Conclusion

The conclusion outlines possibilities for the future of Cuban theater and queer artists. Theater, which is largely dependent upon the state, has few opportunities for growth. Queer rights, while championed by some in the administration, are still highly vulnerable, and violence against queer and trans people still occurs regularly. Likewise, artists’ rights are also in jeopardy with the implementation of Decree 349. This seems to indicate that works that require audiences to read into them in acts of momentary togetherness will be a possible way to resist repression against arts, queer people, and queer artists in the formation of community.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the theoretical and historical contexts that shaped the texts examined in Staging Discomfort. The chapter pays significant attention to the role of the revolution’s breed of masculine heteronormativity as a vehicle for creating exclusions based upon the visibility of queer difference. This chapter also outlines (queer) Cuban theater history in order to trace the development of an autochthonous theater, as well as signalling how queer culture resists the repressive aspects of the revolution.

Vexing Visibilities

Chapter 4 investigates the relationship between fear and perceptibility in the play Chamaco (2006) by Abel González Melo. Using works by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, it explores how gay and transvestite characters travel through and manipulate the central city spaces of Havana, most notably the Parque Central, transforming official, celebratory spaces of the nation into concealed meeting places that reveal the true, queer nature of the city. This chapter argues that this play is concerned with the ethereal, and that the transformative possibilities of queer sex—which in this play occur at the periphery of the city center—can encourage a multiplicity of citizenships that extend from the queer throughout the city, and not just at its edges. In Carlos Celdrán’s direction of Chamaco the physical spaces of stage and city are reconstructed by playing with what is visible to the audience and other characters via lighting. Celdrán makes previously “invisible” queer bodies visible by utilizing light as an inclusionary tactic. Further, he challenges ideas about utopia and dystopia, center and margin, hetero- and homonormative by collapsing the public and private spaces of street and home in his staging of the work.

Instigating Intimacies

Chapter 1 examines the blurring of distinctions between audience and actor in director Carlos Díaz’s creative staging of Las relaciones de Clara (2007) (by German playwright Dea Loher) in the musty rooms of a colonial home. Using Bersani and Phillips’s theories, the chapter investigates how a proliferation of intimacies creates a sense of sameness that is rooted in physical proximity and discomfort. This chapter shows how reimagining the possibility of physical intimacies can produce a shared hopefulness between audience, play troupe, and nation. What makes these theatrical intimacies relevant in a contemporary Cuban context is how they resist the state’s persistent attempts to fabricate its own version of a unified society.

Frustrating Futurity

Chapter 3 is concerned with the performance of Pájaros de la playa (2001, 2007) performed by the group El Ciervo Encantado, written by Nelda Castillo and based on the novel (1993) by Severo Sarduy. Here, the staging of bodies dying of AIDS links the queer body to the body in pain in a performance that is beyond language. At its essence, Pájaros challenges the spectator to create meaning in spite of frustration that is caused by denying the audience access to the beautiful through persistent returns to the painful. This vacillation between the agonizing and the beautiful offers a way to understand the sick body, and how to resist the ways in which bodies become mired in singular linear destinations based upon political myopia and fear. Lee Edelman’s sinthomosexuality theory forms the basis of my exploration into how queer bodies resist the linear finality of reproduction and historical narratives. The chapter argues that it is in the moment that the spectator witnesses pain and dying that doubt—about justice and self—emerges and real change can commence.

Sharing Shame

Chapter 2 reveals how the play Baños públicos, S.A. (1996) by Esther Suárez Durán explores how a more liquid connection between shame and dignity might allow for the introduction of queerness into dialogues about national identity. In conjunction with theory by Michael Warner, the chapter elucidates the connectedness between the spaces, bodies, and behaviors presented openly in the play—bathroom space, asexualized bodies, and the act of urination—and those that are present via a subtextual understanding of the work—gay meeting place, homosexual bodies, and gay sex. Here a more complete understanding of Cubanness is achieved through a reinterpretation of everyday spaces that is simultaneously engaged with queerness.

Fronting Failure

The fifth chapter of this book examines the intersection between the body’s diminishing capacity over time and subsequent feelings of failure in the play Perros que jamás ladraron (2013), written and directed by Rogelio Orizondo. Inspired by images of Cuba created by visitors—including Columbus, Leni Riefenstahl, and tourists—this play focuses on redefining the revolution through queer, black, and femme disability. The aesthetic of the staging is as disorganized as Riefenstahl’s work is fluid, although both work to undermine the univocality of the state. Using queer theory from Judith Halberstam and queer disability theory from Robert McRuer, this chapter explores whether feeling failure constitutes failure itself, and how collective acts of performance—such as the audience texting instructions for performers to act—fail too, but allow for a reconsideration of what is possible together.