the mind of his character, and Buero Vallejo lets the audience see this action directly.

In the Burning Darkness

In the Burning Darkness constitutes an inquiry into the mystery of life, an inquiry characteristic of Buero Vallejo’s entire theater. The light, the more authentic reality for which Ignacio, the blind student, yearns, is symbolized by the distant stars. That the light for which he longs is metaphysical becomes obvious, for he states that, even if he could see the stars, he would die because he cannot reach them. The other students of the school, where an atmosphere of superficial optimism and gaiety prevails, refuse to confront the tragedy of their limitations. They refuse to acknowledge that they are blind, feigning a normality that does not exist and even referring to those who see as “sighted.” The institution or school is a world of darkness and shadows that has been compared to Plato’s cave. Isolated in this world of darkness, the students are ignorant of the light that shines outside.

Ignacio, however, soon turns the students’ tranquil blindness into painful awareness as he points out the fiction on which their lives are based. For him, the meaning of existence is to be found only through searching for the truth, despite the suffering that this imposes. For him, there is another world, a transcendent reality to which most men are spiritually blind, a world symbolized by the distant stars for which he longs.

In the end, Ignacio succeeds in making his opponent, the leader of the students, understand his anguish. This leader, Carlos, has considered Ignacio’s attitude harmful to the morale of the school and has sought to discredit him. In a pivotal scene, Buero Vallejo makes the spectators experience the same anguish that Ignacio feels by means of an “immersion” effect—a slow blackout of the stage and houselights as the protagonist describes how those who can see, close their eyes to imagine the horror of blindness. In the end, Ignacio is murdered by Carlos. His dreams, however, live on in his murderer, who repeats the dead man’s words about the distant stars as the curtain falls.

On a metaphysical level, the institution represents this world, and the students, human beings in general, who are spiritually blind. Ignacio’s yearning to see even though he feels it is impossible, evinces the passion for the absolute that typifies the writings of the Spanish existentialist philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, who has strongly influenced Buero Vallejo. Ignacio’s desire to transcend his limitations and to penetrate the mysteries of humankind and the universe is characteristic of many of Buero Vallejo’s dreamers. Buero Vallejo’s tragedy depicts the human condition, which he sees as a constant struggle between faith and doubt, with the continuing accompaniment of hope. His anguished protagonists, torn between faith and doubt, as well as the theme of physical and spiritual blindness, place the author clearly in the tradition of Unamuno. Also present in this play are echoes of the Spanish mystics, especially Saint John of the Cross, who wrote of the “dark night of the soul.”

On a political level, the institution for the blind suggests any authoritarian regime that tries to convince its citizens that they are free and happy when they are not. It is a regime that does not hesitate to resort to violence when its authority is challenged. The institution has thus been seen as a symbol of Franco’s Spain with its violence, injustice, and lies. Significantly, Buero Vallejo conceived the idea for the play while in prison.

El tragaluz

El tragaluz is the story of a Madrid family destroyed by the Civil War and forced to take refuge in a sordid basement apartment. The action is narrated by investigators of a future century, whose progress allows them to detect images or holograms of the past that have been mysteriously preserved. The holograms that the investigators project represent not only actions but also thoughts, and the boundaries between the two are blurred as the cameras capture the totality of human experience. At the end of the war, this family had been unable to board the crowded train that was to return them to Madrid, with the exception of the elder son Vicente, who was carrying their scant provisions. Despite his father’s command to get off, he had continued to Madrid; during the following days, his baby sister had died of hunger before the family found shelter in the basement apartment, where they have lived in poverty for nearly thirty years. In order to make life bearable, they invent a fictitious version of these events that absolves Vicente of all responsibility. The dark basement apartment, like the institution of In the Burning Darkness, represents a refuge from the light of reality—the light that enters the narrow window projecting shadows on the opposite wall that is visible to the spectators.

