Transcript Broken Eggs

Understanding Interculturalism
Background
• Intercultural. Multicultural. These are highly
debated terms in today’s media. A dictionary
definition of multicultural is simply “of or
pertaining to a society of varied cultural
groups.” It is used to acknowledge the rich
diversity of American society and also to
challenge the achievements and values of
Western European culture.
Background
• In this era of concerns for representing
minorities and all cultures in society, political
groups, on campuses, and in arts institutions,
such words as multicultural, intercultural,
ethnicity, and fusion abound in the new
dialogue on cultural diversity.
Background
• Whereas multicultural celebrates the
separateness and distinctions of diverse
cultural groups existing side by side,
interculturalism examines the collisions of
those cultures, orientations, and ideologies.
Background
• What has not been or cannot be successfully
fused is seen not as disasters or indictments of
Western civilization but as “fertile rifts of creative
possibilities.” Thus, there emerge in works of art
the tensions between the Islamic and English
literary practices in the novels of Salman Rushdie,
the mixing of forms, texts, and performers by
director Peter Brook, the theater anthropology of
Eugenio Barba, and the performance art of
Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Anna Deavere Smith.
Background
• Whereas the multicultural generates political
and scholarly writings , interculturalism has
fostered new art about cultures co-existing
uneasily.
The Intercultural Text
• The intercultural text, first, demonstrates the
collision of cultures. It takes its tensions and
conflicts from the cultural uneasiness defining,
for example, life in the United States in the
last decades of the twentieth century.
• The intercultural text for the theater is rich
and engaging in the artists’ efforts to confront
and explore those cultural edges where fusion
has not taken place.
The Intercultural Text
• In particular, plays by Hispanic American
writers examine those failed cultural fusions in
lives dislocated from a familiar language,
people, and customs. Many plays by Asian
American playwrights, like David Henry Hwang,
focus on cultural differences and racial
identities that lead to generational and
personal conflicts.
U.S. Hispanic and Latino/a Playwriting
• Since the late sixteenth century, a Spanish-speaking
theater whose purpose was to preserve Hispanic
traditions and language has existed in North America.
• The new Latino/a writers who were writing in styles
and subjects outside the mainstream of American
traditions found stages in workshops and converted
neighborhood spaces to test the waters of their new
subjects: the border experience, colliding cultures,
issues of ethnicity and gender, old-world taboos versus
new-world lifestyles.
U.S. Hispanic and Latino/a Playwriting
• Machado’s The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa,
Moraga’s Shadow of a Man, Sanchez-Scott’s Roosters,
and Rivera’s The House of Ramon Iglesia focused
national attention on new voices in the American
theater who were presenting new ways to
understand Latino/a identity and explore issues of
assimilation, marginalization, and political and
artistic bias heretofore ignored by the mainstream
culture and its institutions.
Broken Eggs
Eduardo Machado
Eduardo Machado
• Eduardo Machado is a playwright in motion,
the reflection of a life in motion. Born in Cuba,
his family fled to Miami when he was seven,
and then moved on to Los Angeles where they
began their new life. Eduardo kept moving:
beyond the conservatism of his upbringing,
beyond the parochialism of a single culture,
beyond the confines of a single form of
theatrical expression.
• He is simultaneously writing plays for HBO and
CBS, while two of his earlier plays, Stevie
Wants to Play the Blues and Once Removed,
are opening in Los Angeles and San Francisco
this winter. Today, he is in a coffee shop on
Amsterdam Avenue, and for a moment we talk
not about where he is going, but where he has
come from.
Critical Introduction to Broken Eggs
• Eduardo Machado (1953-) was
born in Havana, Cuba, and grew
up in nearby Cojimar. Born on
the day Fidel Castro launched
the Cuban revolution, he grew
up in its shadow.
• Eduardo Machado holds a
faculty appointment in the
School of the Arts at Columbia
University New York City, and
heads the graduate program in
playwriting there.
