Theatrical censorship during Argentina's last dictatorship

Historians and survivors alike describe the first years of the 1976–83 military dictatorship as its harshest. State-sponsored terrorism was institutionalized in what the military triumvirate termed a ‘Process of National Reorganization’ that sought to impose ‘national values’ in tandem with ‘national security’ through a ‘Dirty War’ on ‘subversion’ (all terms employed by the regime and its supporters). Of the 8,960 disappearances officially documented by the 1983–4 National Commission on Disappeared Persons (and we should recall that popular statistics place the actual number of desaparecidos at 30,000 men, women and children), 1.3 per cent were classified as ‘actors, artists, etc.’. Repressive measures influencing cultural practices were intensified and, in some cases, rendered official, resulting in the prohibition by decree of certain artistic products, including plays. Additionally, theatre artists were effectively forced into internal and, for many, external exile, if not disappearance and death, through unofficial blacklists that prohibited them from being employed by state-supported theatres and working in the more lucrative fields of television, film and radio.Footnote ⁶ State-run theatres avoided national playwrights and instead staged ‘classics’ under heavy supervision. Buenos Aires's opera house, the Colón Theatre, was managed by an Air Force commodore, while commercial houses focused on producing revues and ‘safe’ musicals imported from Broadway.

Argentina's independent – that is, non-commercial, non-state-supported – theatre practitioners and audiences were subjected to myriad acts of aggression: unannounced inspections leading to one- to two-day closures, performances interrupted by audience plants, smoke bombs forcing spectators and performers out of theatres, late-night bombings and fires damaging and even destroying theatres, individual lives threatened in anonymous telephone calls and unsigned letters, and in some cases disappearance. Yet at times plays and performers in smaller theatres and cabaret spaces were left alone, suggesting that the military junta preferred to ignore the productions rather than draw unwanted attention through a publicized closure.Footnote ⁷

Such seemingly random applications of censorship were in fact part of the regime's concerted project to keep the lines between acceptable and unacceptable performance purposely blurred in a mix of explicit and implicit censorship.Footnote ⁸ Avellaneda notes that, after the dictatorship fell in 1983, ‘it became evident that there had been a real plan of ideological cleansing prepared by civil and military intelligence services, based in the Ministry of Education and Culture, initiated in 1976 and known as Operación Claridad’.Footnote ⁹ The ominously named Operation Clarity was in charge of producing ‘unofficial’ blacklists of artists, intellectuals, writers and professors, classifying them according to their relative dangerousness, banning their works, and in many cases making them ‘disappear’. These implicit operations coincided with one of censorship's more insidious objectives, as Chilean theorist Roberto Hozven notes: ‘Censura, by not making literally specific what the prohibition covers, extends itself figuratively to the totality of our social actions and interpellates us . . . as the always possible receivers and protagonists of some guilty action.’Footnote ¹⁰ The internalization of the censoring process manifested itself in what has been termed a self-censored discourse. Hozven identifies self-censorship – autocensura – as the act whereby the artist provides a self-alienated solution to potential censorship: by ‘reproducing [censura] within oneself in order to attempt to prevent consciously, through the active practice of fear, the eruption of any “slip” provoked by [one's] unconscious rebellion’.Footnote ¹¹ Hozven is one of several Chilean critics who attempted to document the effects of external censorship and internal self-censorship on the theatre produced during their own country's 1973–90 military regime. This critical manoeuvre distinguished two types of self-censorship: (1) an after-the-fact self-censoring that withdraws a previously made unacceptable statement, and (2) a precautionary self-censoring that endeavours, as Hozven states, ‘to put the band aid on before the wound shows up’ as a means of predicting and thus averting any would-be offence.Footnote ¹² Both self-censoring acts paralyse and alienate their subject, or, as one Argentine writer put it during those early years, ‘We each have a broken pencil and an enormous eraser already encrusted in our brains.’Footnote ¹³ Here María Elena Walsh refers to a process of internalized self-policing that paralyses the artist's creative process and destroys the creative act's tools. Self-censorship apparently works at both the conscious and unconscious levels, thus it becomes nearly impossible to determine the scope of its influence on the creative process.Footnote ¹⁴