The old father, traumatized by the disloyalty of his son, constantly relives the past, insisting that the basement window is the window of a train. Furthermore, he spends his time cutting out human figures from old postcards and watching the anonymous people who pass the window—just as his two sons did years ago when they pretended that they were in a theater. Contemplating these figures, the father asks a persistent question: “Who is that?” For the younger son Mario, a dreamer like Ignacio of In the Burning Darkness, this apparently incoherent question suggests the enigma of humankind’s identity—a concern common to both Søren Kierkegaard and Unamuno. Indeed, the father has been compared to the old madman of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (pr., pb. 1958), who is absorbed by this same enigma. Like Ignacio, Mario longs to transcend the limits of human understanding, to penetrate the ultimate mysteries of the universe.

Mario, the idealistic dreamer, chooses to remain in the basement, disdaining material success in a world in which the only way to get ahead is by deceit, precisely the means used by Vicente, who left home years ago to achieve economic prosperity and who now holds an important position. Mario has deliberately chosen poverty and obscurity. The opposition between the two brothers is heightened by Mario’s concern for Vicente’s secretary, Encarna, a poor country girl exploited by Vicente, who has forced her to become his mistress. For Mario, she represents the latest in a series of victims that began with his baby sister.

The opposition between the two brothers—which is not unlike that between Ignacio and Carlos of the preceding play—culminates in the “trial” scene, in which Mario accuses Vicente not only of responsibility for the death of their sister and the madness of the father but, even more important, of having victimized others ever since. Vicente “took the train” to success years ago and has never gotten off. Alone with his father, Vicente confesses his guilt. Believing, however, that change is impractical or impossible, he prepares to leave, to return to the “train that never stops.” The father, reliving the past, believes that Vicente is once again about to board the real train that took him away years ago. He then stabs his son in a burst of madness—or of sanity—as the sound of the locomotive (heard whenever the characters look out the window) becomes deafening. Ambiguous and mysterious, the father is both a pitiable madman and an all-knowing judge and God figure.

El tragaluz represents a judgment on an entire generation. The investigators make clear the historical dimension of the drama when they state that “the world was full of injustice, war, and fear.” Men of action (such as Vicente) “forgot to contemplate” or dream and “those who contemplated” (such as Mario) were “incapable of action.” The investigators make clear that they themselves have overcome these errors. Through them, Buero Vallejo thus expresses his hope for a time when people will have learned the lessons of history, when they will have created the more just and humane society that Mario and Vicente’s generation failed to realize.

Buero Vallejo’s narrators are far from being a mere Brechtian device. Their purpose is to move the spectators, to bring them to identify with the family within the frame, to understand rationally but, even more important, to feel that they themselves, like the family depicted, are being observed and judged by a sort of future conscience that is really operating in the present. Curiously enough, the spectators themselves are observed by the very characters that they are observing and on which they are passing judgment. Because the basement window is located on the invisible wall between actors and spectators, the latter are the subjects of the former’s questions about the identity of the figures who pass by from the outside world. The spectators are thus led to examine their own conduct as they themselves become subjects of an investigation.

The tragedy underscores the solidarity that people must come to feel with both past and present generations. The guilt of Vicente and of Mario is the spectators’ guilt. To the query, “Who is that?”—whether it is the father’s question as he refers to figures who pass by the window or the investigators’ questions as they observe the subjects of their experiments—the answer is, in a certain sense, that given by one of the investigators as she addresses the spectators: “That one is you, and you, and you. I am you, and you are me.” The collective tragedy of Spain, El tragaluz is, no less, the individual tragedy of man as an ontological enigma. The play begins as a portrayal of Spanish society of the Franco era and develops into an anguished inquiry into the human condition.

The Sleep of Reason

The Sleep of Reason takes place in the disastrous period following the War of Independence against the French. The years of civil discord under Ferdinand VII, with the restoration of absolutism and the accompanying terror, torture, and executions, resemble in many respects the period immediately following the Civil War of 1936-1939.

