Bulletin of the Comediantes

IN A BOLD DEFENSE for the ongoing relevance of comedia studies as a field, this edited collection brings together more than twenty scholars and theater practitioners to actively reflect on the dynamic relationships between theater, politics, culture, and identity. The overall aim of the book is to explore best practices for engaging with early modern Spanish theater, both within the context of our classrooms as well as in the wider context of contemporary performance and adaptation. The essays assert the variety of ways these plays speak to both historical and contemporary understandings of justice and experiences of inequality.

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre is divided into three parts. In part 1, a group of theater scholars provide textual analyses and close readings of ethics via comedias tied to race, class, and gender. The playwrights studied are both canonical and noncanonical, including Gaspar Aguilar, Ana Caro, Miguel de Cervantes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, and Luis Vélez de Guevara. Parts 2 and 3 focus on contemporary theater companies from the United States, Mexico, and Spain that adapt and perform early modern Spanish theater. Part 2 takes up how early modern plays are adapted for contemporary audiences. Part 3 comprises six short interviews with actors and directors from theater companies from the same wide geographic reach about process, intention, and futures of staging the comedia. Taken as a whole, these materials provide rich pedagogical resources. As an example, the textual analyses in part 1 could be easily paired to readings of comedias assigned in the classroom, or could model strategies of engagement for a course instructor working with one of these plays for the first time.

As an alternate example, the visual and textual descriptions of contemporary adaptations serve as gateways to engage students in the materiality of staging and performance. Contemporary adaptations include works responding to superstars Calderón de la Barca, Cervantes, and Lope de Vega, among others. The vibrant descriptions of production, including set design and costuming in Nieto-Cuebas’s chapter, are supported by two [End Page 95] photos from the production of El coloquio de los perros (see pp. 146, 148) to aid with visualization. Finally, the collection of interviews at the closing of the book introduces readers to an alternate genre of intellectual and professional discourse that captures the lived experience of theatermakers at the time of publication. It is worth mentioning how the translation of interviews from Spanish to English with prominent theater professionals including Natalia Menéndez (Almagro Festival, Spain) and Fernando Villa Proal (Efe Tres Teatro, Mexico City) supports the book’s important work in bringing in anglophone audiences who may be less familiar with the comedia. The interviews provide concrete details about the day-to-day practice and larger ideals tied to contemporary adaptation of early modern Spanish theater, including responses to financial pressures and marketing, as well as changes made to the performance experience related to accessibility, equity, and inclusion for theater patrons.

The introduction to the book gives context for how the volume came to life in response to Matthew Stroud’s 2016 plenary for the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (AHCT), “Why the Comedia?”. As the editors explain, “Stroud makes three recommendations that we [the co-editors of this edition] have taken to heart” (4): highlighting connections between the early modern and our present, including academics and theater practicioners at various stages in their careers, foregrounding the relevance of comedias, and widening established canons. Although the editors summarize Stroud’s advice in the introduction to the book, it would have been useful to reproduce the plenary in full as part of the volume’s framework. Moving out from the specificity of AHCT, the collection engages broadly with theories of social justice, via histories of radical feminisms within the United States, including recent interventions from the field of sociology by...