Censura and autocensura would appear, then, to function in tandem as sutura:Footnote ¹⁵ both of them serve to suture artistic expression closed, retrospectively and prospectively. If self-censorship is regarded as complicitly intertwined with censorship, it becomes understandable why so many artists have rejected the idea of self-silencing or self-editing as a conditioning factor in their creative efforts. Indeed, artists often respond in ways echoing the words of writer Héctor Lastra: ‘I have always insisted that autocensura does not exist. What exists is censura. To speak of autocensura is a way of being reactionary, because you're attacking the individual.’Footnote ¹⁶ As I have argued elsewhere,Footnote ¹⁷ despite valid concerns about blaming the victim as accomplice, the relationship between censorship and self-censorship is not so neatly packaged, nor do the two categories help us to understand fully the production and success of so many Argentinian plays staged during the 1976–83 dictatorship.

How else might we understand positive cultural production under repression? Again, I turn to Chilean critics like Roberto Hozven, Juan Carlos Lértora and Rodrigo Cánovas, who have proposed a third category: contracensura, or counter-censorship. According to Cánovas, counter-censorship actively attempts ‘to disarticulate the repressive discursive system in order to generate a discourse [that would be] censored by that very system’.Footnote ¹⁸ While I question whether counter-censorship actually manages to ‘disarticulate the repressive discursive system’, given the limitations of operating within that very same discursive system,Footnote ¹⁹ I find the term useful for understanding theatrical practices that appear to defy censura and/or autocensura. Counter-censorship can be seen to function as a constructive alternative to the double-bind of external censorship and internal self-censorship, primarily, in the Argentine case, through the use of such rhetorical figures as metaphor, allegory and analogy, as well as the reappropriation of cultural codes already circulating in its theatre. Even under dictatorship, practitioners and spectators, with surprising frequency and success, managed to cut through the repressive sutures of censura and autocensura.

Censura's complexities: two examples from 1977

A brief examination of two productions from 1977 will suffice to demonstrate how complex the relations were between censorship, self-censorship and counter-censorship. These two purportedly clear-cut examples – one censored, the other uncensored – actually blur any boundaries separating the three proposed categories of censorship, self-censorship and counter-censorship, as well as complicate the relation of explicit to implicit censorship, the censor to the censored.

In 1977 Eduardo Pavlovsky's play Telarañas (Spiderwebs/Cobwebs) tested the limits of official censorship and was awarded the dubious distinction of being the first dictatorship-era play prohibited by official written decree.Footnote ²⁰Telarañas centres on the nuclear family unit in its portrayal of a child's attempted indoctrination at the hands of his parents, whose increasingly disturbing techniques of instruction culminate in filicide. Pavlovsky (a practising psychiatrist as well as actor and playwright) had completed writing the script before the military coup, and rehearsals with director Alberto Ure began shortly thereafter in the playwright's home.Footnote ²¹ The play's most controversial scene involved an ‘invasion’ by two paramilitary agents who break into the home and torture the family, only to find themselves outpaced by the father (played by Pavlovsky himself), who urges them on to increasingly violent torturing of his own son. In the production, the two torturers were ‘disguised’ as gasistas (gas-fitters) entering under the pretence of inspecting a gas leak.

Nevertheless, even after such ostensibly self- or counter-censorial precautions, the production team postponed the premiere of Telarañas until the following November, in 1977, because of continued concerns about potential repercussions. The play finally opened during the Payró Theatre's midday experimental theatre series. Critics were invited to the low-profile premiere, and at least one review was published in a Buenos Aires newspaper.Footnote ²² The production had only two performances before director and playwright were called to appear before the municipal secretary of culture. When Pavlovsky chose to ignore the secretary's request that the play be voluntarily withdrawn,Footnote ²³ it was prohibited by official written decree (5695 of the Municipality of Buenos Aires) for its violation of junta-upheld family values but not for any overt politics.Footnote ²⁴ The decree's wording – extraordinarily similar to that of the published reviewFootnote ²⁵ – made no reference to any perceived political content, which the production had taken great pains to withhold (and which should serve to remind us that the dictatorship's project was much broader than mere political restructuring). In a further irony of real-world reference, Pavlovsky's exile two months later would be cued by his secretary when she announced that two gasistas were there to ‘check the meter’. The playwright correctly interpreted their appearance as an intended abduction, escaped out of the window, leaving his psychotherapy patients in mid-session, and subsequently fled the country.Footnote ²⁶ It would be 1980 before he returned.