In declining health and stone-deaf for some three decades, an aged Goya lives half-hidden in his villa, in constant fear of persecution. The spectators are made to share the deafness that adds to the painter’s sense of isolation and estrangement; whenever Goya is onstage, the other characters move their lips without articulating any sound at all, using only sign language or pantomime. Just as Buero Vallejo blinds the spectators for a brief period in In the Burning Darkness, he makes them deaf with Goya. At the same time, Buero Vallejo permits the spectators to perceive the obsessions and hallucinations of the artist, who has been driven to near madness by Ferdinand and whom the dramatist describes as living his hours of deepest darkness. Meows, owl hoots, the whirling of bat wings, and voices—often of the figures from the enigmatic and phantasmagoric “Black Paintings” that cover the walls of his villa—are revealed through sound effects. To these effects are added Goya’s own disembodied voice that from time to time announces the captions of various of his engravings appropriate to the situation. Moreover, the spectators perceive, as does Goya himself, his own heartbeats, dull thuds that vary in intensity to reflect the terror that he experiences.

Buero Vallejo leads the spectators to identify with Goya, not only through having them share the painter’s deafness and “hear” his thoughts, but also by having them “see” the world through his own eyes. To the vocalization of Goya’s inner world, Buero Vallejo adds its visualization; slides of the “Black Paintings” are projected at opportune moments throughout the tragedy. All of these multimedia devices serve to lead the spectators into the very mind of the tormented protagonist.

“The sleep of reason produces monsters,” states the inscription to Goya’s “Caprice 34.” Goya himself explained at the bottom of his engraving: “Fantasy without reason produces monstrosities; but together they beget true art and may give rise to wondrous things.” The “Black Paintings” may thus be considered the product of a reasoned fantasy. Goya’s near, but not total, madness becomes a means of apprehending reality more rigorously than it can be understood through normality. Goya, like the father in El tragaluz, has profoundly lucid intuitions to which the other characters cannot rise.

In his enigmatic “Black Paintings,” Goya attempts to express the truth about the Spain of his time, symbolizing the irrational and absurd evil around him as monsters—half human, half animal. In “The Witches’ Sabbath,” for example, a mob of bestial witches and warlocks listens, in darkness, to the pronouncements of a cassocked ram, Satan. In the drama, when Buero Vallejo has Goya explain to one of his few remaining friends the meaning of his works, the painter declares that the king is a monster and his advisers, jackals. His revenge is to paint them as he sees them. Buero Vallejo thus gives to many of these paintings—products of the black mist swirling in Goya’s mind—a historical and political interpretation. He believes that they represent the artist’s despair over both his own personal destiny and that of Spain. The slender hope to which the artist clings is likewise seen, Buero Vallejo believes, in the painting that depicts a mythical winged woman who carries a terrified man (perhaps the artist himself) away to the mountain, far from the fratricidal rage and war on earth. When Goya is finally forced into exile, these paintings left on the walls of his villa represent his inner victory.

Shortly before his departure, Goya is beaten and humiliated by soldiers sent by the king. Their visit is prefigured by a nightmare of the artist in which the stage is filled with monsters from his imagination—masked figures with bat wings, a cat’s head, pig faces, and so on—who dance grotesquely around him and attack him. This absurd dance is accompanied by nonsensical cries taken from the titles of his etchings. Using psychedelic lighting and sound effects, Buero Vallejo re-creates, in this scene, the famous “Caprice” whose inscription he uses as the play’s title, letting the spectators enter Goya’s tormented mind. The tragedy ends with a question as the painter abandons his villa. While a deafening din of voices repeats the title of another of his “Caprices,” “If the dawn comes, we will go!”—a title indicative of his hope for the light that will drive off the demons—the lights go down, leaving only the gigantic painting, “The Witches’ Sabbath,” glowing in the darkness. Among Buero Vallejo’s tragedies, The Sleep of Reason has won for him the greatest international acclaim.