Critical Introduction to Broken Eggs
• Broken Eggs, the fourth play in
Eduardo Machado’s Floating Island
tetralogy, was first produced in 1984
by New York’s Ensemble Studio
Theater. The Spanish version,
entitled Revoltillo, was performed
three years later at New York’s
Repertorio Espanol.
• The earlier plays are set in Cuba in
the 1920s and in the 1950s. Broken
Eggs continues the story of modern
Cuba with Marquez-Hernadndez
family now transplanted to a suburb
of Los Angeles in 1979.
Critical Introduction to Broken Eggs
• Written in two acts, the play examines the
problems faced by a formerly wealthy Cuban
family experiencing life in exile in the United
States.
• The transplanted Hispanic culture of the
Marquez-Hernandez family emphasizes the
frissons in their lives rather than an assimilation
into the dominant culture. The wedding is the
playwright’s occasion for bringing the family
together in celebration and nostalgia.
Critical Introduction to Broken Eggs
• Broken Eggs is a play that examines the collisions of
two cultures and the reactions of three generations
involved in the collision.
• Broken Eggs is a comedy of family values tested
against an alien culture and found to be strong and
enduring. Despite the anger, unhappiness, confusion,
and emotional chaos, the family, although somewhat
frayed, survives intact.
Stetson University Stover Theatre February 2007
Critical Introduction to Broken Eggs
• As an example of the intercultural text, Broken
Eggs sets forth the dysfunction of a Hispanic
family forced to relocate to Southern California as
an outcome of the Cuban revolution.
• The divorced parents, Sonia and Osvaldo, are at
the center of Machado’s intercultural story, for
they exhibit the fragility and sharp edges of
people existing in limbo – holding on to the past
and watching helplessly the erosion of their lives
in the present.
Critical Introduction to Broken Eggs
• The grandparents are forever separate from the
new culture by inherited rituals and customs; the
grandchildren have connected; but the middleaged parents are suspended between two
cultures. Their pain and fragile accommodations
are the material of Machado’s intercultural art.
In the regional Kennedy Center American
College Theatre Festival regional competition
in Greensboro, N.C. Florida International
University 's production of Eduardo
Machado's The Cook
Performing Broken Eggs
• Eduardo Machado’s plays and musicals have
been produced since 1981 by the Ensemble
Studio Theatre and Repertorio Espanol (New
York City), the Long Wharf Theatre (CT), the
Williams-town Theatre Festival (MA0, the
Humana Festival of Actors Theatre Lousville
(KY), Cincinnati Playhouse (OH), and the Mark
Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
Performing Broken Eggs
• Machado’s “Floating Islands” in general and
Broken Eggs in particular focus on domestic
power struggles as a mirror for a society in
flux.
• The staging of Machado’s epic tetralogy about
four generations of Cubans stretching from
1929-1980 opened in October 1995 at Los
Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum.
Critics’ Notebook on Hispanic
American Drama
• The theatrical diversity of the American theater has
generated a plethora of scholarly books on the history
of Hispanic American writing in the United States.
• The following commentary by Caridad Svich, resident
playwright at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and
editor/translator of books on Maria Irene Fornés and
García Lorca, traces the development of Latino/a
drama by a “new” generation of playwrights who
worked at New York City’s INTAR ( the Hispanic
American Arts Center)
Caridad Svich, from Out of the Fringe
• In the margins, in the black boxes, clubs, art galleries,
performance spaces, garages, basements, universities,
cabarets, poetry slams and other alternative spaces, a
new kind of Latina/o theatre and performance
aesthetic has been forged over the last ten years: a
bold frank, uncompromising, lyrical, private,
metaphorical kind of work that re-visions what it is to
be a Latina/o dramatist in the U.S. Created outside the
mainstream of “official” culture (both Latina/o and
Anglo), this new generation of theatrical writing seeks
to deconstruct and reconstruct not only theatrical
forms but also the boundaries by which those forms
have been created.
Caridad Svich, from Out of the Fringe
• In the 1970s and 1980s, Latina/o dramatists
were encouraged by the bold experiments of
master playwright and teacher María Irene
Fornés, activist and storyteller Luis Valdez,
maverick playwright and pioneering publisher
of Latino/a work Pedro Monge-Rafuls, and a
handful of other brave writers who were
testing the uncharted, previously forbidden
waters of American theatrical writing.