Telarañas was one of many plays of the early dictatorship that employed family violence as a stand-in for the larger repression, the family as microcosmic substitute for the national macrocosm. Another play, and my second example, was Roberto Mario Cossa's La nona (The Granny),Footnote ²⁷ which premiered only a few months before Telarañas. Under Carlos Gorostiza's direction, the production was declared the comedy hit of the 1977 theatre season and would run for one and a half years before being made into an equally successful film. The humour of La nona was bitterly dark, determined as its author would say seven years later ‘by the climate of terror in which the country was living’Footnote ²⁸: the eponymous protagonist is a centenarian Italian immigrant whose insatiable hunger annihilates her entire family in what is easily interpreted as a national middle-class genocide. Cossa transformed the grotesco criollo model, a local theatrical fixture since the 1920s, into a neogrotesco play that shared the earlier genre's basic plot of a middle-class family's decline and resulting anguish. Cossa's neo-grotesque exposed Nona's true authoritarian nature, and its indictment of patriarchal repression became even more explicit through the stroke of humorous yet bitingly critical casting of a male actor in the lead. Nona is portrayed as a blind, self-obsessed destructive force and certainly a metaphor for the repressive military regime, with her family standing in for the classes that initially accommodated the coup only to find themselves devoured by it. The play concludes with Nona still eating, her daughter, grandsons and great-granddaughter all dead. Set within the menacing national context of the military dictatorship, Cossa's play became a stinging critique of the Argentine middle class's extreme individualism and its complicity with the totalitarian regime.

What made La nona the comedy hit of the very season in which Telarañas was banned? Does it suffice to attribute the ‘success’ of La nona to counter-censorial mastery and the ‘failure’ of Telarañas to a production team's refusal or inability to accommodate (self-)censorial demands? Applying the term censura – even by explicit official decree – does not begin to shed light on the complex workings of these two productions. Ure's confrontational directing style forced the family politics of Telarañas to a visceral extreme, and the actors’ performances pushed the limits of physical, emotional and verbal savagery. The production apparently exploded family dynamics with a violence that, in the memory of one spectator writing after the country's return to democracy, was so ‘magnificently brutal, stupendously obscene . . . that not a puppet was left unbeheaded . . . it was a healthy kick to the pit of the spectator's stomach’.Footnote ²⁹ And while La nona also indicted its predominantly middle-class audience, it dispensed a continuous dosage of humour by way of an already established local theatrical tradition and a protagonist whose metaphorical allusion was largely left open to audience interpretation. Was the difference in the two productions’ relative success a question of counter-censorial expertise? Of degrees of violent self-representation? Of the subversive power of humour? Of overt or covert audience implication? Of the playwright's earlier political activities? In the 1973 elections Pavlovsky had run for Congress on the left-wing Socialist Workers’ Party ballot, while Cossa has never publicly claimed any party affiliation. All would appear to be factors contributing to the productions’ respective achievements.

Ultimately, how is counter-censorial success measured? While La nona generally fits the counter-censorship paradigm, one might argue that the ‘failure’ of Telarañas – through refused self-censorship, decreed censorship, obvious collusion in the media and Pavlovsky's later prominence – actually succeeded in drawing needed critical and cultural attention to the various mechanisms of censura. From a historiographic perspective, it might be argued that the notoriety of Telarañas in fact achieved counter-censorship's objective of generating a would-be censored discourse. Evident in even such a brief overview is that counter-censorship eludes easy compartmentalization; it does not provide a neat alternative to the censorship/self-censorship paradigm. All three remain inextricably intertwined.