The Foundation

In The Sleep of Reason, Goya’s near madness results in profoundly lucid intuitions and thus represents a new access to reality. In The Foundation, however, the protagonist’s madness represents an escape from a reality too painful to face. In this tragedy, the spectators see much of the action through the eyes of a youth who suffers from a type of schizophrenic delusion. Because the spectators identify with him, they, too, become victims of a delusion; when they share, also, in his return to lucidity, their madness, like that of the protagonist, results in a clearer understanding of their own situation.

At the beginning of The Foundation, the action appears to take place in an elegant center for research: There is a comfortable room with a view of a sparkling landscape with majestic mountains, green forests, and a silver lake. At the end, the spectators find themselves in a prison cell and learn that the five major characters are not eminent writers and scientists who have received grants from a “Foundation,” as they were led to believe, but prisoners condemned to death for political activities against the established order. This change in the spectators’ perception is the result of the change in that of the protagonist, Tomás, as he gradually overcomes his alienation to perceive the same reality as his cellmates. After revealing, under torture, the name of a comrade, Tomás was incapable of facing his guilt and his sentence. He therefore created an illusionary world without pain, thus rejecting the truth for a lie.

From the beginning of the drama, the spectators see what Tomás sees—pleasantly furnished quarters and a luminous landscape whose rainbow-hued light floods the room—and hear the same music of Antonio Rossini that he hears on the stereo. Soon, however, they begin to share Tomás’s perplexities at certain words of his cellmates that do not seem to correspond to the situation as he—and the spectators—perceive it; they end up by losing their faith in his and their own vision. Buero Vallejo disconcerts the spectators with the contradiction between Tomás’s world and that of the other prisoners, plunging the spectators into a world of falsehood so that they may slowly emerge into a world of truth along with his protagonist.

Under the guidance of an older prisoner, Asel—one of Buero Vallejo’s author surrogates—Tomás begins his slow journey to reality as he begins to demand explanations for strange occurrences that, he comes to realize, surprise only him and not his companions: the disappearance of the tobacco he thought he had, the failure of the television and the stereo he imagined, and so on. Buero Vallejo’s technique has been called the visualization of an interior monologue.

The “immersion” effect in this tragedy is one of Buero Vallejo’s most elaborate experiments in stagecraft. From the very beginning, the spectators share Tomás’s perceptions, as illusion (the “Foundation”) gives way to reality (the prison). Throughout, the set undergoes constant modifications that reflect Tomás’s discovery of the stark truth. These modifications both maintain the spectators’ curiosity and underscore the dialectical opposition of the two worlds presented: that of Tomás and the spectators and that of the other prisoners. The luxurious armchairs are replaced by bedrolls; wall panels descend to cover the television and stereo; the fine crystal, silver, and linens are replaced by simple metal cups and spoons; and, finally, the landscape beyond the picture window vanishes behind a portion of the wall, signaling the final triumph of reality.

The “Foundation” is an image of the world seen through the eyes of estrangement. In Tomás’s rejection of reality, the spectators see their own refusal to accept the reality of their world. When the set has been dismantled, however, when Tomás’s fictitious world has crumbled and reality has emerged, the spectators see their own world for what it is and always has been.

After leading the spectators to see the world through Tomás’s eyes, Buero Vallejo invites them to reflect critically on its significance. For Buero Vallejo, tragedy always implies both emotive identification and critical reflection. Once again, Asel serves as a guide. Tomás, while realizing that his “Foundation” is not real, asks himself if the rest of the world is any more real—if the prison, their death sentences, and even they themselves are not equally illusory. If so, Tomás asks, why attempt to escape, only to discover a freedom that is equally deceptive? Asel replies that, even though everything may be an illusion, an immense hologram, the fear that this may be so must not paralyze him, and no progress, however limited, must be disdained. “When you have been in prison,” Asel explains, “you end up understanding that, wherever you go, you are in prison.” After understanding this, Asel continues, “you have to go out into the other prison. And when you are in it, go out into another, and from that one to another. The truth awaits you in all of them.” People move from one prison to another, from one illusion to another, but each step may bring them closer to reality. Only through action—represented by the difficult tunnel that Asel wants the prisoners to attempt—can truth and freedom be won.

