Comparative Drama

“There is little need,” Ruben Espinosa has observed, “for others to tell a marginalized individual how to connect with Shakespeare, but there is a pressing need to listen when that individual explains what makes him or her connect and why that happens.” This quote, which Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos cite in their contribution to Shakespeare and Latinidad, offers a concise and incisive methodology for how to engage with the essays, performance reviews and reflections, and interviews contained within the volume. So often as scholars and artists, we dive head first into the hows—how to answer a question, how to stage a play, how to fix an issue—without giving thorough consideration of what exactly we are dealing with or why we need the problem solved. Edited by Carla Della Gatta and Trevor Boffone, Shakespeare and Latinidad brings together a community of scholars, theorists, practitioners, and activists to encourage us to slow down on the how and truly listen to the whats and whys that brought the diverse ensemble to Shakespeare.

And I say community full-throatedly. Because of the vast diversity of Latinx peoples and cultures, “Latinidad” as a framework for engaging with Shakespeare is itself rife with contradictions and pitfalls. Della Gatta and Boffone acknowledge as much in their introduction, and offer specific definitions for Latinx, Latinidad, and Latinx Shakespeare to frame the discussion clearly and elegantly for the reader: “Latinx is the gender-non-binary term for people from a shared colonial heritage of the Americas who reside in the United States; ‘Latinidad’ is Latinx culture,” and Latinx Shakespeare are “productions where Latinidad is integrated into Shakespearean stories and plays so that they are made Latinx.” The word “productions” in their definition is important—Theatre Departments, while still producing and performing Shakespeare’s plays, have largely ceded the study of Shakespeare within academia to English and Literature Departments. As such, using “productions” in their definition signals that this book engages far more with the tools of the former—performance review, artistic processes, and pedagogy—rather than those of the latter—deep textual analysis, theory, and literary criticism.

With the framework for discussion clearly articulated, Della Gatta and Boffone divide the book into four sections. Part one, “Shakespeare in the US Latinx Borderlands,” consists of performance reviews that each in their own way engage with the question of what makes a Shakespeare play Latinx. Part two, “Making Shakespeare Latinx,” recounts methods for appropriating Shakespeare’s work to empower Latinx practitioners and students. Part three. “Shakespeare in Latinx Classrooms and Communities,” turns activism and pedagogical lenses [End Page 339] onto the topic. Lastly, Part four, “Translating Shakespeare in Ashland,” engages with the Play On! Shakespeare initiative, which began at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Among the many successes of the book is how the methodologies and contents of each section engage with the overall structure. For instance, Part three fully embraces the classroom community ethos in the content. Roxanne Schroeder-Arce’s “Shakespeare With, For, and By Latinx Youth: Assumptions, Access, and Assets,” while being a solo-authored piece, uses a collection of interviews with youths as case studies for how to explore Shakespeare with and for Latinx youths. In “Celebrating Flippancy: Latinas in Miami Talk Back to Shakespeare,” James M. Sutton collects the words of seven Latina alumnae of Florida International University on their experiences learning Shakespeare as Latinx students. The next chapter is a dialogo between Jose Cruz Gonzalez and David Lozano, two artist-activists, titled “On Making Shakespeare Relevant to Latinx Communities.” Even the two solo-authored pieces in the section—“Romeo y Julieta: A Spanish Language Shakespeare in the Park” by Daphne Sicre, and “Politics, Poetry, and Popular Music: Remixing Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta” by Jerry Ruiz—are positioned to create a dialogue between two experiences performing different adaptations of Romeo and Juliet—a cut down version of Pablo Neruda’s 1964 Romeo y Julieta and Angel-Lui Pujante’s 1993...