Even though explicit censura appeared to recede during the dictatorship's final years, theatre artists still found themselves negotiating the intricacies of what could and could not be staged. The Teatro Abierto (as in ‘Open theatre . . . for a closed country’) festival of 1981 saw its performance space mysteriously burned to the ground only to move to another, larger theatre that better accommodated the more than 25,000 spectators who flocked to its performances. In that initial season, only one of the twenty one-act plays made allusive reference to the desaparecidos. It would be the following year, after the Malvinas/Falklands debacle (as journalist Andrew Graham-Yooll has called it, ‘that monumental . . . blunder’)Footnote ³⁰, that the festival included one of the first explicit representations of the disappeared – in Carlos Somigliana's 1982 Oficial primero (Official Number One),Footnote ³¹ where the stage ended up physically buried in bodies. In the years that followed, bodies abounded on local stages as the country came to terms with its recent history.

Censura under democracy

Despite the explosion in artistic expression that took place in the early years of redemocratization, with a multiplicity of theatrical events occurring seemingly everywhere and anywhere, repression did not disappear from the national cultural scene, thus providing further evidence that, as Avellaneda claims, ‘cultural and ideological censorship in Argentina [has] not [been] exclusively the domain of military dictatorships’.Footnote ³² During the transition to democracy there was ongoing explicit and implicit censorship. When author Griselda Gambaro came back from exile in 1980 (having left the country in 1977 after receiving death threats and seeing one of her novels officially banned), she immediately returned to playwriting, something she said she could not do while in Spain far from her Argentine audience.Footnote ³³ She first wrote Real envido (Royal Gambit), a text that would not be staged until the eve of the country's 1983 return to democracy.Footnote ³⁴Real envido, a parodic revision of multiple classic fairy tales, inverts the traditional values of chivalry to reveal the underpinnings of patriarchal despotism. In February 1983, the original production at the Odeón Theatre was closed down for one day when, according to director Juan Cosín, the censor saw, in a vignette involving four puppets, an allusion to the military triumvirate and soon-to-be-elected presidential candidate Raúl Alfonsín. In September the year before, another Gambaro play, La malasangre (Bitter/Bad Blood),Footnote ³⁵ was the target of at least one mid-performance attack by armed ultra-nationalists objecting to perceived criticisms of a nineteenth-century Argentinian dictator in a play whose own author claimed made ‘a direct reference to the dictatorship’.Footnote ³⁶Censura did not disappear once the formerly ‘closed’ country reopened in the 1980s and early 1990s.

And the internalized after-effects of autocensura were also regarded as still present. While playwrights like Gambaro were confronting their country's past, there arose another generation of theatre artists avowedly uninterested in bearing witness to recent repression. While the more realistic theatrical productions insisted on incorporating the disappeared into the historical pantheon through the most literal of embodied performances, many experimental artists of the 1990s avoided overt theatrical engagement with their country's recent history. Some critics – still assuming the conflation of sociopolitical activism and realist aesthetics popular in late 1960s–early 1970s Argentina – have gone so far as to attribute the so-called ‘postmodern’ aesthetic of these younger artists to an internalization of censorship so complete that artistic self-censorship is misapprehended as an aesthetic choice.Footnote ³⁷ Yet, I ask once again, is such an explanation sufficient? Does not such easy dismissal exclude the possibility of socially and politically engaged theatrical experimentation, of which there are indeed examples? Must a postmodern aesthetic be assumed apolitical? Critics were not the only ones to deride such experiments: when the post-dictatorship ‘underground’ theatre movement sprang up (never codified by the artists as a movement per se), older, more engagé theatre artists complained of the deaths of the play, the playwright and the message – suggesting a generational conflict that rehearsed once more simplistic oppositional cultural politics. However, and returning to my earlier example of the theatrical representation of disappeared human bodies, what had made dramatic sense in early redemocratized Argentina – living actors embodying the disappeared – approached caricature ten years into democracy. Indeed, rather than reflecting the critical accusations of internalized self-censorship, some recent experiments seemed to offer other avenues than embodiment for the theatrical representation of disappearance. One such instance was a late 1990s production which performance troupe La Pista 4 took to experimental music and theatre festivals, poetry encounters, art fairs and theatres: a staged (but never broadcast) radio play of Néstor Perlongher's poem Cadáveres (Cadavers/Corpses) that disrupted virtually all identification of disappearance with the onstage body.Footnote ³⁸ Critics such as Jorge Dubatti have defended these more recent artistic trends as ‘micropoetics’ or ‘microaesthetics’ that accommodate a plurality of aesthetic, social and political positions. Once again, the easily invoked categories of censorship and self-censorship do not seem to tell the entire story, nor do they accurately account for the multiple aesthetic trends operating in post-dictatorship Argentinian theatre.

