Santiago Loza. Nothing to Do with Love and Other Plays. Ed. Samuel Buggeln and Noe Montez. Trans. Samuel Buggeln and Ariel Gurevich. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2021. 199 pp.

Reviewed by Amalia Gladhart

In Nothing to Do with Love and Other Plays, translators Samuel Buggeln and Ariel Gurevich present an inviting and varied introduction to Argentine playwright Santiago Loza’s work for readers and directors outside of Latin America. The volume includes translations of five of Loza’s plays, selected with an eye to including both better-known texts and plays meriting wider attention. An introduction situates Loza’s work within recent Argentine theater, and an interview with Loza offers further insight into the playwright’s methods and concerns. Numerous photographs as well as detailed credits for the original Spanish-language productions provide valuable documentation for both scholars and practitioners. Three of the translations have been staged by the Cherry Artists’ Collective, co-founded by Buggeln in Ithaca, New York.

The action in these plays is real and unreal, the impossible or fantastic incorporated unblinkingly. Loza’s plays are poetic and elliptical, tending toward monologue even when two characters appear on stage. The protagonists are often marginal or forgotten, silenced characters who can assert themselves only in an act of self-destruction. As translated, the language of Loza’s plays is natural and, sometimes, a little off—in keeping with the characters’ idiosyncratic expressions and attitudes. The translators render Loza’s wordplay successfully, attentive to sound and to the characters’ use of colloquial language and idioms. Notes following each of the plays highlight particular challenges and their solutions. These notes offer the kind of nuts and bolts insight that can be endlessly fascinating to translators, and do so in a way that should allow nontranslators and those perhaps resistant to the idea of theater in translation to see beyond the barriers, real and imagined. The inclusion of images from multiple Spanish-language productions, as well as from the stagings of three of the translations, highlights the versatility of Loza’s scripts in performance. In their note on Altitude Sickness, the translators observe: “As a matter of practicality, right now the North American theater ecosystem is so hostile to work in translation that one could argue that the translator’s job is simply to remove as many obstacles to production as possible” (180). To that end, their discussion of differing expectations in Argentina and the U.S. with respect to the primacy of the playwright’s text and the degree of latitude afforded a director, is particularly helpful.

Nothing to Do with Love (Makes Me Envious) [Nada del amor me produce envidia, 2008], places a 1940s Seamstress between rival cultural icons Libertad Lamarque and Evita Perón. Though the play evokes two larger-than-life historical figures, the Seamstress is alone on stage as she recalls her long career, the best dress she ever made, and the fierce competition occasioned by her handiwork. She directs her words to a dressmaker’s mannequin, noting her need to chat lest her tongue dry out and taking pleasure in those words, in the sound of her own voice: “I like the word ‘chitchat.’ The same way I like the word ‘locution,’ the way the ‘yoo’ sounds: ‘locution.’ And I like the word ‘interlocutor’ even better. . . as if the ‘yoo were hiding in there” (2). The Seamstress has been a figure on the sidelines, hiding the missteps and indiscretions of others, sparing brides public embarrassment with a strategic pleat or flounce. She says, “The world is made of two classes of people, those who decide, and those who comply. I belong to the second category” (20). Yet the Seamstress ultimately finds her voice—her “I.” Claiming the coveted dress for her own, she is transformed, though the force of her self-assertion is spectacularly self-destructive, a moment of rapture that condemns her to, “This eternal life stitching and unstitching. . . The reduced heaven of the seamstress” (27).

In Winter Animals [Pudor en animales de invierno, 2011], an aging father travels from his rural home to visit his isolated, closeted son in Buenos Aires. Son and Father regularly speak past one another, at once seeking and avoiding intimacy. The encounter between these two distanced characters is complicated by the surreal introduction of a naked woman living in the son’s refrigerator. The woman’s nakedness is acknowledged, but never explained. The father tries to talk about women—their skin, their appearance, his first night with his wife—even as his son pulls away. Both have trouble sleeping, and each in turn watches the other sleep. The vulnerability of sleep, and the quiet observation of the other’s surrender, is poignant. They are, like winter animals, hibernating, their gestures toward mutual understanding and communication suspended.

I Was Born to See You Smile [He nacido para verte sonreir, 2011] is another accompanied monologue. Miriam, the protagonist, explains to her unspeaking son the decision to commit him to a mental institution, where she and his father will take him later that day. Miriam is a complex character. Entitled, wounded, she is cruelly dismissive of the needs of “dear Laura,” her son’s caregiver. Yet she is also a sympathetic figure, lonely and determined in her efforts to connect with and somehow understand her son. In a two-character play with only one speaking part and no stage directions, the photographs of previous productions offer a powerful visual aid (and a reminder of the son’s presence). Miriam’s repeated plea, “Look at me,” goes (verbally) unanswered. She is certain of her rationality, of a difference between herself and her son: “A person can be in reality, or not. I chose to stay. You left” (98). And yet her reality is blinkered, shaped by social class and self-image. When she and Laura dragged her son to the bath, “It was hard for me. Not for her. She has the brute force of the people who do that kind of work. . . service work I mean. . . I couldn’t serve other people, I don’t have the physique” (106). “Are you still you?” she asks her son, earlier in the play. “I’m still me. I’m still here, inside of myself” (92). She is still there at the end, readying him for the journey.

Altitude Sickness [El mal de la montaña, 2013] has the largest cast of the plays in this volume, four characters whose alternately intersecting and diverging experiences are not easy to pin down. The timeline and individual identities are ambiguous—is Pamela in fact the same woman each time she appears, or is she more than one person? The translators note that this play, written on commission, was something of a departure for Loza. It is the least compelling of the plays, at least on the page. The privileged characters’ thoughtless, unmotivated violence is stark and unsettling, as is their disdain for the poor and homeless cluttering their environment. Still, taken as a whole, the play is rather flat.

In The Saint [La mujer puerca, 2012], a pious young woman—she could be a nurse or a nun—who longs for sainthood, for a sign from God, describes the harsh treatment she has experienced since childhood. The ugliness of the abuse she has suffered contrasts with the wry quirkiness of her perspective. As she observes, “God punishes the curiosity of women” (184). Buggeln and Gurevich have retained the old man in the translated text, but also note that the Buenos Aires production dispenses with his presence on stage. The old man’s lines are brief and repetitive—often only three or four words—while the verbal weight of the play is fully carried by the Girl. The translators highlight the humor of the play in performance, observing that, at the time of their writing, the play was “still running in its eighth season in Buenos Aires, still starring the incredible Valeria Lois in the Girl’s now-iconic pink turtleneck and lip gloss. Prospective performers of this text in English should note that as Lois performs her, the Girl is anything but self-pitying: the actress is famously comic, and the Girl often seems to embody an almost absurd and heartbreakingly funny impulse to look on the bright side” (192). And the Girl does get her sign. Having seen God, she assures the Man, “We’ll go to sleep soon” (191).

Nothing to Do with Love and Other Plays is a valuable addition to the list of Latin American theater available in translation. Enjoyable and informative, it is also an attractive book, well-bound, laid-out, and illustrated. The characters, with their persistent search for respite and connection, are haunting, their voices distinctive and memorable.

Amalia Gladhart is Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon. She has translated narrative and dramatic works by Patricia Zangaro, Angélica Gorodischer, Alicia Yánez Cossío, and Gila Holst. Her translation of Jaguars’ Tomb, by Angélica Gorodischer, was awarded the 2022 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize.