A loneliness full of voices. The experience of pain and rhapsodic writing in contemporary monologues: Bilis negra, El empapelado amarillo and Susurro

Abstract

In 21st century theater, in the context of the crisis of modern drama, we find a proliferation of dramatic monologues that explore discursive and scenic possibilities to highlight, among other issues, the contemporary crisis in communication and the fragmentation and hybridity of identity. Experiments with the body alone on stage and with the voice in the first person problematize the self as a public intimacy and as a crossing of multiple voices.         

Bilis negra. Teatro de autopsia (2015), by Convencion Teatro, El empapelado amarillo (de Charlotte Perkins Gilman) (2019-2021), by María Laura Caccamo and Carlos Lipsic, and Susurro (2020), by Estefanía Otaño, are monologues that explore rhapsodic writings –rewriting, phago-cytization, collage, generic hybridization– and experiment the pain of a woman’s self crossed by a plurality of voices. With these procedures of scenic writing, the experience of suffering, singular and non-transferable, becomes common: the borders between what is self and what is foreign are blurred in an inter-subjective affection.

Starting from an approach to the creative processes, the reading of theatrical texts and the analysis of theatrical performances, we will study the political power of the dramaturgy of monologues, insofar as they can be thought of as populated solitudes.