Review of The Entremés for Performance: Translations of One-Act Plays from Golden Age Spain, ed. Kerry K. Wilks and Ian M. Borden. Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024.

Reviewed by Kathleen Jeffs, D.Phil., Gonzaga University

To those theatre practitioners, educators, and scholars sifting for gold amid a dizzying array of possibilities within the Spanish Golden Age canon, this book provides a whole pan of valuable nuggets. The entremés (one-act play historically performed in between the acts of a full-length play) is such a gem of a form for performance and classroom work because it is short, often funny or poignant, and always approachable for audiences and students due to its get-in-and-get-out jokes and stagecraft. This collection, edited by the formidably talented Kerry Wilks and Ian Borden, represents a trove of speakable, studyable translations. The breadth of both the types of one-act plays included and the authors selected provides an entirely new scope for understanding this unique genre’s range of possibilities.

The plays themselves are fully contextualized and grounded in historical and dramaturgical context, and span from the “forerunners of the genre (Encina, Lope de Rueda) and also writers who wrote as the genre was transitioning in the late 17^th and early 18^th century” (Zamora, Cabañas). Some are familiar, such as Cervantes’s El retablo de las maravillas here in a lively performance translation as The Ark of Wonders by Borden and Costales, and the requisite presence of Juan Rana in Calderón de la Barca’s El toreador / Bullfighter for a Day, while others are perhaps less well-known such as Vélez de Guevara’s Antonia y Perales / Antonia and Perales, which Erdman translates in rhyming couplets in a strategy designed to “restore the wit and verve ‘lost in translation’ through the sheer pleasure of rhyme”. There is a very interesting play with a Sweeney Todd vibe in Quevedo’s La ropavejera / Secondhand Rose Shop, in which “a person who sells used clothes, is actually selling body parts and other remedies to help her customers maintain a youthful appearance”. This play in particular makes a strong example of how performance testing benefits the ultimate product in that readers can be privy to workshop and performance options as well as literary choices. Many of the plays in the volume have been either workshopped or performed at the Association of Hispanic Classical Theatre’s annual conferences in El Paso. The methodology for those translation workshops are outlined in the play’s illuminatingly process-laden introduction (including detailed examples of the translation group delving into how a pause or an emphasis on a certain word in the delivery of the line makes all the difference; in this case, the translation magic is in a tactical silence, not in a word choice, which is a wonderful moment for students and translation scholars to unpack).

The book is in facing pages of English and Spanish, which is highly enjoyable for those of us who want to see how the sausage is made, as we can see the choices laid bare throughout the “decoding process” on the pages and laugh along with the jokes in both languages. The section on “Decoding and Recoding” in the introduction to Gunter’s translation of La capeadora / The Cape Snatcher is fascinating, with its deep dramaturgical process of revisitation, transplantation, substitution, expansion, and a focus on the culminating finale that helps the reader appreciate the translators’ work and the play itself all the more. That play is a tour de force of the genre, with everything you could want in bawdiness, physical action, linguistic pyrotechnics and two alternatives to choose from for the final song sequence, including one set to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie”. Yancey’s version of Los putos / Jinxed offers another juicy play that he rightly quips “one might easily imagine appearing in an episode of Saturday Night Live”. That play is by Jerónimo de Cáncer whose works haven’t become as well-known perhaps as those of his collaborator, Augustín Moreto, so this is a welcome example of the educational aspect of the book. Yancey’s explication of the sorcery and departure from the typical tradition of ending these plays with music is appreciated also in the spirit of educating the reader about how this unique play both is typical and not typical of its sort. That script in particular seems to have a flow and a naturalness to it that is typical of Yancey’s performance-oriented translation work. Magic also flows through Francisco Bernardo de Quirós’s El muerto, Eufrasia y Tronera (El muerto) which Wilks and Worthington have endearingly titled Dead or Wed (familiar to readers of The Mercurian as it was published here in 2018) and continues with Moreto’s witchy Entremés famoso de las brujas / The Famous Interlude of the Witches in a delightful version by Nieto-Cuebas and Vargas Ramos, which balances the meter of the Spanish with an English version of the slang, bravely solving translation challenges that would flummox the best in the field, for example, “words in English that one could confuse with necromancer”, etc.

Mention needs to be made of the contributions, both overt and behind the scenes, of Susan Paun de García and Harley Erdman, whose translations and generous assistance to their collaborators shine throughout. As the embodiment of the indefatigable spirit of the entremés himself, Ben Gunter, graces the cover and his energy permeates the volume. His contribution reaches new heights in the section “Classic Doubletakes: Second Looks, Three Times Over” in which the volume takes a turn toward adaptation, relocation, and his invocation of Susan Jonas’s delicious articulation of our project as translators: “The classics provoke paradoxical feelings, from reverence to repudiation, and this friction is gold” (Jonas, “Aiming the Canon at Now: Strategies for Adaptation”, in Dramaturgy in American Theatre: A Sourcebook, p. 245). In introducing these “doubletakes” Gunter invites us to appreciate the fact that “variety in the responses that these plays arouse increases their capacity to qualify as ‘classics’.” And as if that weren’t quite enough to chew on, there follows an appendix of pedagogical materials that will open seams of inquiry, discussion, comprehension, critical thinking, and staging experiments in classrooms and studios for years to come.

There are little tasty treats embedded into the educational introduction to each play and in the copious notes that are just as valuable as the plays themselves, so don’t skip the descriptions of “translating the script’s syncopated, sonorous, spicily dialectical verse” or the rich footnotes that bring the references to life. To cover such depth and breadth results in a good-sized tome if you can get your hands on the physical book, which I recommend over the electronic version for ease of digestion. This reviewer highly recommends taking the editors’ advice to “Enjoy them. Argue with them. Put the play onstage and test them out” as they have in creating this volume of workshop-developed, performance-tested works of short theatrical exuberance. You won’t be disappointed.

Kathleen Jeffs, D.Phil., serves as Associate Provost for Assessment, Accreditation, and Programs at Gonzaga University, where she also served as Professor and Chair for the Department of Theatre & Dance, and Director of the University Core. Kathleen’s research areas focused on the performance of Spanish Golden Age drama in translation. Her post-doctoral research assistantship with Jonathan Thacker was a virtual environment geared for theatre practitioners and educators to spark new performances of Spanish drama in English translation, Out of the Wings (www.outofthewings.org). Publications include an analysis of her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company: Staging the Spanish Golden Age: Translation and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2018) and a new translation of The Force of Habit (La fuerza de la costumbre) by Guillén de Castro (Liverpool University Press, ed. Machit, 2019). Latterly she and Suzanne Ostersmith published a textbook, Interdisciplinary Arts: Integrating Dance, Theatre, and Visual Arts (Human Kinetics, 2022).