Romina Paula. Fauna and Other Plays. Ed. April Sweeney and Brenda Werth. Trans. April Sweeney, Brenda Werth, and Jean Graham-Jones. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2023. 164 pp.

Reviewed by May Summer Farnsworth

Fauna and Other Plays, edited by April Sweeney and Brenda Werth, offers four plays in English translation by Argentine playwright Romina Paula. The editors, Sweeney and Werth, include their own co-authored translations of The Sound It Makes (2007), Fauna (2013), and Rewilding (2016), along with a translation by Jean Graham-Jones of The Whole of Time (2009). The production photographs, translations, and introduction familiarize English-speaking audiences with one of the most innovative and acclaimed dramatists working in Argentina today. In the essay that accompanies the translations, “Rewilding the Poetics of Love, Life, and Intimacy in Romina Paula’s Theater,” Brenda Werth describes the combined effect of various artforms—music, dance, film, and painting—on Paula’s theatre, acknowledging the author’s vast experience with directing, performing, and writing. Werth situates Paula’s work within the tumultuous political and economic landscapes of Argentina’s post-dictatorship era, the presidencies of Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner, the return to neoliberalism, and the vibrant protest movements of recent decades related to gender, sexuality, and reproductive justice. Paula experiments with innovative approaches to the enduring themes of national trauma and memory, according to Werth, adding new ways of looking at gender, sexuality, and family dynamics. Rather than following the allegorical tendencies of previous generations of playwrights, however, Paula focuses on: “oppressive gender norms, intersectionality, a critique of interlocking systems of power, and social media as a powerful tool of activism” (xix). The four plays included in this volume clearly exemplify these distinct characteristics of Paula’s playwriting.

The selections and translations included reveal Paula’s penchant for blending everyday experiences with the uncanny and the metatheatrical. Werth aptly describes this as a “blurriness between fiction and the real” and an exploration of “what constitutes art, acting, experience, and identity” (xv) in twenty-first century Argentina. Paula revisits and reimagines works by legendary authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Rainer Maria Rilke, popular singers, like Marco Antonio Solís, and provocative visual artists like Frida Kahlo. The Sound It Makes (translated by Sweeney and Werth) reexamines and interrogates misogyny in Borges’s short story, “The Intruder.” Two brothers, Nacho and Colo, seem anxious in the company of a woman, adopting a fearful and guarded attitude toward Mariana, the confident, intelligent, and composed female cousin who comes for an unexpected visit. Mariana studies the brothers and asks probing questions. Sweeney and Werth’s translation captures the feminist wit and straightforward irreverence of the dialogue, as evident in Mariana’s blunt assessment of the men: “MARIANA. You never go upstairs. I can tell because it’s filthy up there. (Silence.) Are you traumatized, too? / NACHO. What? / MARIANA. I asked you if you were traumatized. / NACHO. No, from what? / MARIANA. I don’t know, it just seems like you are. You and your brother are a little weird. A little traumatized . . . ” (23). The Whole of Time (translated by Graham-Jones) opens with casual conversations between siblings about machismo and gender-based violence in Mexican popular culture. The play references Frida Kahlo’s life and art, singer/songwriter Marco Antonio Solis’s hit song “Si no te hubieras ido,” and the theatre of Tennessee Williams. Along with her fluid translation of the dialogue and stage directions, Graham-Jones provides contextual notes on popular culture and violent crime in the River Plate in the 1990s and 2000s. Graham-Jones points out, for example, that Ricardo Alberto Barreda became known as the “patron saint of misogyny” after killing his wife, his daughters, and his mother-in-law in the 1990s. She also notes that “Pantriste” refers to the nickname given to a student, Javier Romero, who shot thirteen classmates in 2000, killing three (47). In another footnote, Graham-Jones explains a reference to “Pepita la Pistolera,” a character from a Uruguayan film about a woman who committed a series of robberies by passing an umbrella handle off as a gun (48).

Fauna (translated by Sweeney and Werth) explores multiple interpretations of a single story through poetry, metatheatre, and divergent points of view. April Sweeney directed a production of Fauna in September 2022 at Torn Page in New York City with Laura Butler Rivera, Richard Jesse Johnson, Veraalba Santa, and David Skeist. A filmmaker, a daughter, a son, and a director attempt make a movie about the life story of a charismatic and unconventional woman: Fauna. The central figure of their film evokes nineteenth-century discourses about civilization and barbarism. Fauna was known for riding horses, wearing men’s clothing, and translating poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. Each character narrates their own understanding of Fauna’s legacy, but their stories do not neatly align. Paula’s text seeks to “capture what is true and real, and how to decipher where reality ends and fiction begins,” according to Werth (xxiv). Through minimalist set design and the technique of role play, Paula explores diverse possible motivations for the differing gender expressions of her captivating title character. Sweeney and Werth also offer an important note about the challenges of translating translations; since Paula had already translated Rilke’s “Todeserfahrung” from German to Spanish, Sweeney and Werth found value in incorporating both the original poem and the playwright’s Spanish rendering into their English translation. As I had the privilege of attending the English-language premier, I can attest that the language was as engaging and poetic in performance as it is on the page. I recall the audience’s rapt attention at the highly symbolic monologue in which Santos (Richard Jessie Johnson) describes the bizarre and tragic death of two mares: “Monito gets closer. He hears the intense buzzing of a swarm of bees. He sees the bees attacking the horses and devouring them. No longer standing, they now lie motionless, mares with still hearts, they walk no more, they want no more. The two bodies are even darker at night, engulfed by bees that have left nothing—not even a hair or piece of flesh” (108). The last play in the collection, Rewilding (translated by Sweeney and Werth), stands out for its abstraction and experimentation in dialogue and storyline, but it also retains persistent characteristics of Paula’s work: intertextual references, non-normative gender representations, and minimalist scenography. Rewilding explores classic and universal themes—art, love, family, and philosophy—through fragmented vignettes rather than conventional plotlines and linear narratives.

As a whole, Fauna and Other Plays makes an important contribution to Latin American theatre studies; it introduces Romina Paula’s theatre to a wider audience of students, educators and practitioners, while also connecting with previous studies of Argentine theatre in the ongoing post-dictatorship era, such as Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts (Duke UP, 1997), Brenda Werth’s Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Jean Graham-Jones’s Exorcising History (Bucknell UP, 2000), Jorge Dubatti’s Teatro-matriz, teatro liminal (Atuel, 2016), Jordana Blejmar’s Playful Memories (Springer, 2018), Cecilia Sosa’s Queering Acts Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship (Tamesis, 2014), and Paola S. Hernández’s, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater (Northwestern UP, 2021). Without a doubt, Fauna and Other Plays will inspire more theatre practitioners in the English-speaking world to add Paula’s theatre to their repertoire and will help educators update their syllabi in gender, Latin American, and theatre studies.

May Summer Farnsworth, PhD (She/Her) is a professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she teaches courses and directs undergraduate research on language, literature, and translation. She is the co-editor of a two-volume anthology of plays by women in Latin America, Escrito por Mujeres (LATR press, 2016), and the author of Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico (U of Iowa P, 2023).