audience as an underlying force, played out in body and speech in relations with other characters, capable of subjecting them to undesirable limitations, as we will see in other scenes. This disconnection sets up Dana’s later encounter with Irina in the hotel bar, in which, again, the possibilities of realizing a mutual connection between the two characters are swiftly truncated.

In difference to Ferrán’s incognizant machismo, other powerful figures engage in seduction and manipulation with similar overpowering results. Such violence when acted upon characters is made explicit in the controlling power of Toni (Sergio Caballero) over the young Chelo (Maria Maroto). Possibly his former student (“Podría caber perfectamente en el traje de mi colegio,” she remembers [23]), Chelo is introduced to the audience as Toni’s longtime lover, which plays upon their age difference, at first, to convey the uneven power dynamic between them as perhaps one of reprimanding schoolmaster and pupil. Typecast in the boredom of a comfortable and loveless middle-class relationship, the dramatic couple in crisis portrays, increasingly so throughout the scene, that Toni’s emotional and verbal abuse of Chelo aims to keep her subdued to his authority. Toni ridicules her “childish” desires for a more exciting home life, on the one hand, and her sexual fantasies to be an object of desire, on the other—a scene that turns briefly to physical violence when he tugs at her dress, ripping the buttons (“te lo has regalado tú con mi puto dinero” [23]). The verbal abuse Toni spouts is highlighted for the audience as equally as damaging as this physical aggression, which has Chelo assume a kneeling position in the corner—the image of disciplinary humiliation in the classrooms of yesteryear—crying and turned away from her aggressor. Toni’s consistent reaffirmation that he is the material provider of the relationship articulates his paternalist role within this power dynamic that shuttles in the exchange between an abusive lover, father, and schoolmaster.  

However, the violence of Toni’s power over Chelo is not exerted uniquely from a top-down position, for Toni, vulnerable at the thought of a breakup, tries to seduce Chelo in his appeal to conserve their relationship, or rather, to conserve his authoritarian role within it. In an attempt to appease her erotic fantasies, he performs the role of a corrupt “bad cop” who demands to search her, before he breaks from his policeman character with further ridicule. Toni returns again to the kind of remarks throughout the scene that reaffirm his power over her decisions—she is incapable of leaving him, he quips. His seduction is played out as a form of doubling, then, in assuming this dual role of drawing Chelo in and of exerting control over her, only made possible by the doubling of his character (Toni and the “bad cop”). Notably, when he breaks from the role-play, his retort is articulated through an observation on the times:

Las aventuras están en las películas. El paro alcanza cotas elevadísimas. La gente está amargada, no hay tiempo para jugar a las princesas ni a las casitas. (30-31)

These are not times for infantile fantasies, he sneers, in an assertion that reinforces his authoritarian role, much like the imaginary “bad cop” he plays to seduce her, who dictates Chelo’s desires against her will. It is the backdrop of the crisis that polices, in part, the characters’ realization of desires, as Toni does Chelo, evident in other scenes. Indeed, in this complex psychological portrait of the couple, Toni contradictorily negates and plays out Chelo’s fantasies (i.e., he mediates them on his terms) in order to entice her to conserve the status quo, and it is Chelo’s submission to Toni’s reassertion of his paternal authority (“yo te cuido, yo te protejo, Chelo” [33]”), which has her delay any decision to end the relationship by the end of the scene. Her return is played out even as Toni hushes her, interrupting her final words in the exchange. His role then, in reaffirming his authoritarian dominance over Chelo, is one that dictates limitations on her desires, decisions, and the sayable, which extends beyond the case of their relationship in the play. For Toni is portrayed as an authoritarian double that forcefully shapes the exchange in violent ways; that is, he polices her desires, decisions, and speech against her will through seduction and the powerful imposition of dominance by force. Taken up together, the authoritarian norms he enforces by violence—the limitations of desire, decision, speech—are those that regulate the permissible, much like the circumstance he quotes for the other characters in later scenes.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make a compelling case that desires are produced, structured, and shaped (i.e., ordered and partitioned) in part within prevailing power relations, though never determined or static. In their process of production, desires are transformed by and, in turn, can transform the real, begetting the becomings that Deleuze and Guattari describe in the possibility of subjugation and emancipation of desiring subjects. In this light, a forced process of change, due to its forced character, may involve the involuntary shaping or repression of desires by the structures of power (i.e., their ordering function), experienced with considerable violence for the subjection they prove capable of producing. Therein also reside, however, the possibilities that decision, action, and speech can, in turn, shape desire (i.e., to produce desire, desiring-production) whether they have an emancipating or policing effect. Just as Ferrán unknowingly subjects Dana to the powers of male dominance she aims to escape, her shame is made readable to the audience in this production, as is Chelo’s own subjection to the dually seductive and aggressive reassertion of Toni’s authority that polices her permissible desires, decisions, and words. I should like to propose taking Zamora’s play as my case, then, that power relations are not abstract forces existing somehow outside the scenario; rather, they speak and act through speech and action within the mediated scene of encounter as they are constructed relationally within it among the characters. Hence, their two-way or double, mediated character, is discursive in part, capable of shaping and conditioning the possible. It is through this dramatic artifice of body, language, and movement, I propose, in which Zamora’s theater calls the spectator’s attention to the scene of encounter as capable of mediating desires shaped, repressed, or conditioned (i.e., ordered and partitioned) by predominant power relations that act upon the characters relationally in their individual dramas. In them, policing performs the role of an ordering function, as in Deleuze and Guattari, dividing and disciplining the characters amid invisible partitions, while restoring them to the “norms” of the house rules. How this works, though, requires taking a look at other scenes.