The current critical stakes of censura

The final portion of this article examines two plays that, while written and – in one case – staged before the last dictatorship, only recently received full productions inside Argentina. In both cases, the reasons most frequently offered for non-production have been based on censorship or self-censorship, and each play is still cited by scholars as exemplary of a certain kind of specifically ‘Argentinian’ censura. Nevertheless, in neither case does such critical categorization adequately account for the contemporary productions and their reception; furthermore, I argue that such categorization leads us to the role that we scholars – inside and outside Argentina – have played in the application of censura to Argentinian theatrical production.

In 2004, Buenos Aires audiences were able to see not one but two productions of Eva Perón, a ‘tragic farce’ that had supposedly never before been staged in Argentina after the uproar surrounding its 1970 premiere at Paris's Théâtre de l'Épée de Bois.Footnote ³⁹ Copi, the play's author, was the nom d'artiste of Raúl Damonte Botana, Argentine-born, Uruguayan-bred, and, from 1962 until his death in 1987, a French resident best known for his cartoons, novels and outrageous cabaret performances.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Copi's version of the Argentinian icon's life, Evita does not die but rather abandons the country, leaving behind her jewels, her mother and her husband, Juan, to construct the Santa Evita myth out of the corpse of her murdered nurse. As a further slap in the face for mythologizers of Evita, in the Paris production director and Argentine expatriate Alfredo (Rodríguez) Arias cast Argentine male actor Facundo Bo to play Eva in a performance of high camp in keeping with many Copi productions. Violent response matched the production's success: at least one performance was interrupted by masked and armed men setting fire to the set and damaging the theatre. The play completed its run under police protection.Footnote ⁴¹ Copi would not be allowed back into Argentina until 1984 and the country's return to democracy. It was only after the author's death, in 1987, that his plays began to be staged in Buenos Aires, and only in the year 2000 was Eva Perón finally published there in Spanish translation.Footnote ⁴²

It has often been stated that Copi's play could never be staged in Argentina. The reason typically given is that loyal Peronists would not accept either the play's revisionist historical sacrilege or its expletive-wielding Evita-transvestite. Both justifications ignore performance history and thus point toward possible historiographic prejudices regarding the critical acknowledgement of actual practice. For example, in the year 2000 the National University in Tandil, located in the province of Buenos Aires 360 kilometres outside the national capital, included Eva Perón in its academic season.Footnote ⁴³ Was the university production's omission from most accounts of the play's history an act of megalopolitan egotism on the part of Buenos Aires-based critics, frequently accused by other Argentinian scholars of ignoring or at best tokenizing theatre taking place outside the capital? Ever since the international success of the 1970s Rice–Lloyd Webber rock opera, drag Evitas have been lipsynching ‘No llores por mí, Argentina’ on local stages, thus clearly demonstrating the presence and acceptance, at least in certain performance circles, of cross-dressed Evitas. Is this lack of acknowledgement yet another case of scholarly oversight? Such counter-examples notwithstanding, the general impression of Copi's play as unstageable in Argentina has prevailed until very recently. Thus, having two independent versions of Eva Perón participate in the same 2004 Buenos Aires alternative theatre festival, Tintas Frescas (Fresh Tints), drew much critical attention. One production came from Chile by way of Europe, while the other was locally produced: in 2001 Facundo Bo's nephew and France-based theatre artist Marcial Di Fonzo Bo (with his company Théâtre des Lucioles) created the self-proclaimed ‘first’ Spanish-language production, which toured Venezuela, Mexico, Spain and France before arriving in Buenos Aires. The ‘functional’ and ‘minimalist’ set was created with moveable semi-tranparent scrims that echoed Copi's own cartoon boxes.Footnote ⁴⁴ All the roles were played by men, with Di Fonzo Bo – an actor perhaps best known for his work with Swiss German director Matthias LanghoffFootnote ⁴⁵ – in the lead.