At the end, Tomás is called from his cell to be led either to the isolation cell from which access to the tunnel may be possible, or more probably, to his execution. His fate remains undetermined. That the deceptive world of the “Foundation” continues, regardless of his destiny, is seen clearly when a guard, dressed as the hotel manager Tomás saw in his delusion, appears to welcome new inmates to the cell—which is once again transformed into the elegantly furnished room seen at the beginning of the drama. Buero Vallejo thus invites the spectators to reenter the “Foundation” together with the new occupants, as the drama begins all over again. The tragedy thus ends ambivalently, with a question that only the spectators can answer.

On the political level, The Foundation is Buero Vallejo’s response to Franco’s Spain or any other country in which people are not free. He underscores the importance of each step, each concession won from an authoritarian regime, no matter how provisional, in the struggle for freedom. The play constitutes an attack on sociopolitical systems that deceive and enslave—against the oppressive “Foundations” of the world and their ideology. Even more important, however, the play is a parable of the human condition, of the search for the truth that will enable people to be spiritually free. The work thus develops certain ideas that have their genesis in In the Burning Darkness. The prisons of which Buero Vallejo speaks are not only those that enslave the body but also those that enslave the soul. The playwright suggests that the obligation of human beings is to struggle for a more lucid understanding of reality, no matter how harsh and dreadful this reality may be, to struggle to overcome their human limitations. Buero Vallejo emphasizes the fact that the journey toward truth and freedom, which is the concern of all authentic tragedy, must be gradual. He suggests metaphorically that his journey must be inward (in Tomás’s case to his own true past) and outward, through a series of concentric prisons from which tunnels must be opened toward an ever-brighter light.

This process has been Buero Vallejo’s own. His trajectory as a playwright represents a search for truth in which, if definitive answers have seldom been found, at least the directions have become clearer. The understanding to which modern human beings aspire is tentative and precarious. It is seldom the sudden and complete illumination that finally comes to Oedipus in a blinding flash of light. This search is evident in his works from the 1980’s and 1990’s, Caimán, Diálogo secreto, Lazarus in the Labyrinth, and The Music Window. As these works demonstrate, the theater of Buero Vallejo is humanistic in its intent to resolve internal and external realities as the individual struggles to find a meaningful place in society. By immersing his characters in psychological conflicts, Buero Vallejo draws the audience into the experience. Hope endures despite suffering, imprisonment, and loss.

Caimán

Caimán utilizes metatheater and the techniques of mise en abîme to define the characters both subjectively and objectively. The play is presented as a story narrated by a mother who refers to her dead daughter. As actress, she enters the scenes as they are retold and reviewed. The drama unfolds as a story that is narrated at the moment it becomes action.

Diálogo secreto

Diálogo secreto (secret dialogue) dramatizes the tormented conscience of a protagonist afraid of confronting reality. A famous art critic, he is plagued by the burden of maintaining his image while living a lie during a lifetime of fraudulent and deceptive practices. Art in its purest form offers him hope for redemption.

Lazarus in the Labyrinth

In Lazarus in the Labyrinth, Lázaro creates a false memory to protect himself from the truth about an attack that killed his girlfriend more than twenty years earlier. Amnesia, visual and auditory illusions, and paranoia torment the protagonist. The dramatic tension results from the subjective versus the objective points of view, spatial confusion, and eventual liberation by searching for the truth.

The Music Window

The drama The Music Window attempted to criticize the negative repercussions from the rapid transformation of Spanish society after the Franco era. The cost of freedom devoid of ethics is personified in the character of Javier. Materialistic and power hungry, Javier’s spiraling descent into vulgarity and depravity represents the moral bankruptcy of post-Franco Spanish society.