Policing and enforcing limitations extend to the proprieties of behavior in the spaces of the hotel. Outside the hotel rooms, there are transient figures and spaces that have these narratives crisscross each other, in chance encounters in the hallway and hotel bar. Notably, the encounters taking place in the hotel’s common spaces are those that bear no specific augmented genre as in the private spaces of each hotel room. Such is the case with the wandering character, Irina (Maria Zamora), whose story opens and loosely closes the play, and the scenes in which she appears. A young, unemployed mother in poverty, Irina pushes her baby carriage through the common areas of the hotel throughout the play, where she encounters the occupants and staff while waiting for her husband. Her character, transient and out-of-place, is constructed from the question of belonging, or rather of not belonging in the modern hotel, on first account because she is not a client, but also due to the visible markings of her socioeconomic status, in her simple clothes, that might have the hotel staff identify her as a loiterer (i.e., “¿No me dirán nada por estar aquí, no?” [17]). Irina, who does not belong in any of the spaces she traverses, is somewhat like the genre of the scenes in which she appears: indeterminate and visibly marked (in outward appearance to others) as not fitting into any specific, categorical attributes that would shape her story through the conventions of a genre.

Having escaped her disastrous blind date, then, Dana sits at the hotel bar and orders a coffee where she meets Irina. In a similar disposition to connect with a stranger, Dana invites her to a coffee, given that Irina carries only twenty-three cents lifted from the change found at another table. As with Ferrán in the previous scene, Dana opens up to her interlocutor by expressing her solitude, particularly, as a single woman who is only remembered by her married girlfriends when they care to have a night out. The two of them even establish a chance connection, reminiscing about how they attended the same primary school together long ago, in what suggests that Irina may have also come from a middle-class background, having once seen better times. Nevertheless, Irina quickly monopolizes the conversation, dominating it on her own terms. In monologue, Dana hears about Irina’s troubles, their family love despite desperate poverty, the doctor’s assessment of their baby’s developmental disability, unwelcomed flattery about Dana’s fine clothes and perfume, and so on. After Irina interrupts Dana several times, the scene ends abruptly in an explosive rant by Dana, who warns, “Te has tomado el café pues deja de monopolizar y cierra un poco el pico, hija. Déjame también meter baza…No puedes ir avasallando a las personas con tus miserias” (96). In an animated leap from her bar stool, Dana spouts derogatory classist insults—Irina smells like cheap lunchmeat and, bloated, looks like she suffers from malnutrition. She exits the scene, leaving Irina with a bill for two coffees she cannot pay, as the bartender intervenes to call security. Irina, in other words, has been identified in public for her out-of-place status.

In her appeal to charity from Dana, Irina is less a character portrait of a class unable to represent itself to others, but rather one that in its appeal to be heard cannot engage the conversation on her interlocutor’s predominant terms for the exchange. In this regard, Irina’s character functions as a subaltern, wandering, indeterminate, and out of place in the hotel, the spaces of which loosely begin to acquire their resemblance to a social architecture of norms that structure privilege and exclusion, belonging and unbelonging. Alluding to their shared class background as schoolgirls, the scene sets up a sharp contrast between the adult versions of a struggling and a well-to-do character in the possibility that Dana could also find herself in Irina’s situation, which she disavows disparagingly, leading to Irina’s expulsion. Dana’s desire to share mutually in her solitude with an-other, as she did with Ferrán, has her turn away from alterity (literally, in body, as she departs) in the suggestion that she herself could be this other, which maps out her disavowal for the audience in body and speech. In dialog, the relational powers between them come to the fore in the socioeconomic hierarchy at this turning point (i.e., her turning away from the other), highlighted in Dana’s explosive remarks that reassert her class difference, violently, from Irina’s own. And Dana’s public embarrassment of Irina leads to the policing of a destitute character that has no place with the others, according to the house rules.

Speaking to power, then, goes horribly wrong for Irina when she indulges in telling her story on her own terms. Yet, ironically, in the power dynamic that Dana establishes for their conversation, Dana is no longer willing to listen in her desire to be heard. Dana’s two encounters turned foul provide a contrast between cases in which social atomization among the characters is as much a question of engagement on equal terms, or of address and reception against the backdrop of unspoken power relations structuring the conversation (i.e., cross-cut by gender, sexuality, class), as it presumes reifying in practice and language the very power structures to which both parties are subject. As such, Dana problematically exerts the humiliation she herself suffers in the previous scene, to the detriment of Irina, by making a scene (figuratively) in public. The scene made (literally, on stage) is one in which the class hierarchy structures Dana’s disavowal, leaving Irina ashamed, in debt, and identified publicly for her unbelonging, that is, outcast from the spaces reserved for its clientele and their privacy.