The Buenos Aires production, in contrast, was distinctly local: it was directed by Buenos Aires actor/director Gabriel Correa,Footnote ⁴⁶ and the role of Eva was played by the actress Alejandra Flechner, longtime ‘underground’ performance regular and former member of Las Gambas al Ajillo, one of early redemocratization's most outrageous performance troupes.Footnote ⁴⁷ Di Fonzo Bo's production was critically praised for maintaining the exuberant, ostensibly ‘transgressive’ spirit of Copi's text in a staging described as bearing traces of vaudeville, burlesque and grotesque, whereas Correa was roundly chastised by most of the local press for straitjacketing his leading actress in a staging that veered too closely to, in the critics’ word, naturalism. Reviewer Rómulo Berruti went so far as to imply that self-censorship had determined the director's choices:

Was this an act of autocensura on the part of the director, or an act of censura on the part of a reviewer, apparently uninterested in considering a less camp and more ‘feminized’ Eva, as another reviewer contended was the motive behind Correa's choice in casting Flechner?Footnote ⁴⁹ The consideration of censorship leads to larger critical questions: was it easier for many local critics to accept Di Fonzo Bo's production because it was perceived as aesthetically closer to the original Paris production? What role did the censura ‘myth’ surrounding the 1970 production play in the 2004 Buenos Aires critical response to Copi's Eva Perón? The majority of local reviewers appeared to seek an experience ‘truer’ to the scandalous 1970 premiere, thereby confirming the play's censored status; in the process, though, they rejected a new, possibly feminist version that radically departed from the original production. Perhaps unfairly, they compared two productions whose local critical reception had apparently been overdetermined from the start by the twinned shadows of censura and autocensura.

My final case extends this consideration of critical complicity in the operations of censura to the international scholar: Griselda Gambaro's Información para extranjeros (Information for Foreigners), written between 1971 and 1973, has been widely translated and anthologized, is often praised for its assumed prescience in anticipating the dictatorship's horrors, is exceptionally in-your-face when compared to Gambaro's other ‘abstract allegorical’ plays (as Ana Elena Puga has termed them), and is frequently described as – once again – ‘unstageable’ in Gambaro's native Argentina (even though the play was published there in 1987).Footnote ⁵⁰ The reasons given are often vague and typically rehearse English translator Marguerite Feitlowitz's version:

Feitlowitz's quote, from the early 1990s, has led to the continued assumption that Gambaro still will not release the rights to her play for Argentinian production. Such an assumption was proven false in 2007, when theatre troupe Baobabs staged a ‘free adaptation’ in the Buenos Aires suburb of Bernal, a neighbourhood adjoining Gambaro's own suburban home town of Don Bosco. The Pampero Cultural Center, a long-abandoned state-gas building taken over and converted in 2004 into a community-run centre, was further converted, for this production, into a clandestine detention centre not unlike those that proliferated during the last dictatorship. The price of entry was a book, food or another donation most likely destined for the centre or the neighbourhood's residents. While waiting outside to go in, according to one blogger, spectators (and neighbours) could hear ‘desperate cries, laments, and someone cooing to a baby’. Inside, and in keeping with the 1970s text that combined original writing, testimony and newspaper clippings, a guide led the twelve spectator–tourists through different rooms where different atrocities were represented, lit only by the guide's flashlight. As the tour ended, the actor–guide read a recent news item, and a file folder containing photos and articles about ongoing human rights violations was passed around. The audience stayed on to share mate-tea with the actors, as together they discussed the production and such recent events as the ‘accidental’ death of a local human rights leader, the 2006 disappearance of a retired bricklayer kidnapped before his last day as key witness against those who had abducted him previously during the dictatorship, the brutal enforcement of an anti-terrorist law, and kidnappings and threats made to leaders of various workers’ movements. Before leaving, spectators could sign a visitor's book, in which they were also encouraged to make suggestions and inscribe denunciations.Footnote ⁵²