Asian American Playwriting
• As early as the 1850s, Asian theater and opera
traditions were imported by laborers from
China and by Japanese and Filipino workers
settling in the United States at the turn of the
century. Many workers and their families
remained clustered in neighborhoods within
major port cities, such as San Francisco, Los
Angeles, Seattle, and New York City.
Asian American Playwriting
• In order to combat the stereotyping and
provide venues for their work, Asian- and
American-born writers and artists found it
necessary to establish their own theaters and
cultural centers. Their works, old and new,
exploded narrow stereotypes and
misperceptions about Asian culture, people,
and traditions.
Asian American Playwriting
• In the wake of the civil rights movement in the
late sixties and early seventies, Asian American
artists formed small theater companies in major
cities to tell their own stories with authentic
voices.
• In the last two decades, Asian American artists
have emerged as unique voices in the American
theater, addressing complex issues of race,
prejudice, family, compromise, identity, and
struggles for self-fulfillment.
Asian American Playwriting
• David Henry Hwang’s work has been chosen here
as an example of intercultural writing that reveals
the collision of two cultures (East and West) and
thereby exposes the rough cultural edges in the
politics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and
identity.
• Golden Child shows individuals caught up in the
colliding of traditional Chinese culture and beliefs
with Western Christian beliefs and social mores.
The dualities make for a richly complex and
theatrical text.
Borders of Identity: Where is “Home?”
• In the play, the characters are basically outsiders, living
a kind of “border existence,” at home in neither
country. Whether consciously or unconsciously,
Machado places his characters outside of the reception
hall, literally on the margins. We see them on the
outside, looking into the reception. Regardless of their
class or social status, they are always aware of their
“otherness” and the borders this position creates. The
three-generational family in Broken Eggs reflects the
spectrum of today’s upper middle-class Cuban family,
from the “frozen” grandparents to the assimilationist
bride.
Borders of Identity: Where is “Home?”
• The older characters cannot let their grandchildren
forget who they are. The following exchange
between the grandmother, Manuela, and her
granddaughter Mimi, illustrates this preoccupation:
MANUELA [in reference to Cuba]: My cousins are starving there.
MIMI: At least they know who they are.
MANUELA: You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you. You’re Manuela Sonia Marquez Hernandez. A
Cuban girl. Don’t forget what I just told you.
MIMI: No, Grandma. I’m Manuela Sonia Marquez, better known as Mimi Mar-kwez. I
was born in Canoga Park. I’m a first-generation white Hispanic American.
MANUELA: No you’re not. You’re a Cuban girl. Memorize what I just told you
(Machado, 181).
Borders of Identity: Where is “Home?”
• A few minutes before this exchange, Manuela was
urging her daughter to use potions to get her
husband back, illustrating the syncretic
Christianity they practice, a direct reference to the
influence of the African slaves who were
assimilated into the bloodlines of the colonizers.
• The African blood in so many Caribbean people
suggests a “home” on that distant continent, but
these playwrights do not explore their roots to
that degree. In sharp contrast, Chicano
playwrights have seldom, if ever, written about
their African blood, mirroring the Mexican
tradition of discounting such influences.
Borders of Identity: Where is “Home?”
• Finally, these three plays reflect the fact that the majority of
US-born Latinos, from all three groups, do not have their
hearts in a homeland that was never theirs. For all the
cajoling the Cuban exiles have used on their grandchildren,
these younger people are like the earlier sons and daughters
of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans born in the US and who see
the United States as “home,” for better or for worse.
• Although Machado was born in Cuba, he was only eight years
old when he was brought to the States and he does not seem
inclined to return, satirizing the older generation that
does.The character who become one with the US is the new
Mrs. Rifkin in Broken Eggs. She has basically rejected the
culture of her parents, denying her cultures as she attempts
to escape from her “Latin dad” into a new home, calling
herself “American.”