Policing the practices and uses of space constitutes one part of the constituent framework that shapes the terms of dialog and action in these encounters. These are the house rules, so to speak, the norms that regulate exchange in this space. Zamora’s modern hotel, as a transient space, stages the form of social contract and right to usage noted by Marc Augé in non-places developing in advanced capitalism, forged between “spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces” (94).[2] Particularly, notes Augé, the interstices between usage and their relation to the social uphold an unspoken contract of behaviors in which the privilege and right to occupy these transient spaces presumes that the “user of the non-place is always required to prove [her] innocence,” somewhat like subway passengers, subject to random checks by security, who must demonstrate they have purchased a ticket (94, 102). The right to belonging and the policing of characters in Zamora’s hotel (i.e., that of access), in a similar vein, comes to bear unevenly upon them based on their socioeconomic status, particularly when one considers the privacy and privilege enjoyed by some clients whose stories never leave their respective “rooms” (i.e., Toni and Chelo who order room service, Belén’s inebriated groom who sleeps in the wedding suite), in contrast to the roaming of Irina and the traveling of the working-class bartender Antxón on hotel staff. For, the only clients to leave their rooms before the final scene, Belén and Dana, do so to escape their frustrations with their own private “stories”—for Belén, due to an intoxicated groom on her virginal wedding night—whereby they encounter the working-class Antxón in the hallway and Irina in the hotel bar, respectively. In the common areas, their encounters transpire without the legible features of a genre—as a non-place—that would have the audience associate them with those of the private rooms. Even so, their encounters are likewise fraught with disconnections and abrupt endings that in Dana’s case, “make a scene” by invoking the prevailing power relations on the right to usage (and in turn, policing) in this space, in which the house rules come to bear upon Irina. Rather than a disciplinary enclosure, the hotel resembles an open space of transit regulated, segmented, and ordered by a social contract of conduct and (un-)belonging. Norms can be invoked to enforce the policing of characters, and their access, at any time.

In the hallway, sitting on the floor outside the nuptial suite where her inebriated groom sleeps, Belén (Paula Llorens) encounters Antxón (Miguel Seguí) leaving his shift, who calls out to her for loitering in a space where she doesn’t belong (“Disculpe, aquí no se puede estar, eh?” [98]). At first, Antxón as hotel staff upholds his prescribed role by policing the well-to-do client Belén as he did Irina. Inversely, the client’s power is also given in their encounter, for Belén demands room service, and Antxón refuses, noting her rude forms and sense of entitlement (“Son las normas y la educación, vaya” [99]). But through their conversation, the established hierarchy between speakers transforms, first in Antxón’s backtalk and then in Belén’s developing interest, in what portrays the erotic appeal of a coarse working-class “other” to an affluent character who considers herself somewhat more refined. In this light, their mutual attraction begins to unfold against a specific condition. For, Antxón reveals to Belén that the security cameras posted throughout the hotel are fake, serving only to suggest that the inhabitants are subject to surveillance in a manner that would have them police their own behavior. Once this myth is exposed, the characters begin to engage in a mutual conversation in which they gradually shed their prescribed roles in action and speech that would have them make demands or regulate the behavior of the other.

Unsure why Antxón looks so exhausted after working a double shift, Belén is made aware for the first time that her fantasies for the perfect wedding day, now spoilt, bore a working-class toll, for Antxón is tired “En hablar de usted. En mantener la boca cerrada…, en dejar que me pisoteen, en cargar cajas, en subir botellas, en ascensor para arriba, en ascensor para abajo. En limpiar los vomitados de los invitados de tu boda” (99-100, emphasis is mine). Being stepped on and keeping one’s mouth shut, while cleaning up the aftermath of the affluent guests’ excesses, are a servile toil. In difference to the disposition of other characters, Belén is at least willing to consider her role in this power relation. Following her apology, the attraction between the two develops in their physical proximity on stage and in dialog that banters in mutual interest, in Belén’s reference to Antxón as a waiter and his retort, “Soy mucho más que un camarero” (101). That Belén views Antxón typecast in his profession as any “other” waiter reveals her social position through the very act of reading him according to his generic qualities, that is, of reading his working-class status (his genre or social category). In turn, Anxtón’s response has Belén reconsider her manner of reading him. Their attraction, then, is played out in Antxón’s spoken fantasy about performing sexually in surrogate for the impotent groom, interrupted mutually at different times: first, by Antxón’s remembrance of his girlfriend and later, by Belén’s encouragement for him to call her and express his love, a gesture she herself would wish for. Antxón also becomes the surrogate for Belén, in playing out her desire to be told that she is loved by her unperforming husband. The conversation between the two transforms the given terms of power through a mediation that diverts Antxón sexual fantasy toward his girlfriend, and Belén’s own towards her husband, as the scene ends before she can catch Antxón’s name, while she charges back into her suite (“¡Despierta ya! ¡Despierta!” [106]). Their departure, in a farewell in which Antxón repositions Belén’s loose hair behind her ear, is the culminating point of physical contact in touch that has drawn them together in the dialog, repositioning if momentarily the power dynamic between the two through the mutual mediation of the other’s desires for yet another.  

The reciprocal exchange between Belén and Antxón serves as a counterpoint to all others in the play in which the predisposition of the characters to change the terms of the conversation in mediation can also thereby shape its implicit relation of power between speakers. And building upon previous scenes, it is their open recognition that this policed framework for their exchange is simply a construct—if the security cameras are phony, so too must be the house rules—which lays the bases for their exchange to take place on a more equal grounding. However, as the structures of (class) power are shown to be inscribed within action and speech, as in this exchange, it is only once Belén is made to reconsider her presumptions and her manner of reading Antxón’s genre (class) that the transformation between the two begins to develop. Such is the nature of navigating predominant relations capable of partitioning and ordering the exchanges between characters in which, perhaps as lesson, speaking to power goes horribly wrong for Irina, however undeserved or unjust the consequence, when she engages her interlocutor from the terms she alone establishes for their exchange. The key to transformation, it seems in each scene, whether frustrated or partially fulfilled, is one that requires certain recognition of the constructedness of the powerful conditions acting upon the scenario at hand and an engagement of the very limitations they impose.