The Baobabs production clearly attempted to make Gambaro's play a shared actor–spectator experience of awareness of ongoing repression: as one flyer asked, ‘¿Hasta cuándo seremos extranjeros en el país en que vivimos?’ (‘How long will we be foreigners/strangers in the country where we live?’). The production's very local focus on activist community building flew in the face of some interpretations of Información para extranjeros as intended, literally, to be information for foreigners – that is, for non-Argentines unaware of what was going on in early 1970s Argentina. Instead, the 2007 production fell easily within the context of current Argentine theatre and a grass-roots ‘horizontalist’ restructuring of theatrical production that has paralleled changes in national sociopolitical movements since the country's economic crisis began in late 2000. The Baobabs production resonates with two early twenty-first-century Argentinian theatrical phenomena: the explosion in community-based theatre and the ongoing Teatroxlaidentidad (Theatre for Identity) festival, organized by the Grandmothers and the Children of the Disappeared.Footnote ⁵³ Both phenomena build upon a concept of theatre as community, and both seek to reclaim and recover a spectrum of identities: from the biological identities of disappeared mothers’ children born in captivity and adopted by dictatorship sympathizers, to the cultural identities of neighbourhoods facing their own disappearance through urbanization, gentrification and unemployment. Thus, contrary to its widely proclaimed exceptionality, Información para extranjeros, as staged by Baobabs, becomes one more example of what Marta Mariasole Raimondi has noted proliferating in today's Argentina, theatres that ‘produce collective spaces to recover the microsocial, by favouring the construction of collective identities and participating in this manner in new forms of “social resistance”’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Within the context of contemporary Argentinian performance practices, Información para extranjeros seems to be right at home.

What are the critical stakes in thinking of Información para extranjeros as a censored or self-censored play? International scholars have narrated Gambaro's story in a way not dissimilar to their Buenos Aires critical counterparts in their reviews of the two Copi productions: much as subsequent stagings of Eva Perón must conform to its initial production, Información para extranjeros is expected to stand as an indictment of early 1970s authoritarian Argentina rather than, as in the Baobabs production, a contemporary instrument for dissecting and debating ongoing repression. As a consequence, both texts are constrained – censored – by the very scholars who would condemn such censorship. Once again, in our scholarly haste to classify a text as ‘censored’ or ‘self-censored’ we may overlook important local theatrical responses such as the ones just described.

Anglo-Argentine political journalist Andrew Graham-Yooll has written that ‘Argentina's readings have been faddish, whether nationalist or foreign, at all times’.Footnote ⁵⁵ How has scholarly faddishness contributed to the historiography of Argentinian theatrical production and censorship? What stereotypes of Argentinian theatrical production are perpetuated in the facile and too-frequent blanket application of censura? Ultimately, the simplistic overapplication of the term as an umbrella obscures more than it illuminates. The dangers of too easily applying censura constitute a metacritical sutura that stitches shut openings for critical inquiry, keeping scholars from seeking other factors that determine how censorship works or does not work and thus leading to critical festering and inaccuracy. Through the various examples drawn from Argentinian theatrical practices, I have sought here to expose ‘censorship’ as a problematic category when applied equally at all times, when, as noted earlier, naming constitutes proclaiming and effectively precludes analysis. The history of culture is indeed the history of censorship, and that is all the more reason why scholars should approach the subject with great historiographic and metacritical care. We would be remiss to think that by naming and proclaiming censorship we have concluded our work.