Policing Desires, Devouring Dreams

Zamora scripts both the unformed possibility and frustration of transformation in which the unspoken social contract (i.e., the invisible walls) prevails more often than not. In this manner, the notion of desire in Zamora’s play is attached less to any object than to a scenario of realization, that is, to a policed scene that the characters are prevented or prevent each other from fulfilling (i.e., their repression). Observed in the very circumstance of the crisis that Toni observes to support his recriminating claims against Chelo, policing need not be physically exerted for its control to prove capable of forcibly molding the scenario at hand.

In what stands as perhaps the play’s most productive, developed implication of characters entwined in each other’s stories—their turn to alterity—the encounter between Belén and Antxón is also unsettled by its allusion to violence replayed within the circumstance of the crisis. Antxón, employed by a temp agency, steals food from the weekly delivery truck, which he calls the “economía de la supervivencia” (100). Given his low-wage precarious employment, a disenfranchised Antxón confesses that he cares not if they fire him for stealing, for joking with fellow workers on the job, or for smoking marihuana on break. Yet, his angers are taken home where he sometimes “roce la línea” with his girlfriend, in what suggests that the unspoken physical abuse he exerts is played out problematically as the violence he himself experiences on the job (105). That the other characters should serve as the displaced object of violent subjection, which they themselves experience in other ways (i.e., Dana, Antxón, Toni), is one of the dramatic mechanisms repeated in Temporada baja as a powerful force capable of atomizing the characters, on the one hand, while replaying their subjugation in repetition toward others, on the other.

The dynamics of this violent subjection—in the shaping of permissible desires, decisions, and speech against the characters’ expressed will—are made most explicit in the murder and suicide in the play. In the opening act, Irina’s husband Jordi (David Matarín), desperate for income, bids a nervous goodbye to his wife and infant son before prostituting himself for the first time to a male client in one of the hotel rooms. Much of the play transpires while, drifting or leafing through a gossip magazine, Irina awaits Jordi’s return, unaware that her husband has been drugged, victimized, and eaten by the serial killer Peter (Paco Trenzano) in one of the rooms. Staged in this pulp fiction genre of thriller and suspense, Jordi’s encounter with his assassin introduces the audience to the young victim’s wishes to be a published writer. Thus, the act of cannibalization acquires an added dimension as the devouring of unrealized desires and dreams, clipped short by his murder. As a nervous Jordi asks about the electric drill resting on the nightstand, Peter’s sparse words explain that he “climbed his way” to the top of his business (i.e., trepar) and now owns a few hardware stores downtown. While the drug begins to paralyze Jordi, Peter searches his victim’s backpack to read aloud from his writings gathered in a notebook. In them, Jordi expresses his desire to flee his current situation in desperate poverty as a young married man with an infant son, conveyed to the audience through the pressures imposed upon him to perform an impossible role as male provider for his family (“Tengo capacidades, pero no la de volar. A veces pienso en marchar… pienso en marchar…” [44]). As pulp fiction would have it, the image of the calculating assassin, an upwardly mobile type, offers a representational portrayal in his devouring the low-income character who dreams of escape from despair. As inextricably bound notions of class, gender, and sexuality shape this story, notably, it is also Jordi’s lack of economic means that requires him to prostitute himself to a male client—stated otherwise, to subjugate himself to the desires of the upwardly mobile type—in order to uphold his role, paradoxically, as the heterosexual head of household and family provider. At least, that is what Jordi’s character believes, until he succumbs slowly to the drug that makes him realize that his client has deadly intentions.

In this sense, the two deaths in the play—Jordi’s murder and Pablo’s suicide—are staged in conversation with each other as cases of desired, yet unrealized, future plans that parallel the other characters’ own. In a doubling of types, both are also frustrated writers for different reasons. Jordi is an aspiring writer whose amateur status prevents him from breaking into the profession, and Pablo (played by Zamora himself) is a young, somewhat successful playwright who fails at seeking comprehension from his family through his dramatic work. The contrast in genres, in the suspenseful thriller of Jordi’s murder and the somber tragedy of Pablo’s awaited death, share in common the question of waiting for the audience, of not knowing what will happen to Jordi as the drug slowly impairs his movement on stage (the suspense of expectations in thriller) and of knowing the end for Pablo revealed in the scene (the fatalism of recognition in tragedy). Waiting, then, much like Irina’s awaited return of Jordi, unresolved by the play’s end, is shaped by desirable “other” scenarios that never come to fruition for the characters.  

In the staging of Pablo’s suicide, the audience awaits his expected death from an overdose of ingested tranquilizers, a scene that transpires while his twin sister Mari Carmen (Lorena López) attempts to comfort him in their last moments together. This is not his first attempt at suicide, the audience learns, as Pablo’s character is portrayed as one whose dramatic work is not accepted by the general public for its references to homosexuality, specifically, in the damaging suspicions it raises that he might be a “fag” or “transsexual,” even from his loving sister (“Siempre haces esos personajes de…de gay en las obras esas de teatro, que mucha gente habrá pensado que eres…marica o que rozas la transexualidad” [62]). Foregrounding this implicit violence of stigma and exclusion from the (house) norm(s), Pablo’s death transpires while an important soccer match is on television, the reason why Mari Carmen’s husband will not notice her absence, which returns the audience to the predominant heteronormative masculinity developed in earlier scenes. Much like Jordi, it is inferred that Pablo is also cannibalized, though in a different way. Pablo’s death, largely unnoticed, is portrayed as one that is devoured in the celebratory cheers of television spectators watching the game.

Fig. 2. The silencing of speech between Pablo and Mari Carmen

Silence and speech are shown to be shaped, in part, by powerful norms acting through them in the scene. In Pablo’s final moments, Mari Carmen holds her brother in the bathtub (Fig. 2), which reenacts a gesture in parallel to the childhood memories they recall together growing up in an underprivileged family (i.e., “nunca tuvimos Reyes” [70]). While the audience is made to await Pablo’s end, their conversation is spoken through the lyrics of pop tunes and ballads (Dorian, José Luis Perales, Julio Iglesias, Camilo Sesto). The banality of these words, cited verbatim from a stock of pop songs, is furthermore accentuated by the spaces of silence in the dialog between the characters close to Pablo’s death, marked by ellipsis, pauses, and trailing sentences. In this manner, the song lyrics serve as a vehicle to convey the only substantive content of their spoken exchange after Pablo’s fate is made known to the audience. As such, bringing closure to the scene, Mari Carmen hushes her brother while he sings Camilo Sesto’s “Decir te quiero”: “Las palabras sinceras las que tienen valor, son las que salen del alma… y en mi alma nacen… solo palabras blancas, preguntas sin respuesta llenas de esperanza” (75). Truncated aspirations and desires, expressed through the “sincere, blank words” of the pop ballad, are drawn to the audience’s attention as the vehicle capable of mediating the emotional bond between brother and sister articulated in Pablo’s final moments, against the censure of Pablo’s “other” forms of speech. For, lyrics are “the only ones with any value,” to paraphrase the ballad he sings, as Mari Carmen silences his last words.

The weightiness of words to mediate, in their emptiness, Pablo’s childhood memories and isolation provokes reflection on the character of mediation itself, addressed in previous scenes. Mediation entails a form of doubling in address and reception between interpreting interlocutors, as an activity of decoding and reading messages, which are encoded, in part, by the prevailing power relations that structure the terms of the exchange (i.e., the sayable between speakers). Pablo’s desire to forge familial comprehension through his creative work, and its themes that bristle against masculine heterosexuality (i.e., he is “misread” by a prejudiced audience, spectators are told), is presented as one side of the same coin with the other mediated affection he shares with his twin sister through nostalgic pop songs and their spaces of silence in conversation (i.e., the limitation of the sayable). Thus, the emptiness of the enunciation, in the heaviness of this scene, contrasts the original creative work that Pablo wishes could prove capable of serving this function for his audience. Such duality between the stock of given words and silence that go heard, on the one hand, versus the playwright’s original words that go unheard, on the other, bring to light the predominant terms of address and reception in this encounter in which the sayable (i.e., “the only valued words,” to quote the lyrics) is policed by prejudice against non-normative enunciation, even while Mari Carmen silences her brother’s last words. In this light, Zamora constructs the involuntary shaping of desires and the sayable as a burden capable of “devouring” Pablo’s character in the end, which is not attributable specifically to any one character’s actions (as in Peter’s cannibalization of Jordi), but rather to the powers of a policed scenario in which character speech and action participate in censoring the impermissible. As I mentioned earlier, reading (social) norms and normalcy are part and parcel of Zamora’s play, brought to light here for the ways in which they work on (i.e., they order, partition, police) permissible decision, speech, and desire. Viewers are shown, then, the symmetric, double stage exit of Pablo and Jordi after their respective deaths (Fig. 3), as an off-stage voice reads from Jordi’s unpublished writings once again.

Fig. 3. The doubling of Jordi and Pablo

Cannibalization in the double deaths of Jordi and Pablo, presumes the devouring of two characters and their unfulfilled desires expressed in each scene—that is, their desire for a scenario (of escape, of comprehension) that goes unrealized. In this manner, the consumption of the selfsame implied in the cannibalistic act provides the image of devouring the self and other, captured in the same figure, within the social body to uphold the (house) norm(s). Just as Jordi is cannibalized by the upwardly-mobile type who subjects him to his own desires, Pablo is consumed in the celebratory cheers of spectators whose disinterest in non-normative enunciation, and its censoring of the sayable, proves capable of devouring his character in the end. Rooted in the mechanisms of disavowal—of the rejection of alterity and its annihilation of an-other—cannibalism in both scenes consumes the characters and their unrealized desires for a different scenario, left without a trace. Taking the dual deaths of Jordi and Pablo as an example, there exists a certain equivalence—or, doubling—between waiting and expecting in Zamora’s play, captured in the Spanish verb esperar. For the time of these characters’ impasse is also a time of waiting and of fantasizing about other desired realities, “eaten up” in the case of Jordi and Pablo, but also for the others. The parallel between standing by and dreaming within this space could be said to frame the dramatic action in Temporada baja, given that the crisscrossing of stories that builds to narrative closure is also clipped short—it is consumed—by an uplifting, comedic musical theater finale, which leaves all other stories suspended in unresolved action.

Of waiting and hoping, daydreaming on the job provides a form of escapism that channels unrealized desires in fantasies for what one could have been. In a separate room, two girlfriends and co-workers at a retail clothing store, Paloma (Raquel Hernández) and Enri (Vanessa Cano), share intimate secrets about each other in a scene that escalates into a physical row with slapstick elements. Notably, the scene permissibly earns the audience’s acceptance as hilarity and comic release because the characters are constructed as equals, unlike the abuses of powerful characters, even their victimization, in other scenes. On the eve of her wedding rehearsal, Paloma admits her same-sex attraction to her co-worker Enri, confessing that she has fantasized about Enri in the sex act with her own fiancé. Conveying her disgust for the term “lesbian” in the performance, with contorted facial expressions and hesitant pronunciation, Paloma contests that the l-word “es una palabra rara. Si fuera lesbiana, que no lo soy, no me gustaría que me llamaran lesbiana” (81). Again, the social contours of gender and sexuality, in a same-sex desire that pleases Paloma but has her disavow the confines she associates with the word lesbian, and her perception of its social stigma, censor the language of her character (i.e., with disgust) in the suggestion of unfulfilled desires.

The sharing of intimate secrets bears the possibility of forging a closer relationship, at least as Paloma hopes, which culminates in her planting an unexpected kiss on a hesitant but receptive Enri. On her behalf, Enri participates in sharing secrets by confessing that it was she who stole from the cash register in retribution for her reassignment by store management. So too does Enri offer that every time she enters into the storage room on the job, she envisions herself as a dancer in a Broadway number, a fantasy that both delights and deeply embarrasses her, she admits (83). For Enri, this fantasy lives out an unrealized childhood desire to take up dance, impeded, she expresses, by her heavyset adolescence. However, the humorous banter of insults between friends (“tú sí que eres un mal chiste, tía” [79]) establishes the tone and the terms for an unraveling series of petty confessions that increasingly aim to do harm to the other: Enri was Paloma’s fifth choice for a bridesmaid; Paloma’s co-workers despise her for her irritating positivity; Paloma has insider knowledge that Enri is about to be fired from her job; Enri confirms the rumor that she had a sexual encounter with Paloma’s fiancé, and so on, which sparks the brawl between the two. In this light, Zamora conveys feelings of precarity within the same indiscriminate string of associations. In it, vulnerability provides little distinction between causes or their relation to the social, to labor, or to the shadow cast over dubious plans, in which the circumstance of the crisis is folded reciprocally into the social and vice-versa, as in the other scenes in the play. The scene ends, then, with Paloma revoking her invitation for Enri to join her wedding party, though it is clear in their overture to each other that they will remain “friends,” an indication of which is legible in the repetition of comedic insults at the close of the scene, on the one hand, and in the persistence of this triangulation of mediated desires in which, despite all injury, the unseen fiancé Alberto serves as the surrogate conduit, and mediator of the relationship, between the two. Enri’s daydream at work, her unfulfilled fantasy, is staged in the choreographed musical revue that closes the play (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Enri's musical theater fantasy, "The Inditex Girl"

Enri’s employment as salesperson for Spain’s retail giant the Inditex Group sets the stage for her starring role in the musical number “The Inditex Girl.” Commonly known for its designer clothing styles sold at discount prices, Enri’s place of employment is a campy choice to convey the low-cost glamour of her fantasy, itself an imitation of reality conditioned by material restrictions. The grand finale ends Temporada baja on a comedic high-note in which all characters appear on stage singing lines about their respective roles and frustrated dreams in the dramatic action, woven into the story of Enri who, “Dejé un curriculum allí. Un nuevo mundo frente a mí. Sé que la cosa está muy mal—me dije—y nos tendremos que apañar” (110). Viewers will remember from the previous scene that Enri’s self-realization in fantasy is marred by the suspended expectation that she too will lose her job. Against the scenario of the crisis affecting all characters in different ways, in a new world in which one has to “get by” as one can (apañar), Enri has sought low-paid precarious employment from the multinational retail store where she is largely overqualified: “Sé valenciano y alemán. Pues no te sirven para doblar” (110). Knowledge of several languages is not a requirement to fold clothes, the characters remind her mockingly in their repeated chorus, “Dobla, pliega, sube y baja,” that parodies the repetitious, mechanical action of the store employee folding and arranging the merchandise on display.

This manual activity on the job, and its choreographed rendition on stage, mechanically replays the worker’s action in bodily gestures. That is, it provides the audience with the concluding image of an ensemble of characters who, throughout the dramatic action of Temporada baja, repeat the existing power relations mechanically and uncritically through their actions and speech, which returns them to the status quo of a policed scenario, if not to a fatal end. Thereby the final scene brings together the many references to the limitations placed on characters in their possible realization of a different story, against the circumstance of plural crises, folded indiscriminately within vulnerability for all of them, that powerfully shape their individual realities against their will, in different ways. Taken up together then, across the genres developing in the transient spaces of the hotel, the “low season” to which the title refers is more than a mood, but conveys an inherent violence acted upon unwilling subjects in the shaping of their desires to materialize another scenario altogether and their incognizant participation in making this so in their encounters with other characters.

In the hotel’s resemblance to a social architecture of regulatory norms, traversed by prevailing power relations of class, gender, and sexuality, the actors participate in policing the permissible—of possible decisions, speech, and desires—in ways that reinforce or betray predominant power relations in their encounters. In each case, the encounter provides a mediated scenario of body, language, and movement in which the characters perform and read each other uncritically despite their participation in their regulation of others against the many crises acting upon them in which their vulnerability to power proves indiscriminate within a greater circumstance of the crisis working upon them as a whole. Yet, if one keeps in mind the encounter between Belén and Antxón, these given terms and their ability to partition the characters are also subject to negotiation and change through mediation. In this manner, hoping and waiting for substantive change bears the kernel of unfulfilled possibilities for the characters that appear to coast through the transient non-place of the hotel, bound to the presumed social contract on its right to usage that can be enforced at any time. Viewed in this manner, the invisible walls between spaces and the individual dramas unfolding in private rooms provide an image of the imaginary partition I spoke of from the outset, as one that inverts the interiority of the hotel to become, as a non-place without walls, an open space of conditioned possibilities acting upon the characters in each scenario. It is also, for the audience that recognizes the familiarity of augmented film and dramatic genres transpiring in each room, an activity of reading that places the audience in the characters’ own position as they read each other by attributes, categories, and positions that reify their difference and distinction (i.e., alterity) from others. That is, from the audience’s point of view, the staged effects of their separation, like the invisible walls that partition the characters, are shown to be inscribed within their actions, speech, and perceptions that shape each other’s scenario at hand.

The desires to realize a different scenario are produced and shaped for the characters, whose atomization from each other (i.e., the invisible walls) is largely a question of how they reenact or disengage in conversation with the “other” the preexisting relational powers underpinning their exchanges. Within each context, the disposition of addresser and addressee to recognize their roles in the powerful terms between them, the reconsideration of the characters’ presumptions (i.e., of the manner of reading), and the identifiable tools of mediation between speakers (i.e., the conduits to speak and be heard on readable terms for both), are what prove capable of transforming the given terms of the conversation, if at all, before they go awry. The anatomy of how they do so, however, is dynamic, based on the context of each exchange, and offers no set case. A determinant within the power dynamic in address resides in how the characters police each other and themselves, in part, within the hotel as a space of social contact in its right to usage among them, which serves as a framework governing permissible action and speech, according to the “house rules.” Even in certain scenes, actions and speech replay the violence experienced by characters, displaced toward others in repetition, through forms of disavowal capable of expelling or devouring the other. And on the other hand, the violence of subjection and control, which places limitations on their desires, speech, and decision in different ways, is one that is exerted from within the powers of a top-down subjugation that is shown to require, inversely, their seduction and control to reify subordination to an abusive authority. This subjugation is made more readable for the audience when its violence is exerted by a character, such a Toni. But in the case of a policed scenario, which Toni both performs and cites in the crisis, no specific actor can be attributed with conditioning the scenarios on stage. Instead, the characters themselves in their scenes of encounter mediate the very power relations inflecting their speech and actions in conversations with others, whether unknowingly, desiringly, or otherwise. What is at stake, following Deleuze and Guattari, resides in comprehending, first, the ways in which actors participate in producing each other’s desires in powerful ways, or rather, in policing each others’ unfulfilled realization for a different scenario altogether. Once identified for its constructed character, once flagged the terms of power shaping the scenario, therein also resides the emancipating possibility for change within the encounter. But, then again, my reading assumes at least that spectators are in a willing disposition, like Belén, to perceive how this might work.

Reading the Audience as Actor

If I have paid specific attention to the ways in which the dramatic genres of different scenes are made legible to the audience, and may prove to mold and perhaps even defamiliarize the spectator’s expectations, it is because Zamora establishes, as I see it, an intimate relation between spectatorship as a form of reading and recognition, and the actions of the characters on stage who likewise read, misread, and are sometimes led to question their own manners of reading. In closure, then, I should like to address the question of walls as one of partitioning in the reenactment of powerful relations that shape and limit desires, as they relate to the activity of spectatorship for the audience. For the activity of recognizing the familiarity of augmented genres transpiring in distinct spaces is one that implicates the audience in its perceptibility of the invisible walls separating each room, much like the characters read and misread each other in their encounters.

In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière problematizes the diametric opposition between the prescribed roles of the (passive) spectator and the (active) actor, naturalized within the dramatic and visual arts as a self-evident presumption. The experience of theater-going illustrates his argument; conventionally, the viewing audience performs a specific role in the theater space, comprised of seated, pensive observers whose social behavior is prescriptive to this passive reception as addressees, removed from the action on stage. In this manner, he writes, “viewing is the opposite of knowing,” on the one hand, for the spectator is presumably introduced into the scene of contemplation (i.e., the art gallery, the theater, etc.) without knowledge of its process of production, while this viewing is “the opposite of acting,” on the other, in which the role of the active agent is conceived in opposition to the passive contemplation of the viewer (2). The crux of Rancière’s argument is a political one, in which the possibility of emancipation

begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing, and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms this distribution of positions. (13)

Rancière views in the scripted active (actor) versus the passive (spectator) roles a paradigm and practice of politics that one might note translates suggestively into the partitioned roles of governors and the governed in representative democracy—but also, for my purpose here, to the possibilities of ordinary observation, action, and speech.[3] If, for Rancière, a political act is one that redistributes the powerful operative relations that structure saying, doing, and seeing, then I should like to propose that the encounter, in its mediation of permissible speech and action in the given terms for the exchange, is one that bears the possible kernel of a political act capable of engaging critically the prevailing power relations that shape the scenario at hand. In Zamora’s theater, spectators are shown that this is an ordinary, everyday occurrence that holds to or strays from participating in the policing of the impermissible, on the one hand, and that speaks and acts through personages unknowingly or desiringly so, on the other. Within this micro-scenario, redistributing the terms of power speaking and acting through actors—a small, but a political act—is one that presumes a disposition in address and reception to speak and listen, to read and be read, but that proves capable of transforming the terms of the exchange, and thus potentially the prescribed roles of actors within it. In this manner, Zamora’s one-act play Pequeños dramas sobre arena azul serves as a concluding remark to illustrate this point, for which the play’s title, incidentally, might be taken as the small (pequeño) act of encounter in which the roles of neither actors nor spectators is prescribed by theatrical conventions in the scenario.

 As in Zamora’s other work, the notion of space proves key to the development of the characters in relation to their stage of action. Written specifically for the underground venue “La casa de la portera” in Madrid, Pequeños dramas stages an intimate, yet sardonic performance of house pets and their abusive master, in a space that seats some twenty-five spectators around the periphery of a large living room. Featuring a cast of stage, screen, and television actors (Marta Belenguer, Raúl Prieto, Nuria Herrero, Mentxu Romero, David Martín, and Zamora himself), the three-act play defamiliarizes the audience’s expectations to see a stage drama about human characters, pitched vaguely in its publicity (Fig. 5), when the

Fig. 5. Playbill postcard for Zamora's Pequeños dramas

actors enter the room as human-like domestic pets. Their common plight is their inescapable place, cooped-up in an urban apartment. So too are their dramas quite human, at least for pets. The audience is introduced to the mother housecat who cannot mourn her disappeared litter, due to her painful un-milked udder that reminds her incessantly of loss; to the mother’s stray macho lover who desires more stability than his compulsive promiscuities allow; to the spayed male cat seduced into escaping with the alpha male, which leads to an unknowing leap to his death from the apartment window; to the lice-ridden pigeon, a scatter-brained addict of breadcrumbs, who consistently reveals tragic news without understanding its emotional impact on the characters; and to the abused lapdog empathetic to all others including his abuser, who returns to her time and again. The only human character in the play is the emotionally unstable housemaster, addicted to social media, Zamora scripts, who keeps her dwelling space in isolated, orderly suffering through beatings and portioned doses of tranquilizing catnip. One might perceive the parallel correlation between these character types and the limitations imposed upon their desires to realize a different scenario, in a sort of double to the crisscrossing stories of Zamora’s urban hotel. The colorful casting of human dramas into animal characters estranges the audience enough to call consistent attention to its artificial, even surrealist, imagination (i.e., like the plush, full-body costumes of the actors), and thus makes for an element of absurdity that can achieve the heightened range of emotions that the performance aims to convey.

The cramped space of the production has the animal characters search at times for props under the seats of spectators, in what implicates the audience directly in the action of the play, to move and be moved physically in response to the ongoing action around them. Noteworthy, too, is the distribution of seats around the periphery of the room. In difference to the aisles in conventional theaters that face a separate scene of activity on stage, here spectators seated in a circle see each other, and thereby themselves, as part of the spectacle. Large mirrors hanging on the walls, typical of living room décor, allow spectators seated around the room to view the characters at center from different angles, above the heads of other seated audience members. This plural fragmentation of gazes among and toward other audience members and actors constitutes the unique character of spectatorship in the venue and, specifically, in Zamora’s play, in which the disciplinary modes of spectatorship in the theater are called into question, as the action and movement unfolds. What constitutes proper behavior from theater-goers, given the nature of an ongoing performance in which the audience is, as much as the actors, being watched? And what of movement, as actors require seated spectators to move and be moved throughout the play? Specific scenes tend to highlight this dynamic more than others, such as those of the housemaster who disciplines, violently, her cast of pets.

In one particularly violent scene, in which the master beats her dog, the characters are “off-stage” in the hallway, where only the whelps can be heard, in a theatrical convention that proves disturbing by depriving the audience of sight (one might think of Medea murdering her children off-stage). Thereby the off-stage action implicates spectators by requiring them to imagine its violence against the overheard cries, which proves unsettling. Given the absence of activity within the room “on stage” during this scene, spectators in the audience are left to look at each other while hearing the whelps, in a crisscrossing of observational gazes on the reactions of others. In Zamora’s brilliant parallel, then, the disciplinary action of the housemaster’s abusive rage on her dog resonates with the activity of seeing and being seen in reaction, which despite and due to its potential discomforts, calls into question the disciplinary modes of spectatorship in conventional theater. After all, one might presume that if the audience were not seated in an inward looking circle, the discomfort of this scene, barring its explicit overheard violence, would bear less impact on spectators. The parallel raises a series of questions, with potentially political implications in other contexts. How uncomfortable are spectators when forced to step out of the prescribed roles of spectatorship, which move them towards the role of an actor? What of this discomfort involves moving and being moved physically by actors in an ongoing play that draws others’ attention the spectator’s own movement? What of it entails seeing and being seen in collective reaction to the overheard violence of a scenario of which spectators are fully aware, transpiring “off-stage” and out of sight? In what ways do spectators assume and perform the disciplinary (theater) house rules? For a moment, the audience members in their behavior and perhaps discomfort are invited to see other spectators, and themselves, as a well-trained dog.

In the play, the lapdog’s loyalty proves detrimental to his own wellbeing, as he returns empathetically to his abusive master, time and again. But by this point, at which viewers have already been invited to see themselves as a well-trained animal, Zamora scripts his character’s submission as akin to his audience’s own, to sense that discipline, and its potential violence, keep him domesticated. As tragedy, Pequeños dramas offers no solutions to the characters who, confined in their housemaster’s space, cannot escape their own circumstance. Or, if they do, then the sole attempt to run away, for a character seduced into the illusion of escape, has him jump to his death without knowing that the apartment is several stories above the ground, having never been outside the master’s space. Instead of solutions, Zamora’s performance escapes in a sense by “getting away” with something else altogether. That is, through Zamora’s human-like pet characters, the audience members are invited to see themselves and others as disciplined, perhaps even domesticated, within this space. And to see oneself and others as trained animals is, after all, getting away with enough to incite one to question, rather than to resolve completely, just how this might be.  

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[1] Abel Zamora, Temporada baja, Textos en Escena 17, Valencia, CulturArts Generalitat Valenciana, 2013.

[2] Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Trans. John Howe, London and New York, Verso, 1995.

[3] Rancière’s claim, elaborated from his earlier work in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, finds its roots in the paradoxical notion that this concept of the (passive) spectator is inherited from a classical triangulation between mimesis, or the regime of artistic representation (its grammar, so to speak), poiesis or artistic creation, and their bridge of continuity in aisthesis, or the reception of the work, in the domain of affects and sensations (i.e., aesthetics) conveyed from the work to spectators. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Trans. Steven Corcoran, Cambridge, UK, Polity, 2009.