SOURCE: "The Theater of René Marqués," in Symposium, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1964, pp. 35-45.

[In the following essay, Dauster offers a balanced survey of Marqués's major dramatic works, giving particular attention to the development of theme and theatrical device.]

Among Puerto Rican dramatists today, René Marqués occupies a unique place. Although widely known for his naturalistic and intensely nationalistic La carreta, he has consistently devoted himself to experimenting with dramatic techniques. La carreta and Palm Sunday are his only dramas in an overtly realistic framework; they are neither his best nor his most typical work, which is characterized by shifting temporal relationships and by extreme use of such devices as flashback, integrated offstage effects, and the extensive use of lighting for dramatic purposes. This characteristic technical orientation is clear in his earliest work, the one-act El hombre y sus sueños, which bears the subtitle "Esbozo intrascendente para un drama trascendental." A somewhat diffuse attack on materialism and the rejection of ideals, El hombre y sus sueños takes place on a stage bare except for a semicircle of large white columns against a black drop; a four-step platform in the center holds a monumental bed upon which lies the motionless figure of a man. Against this scene a series of characters enters: the three Friends (Poet, Politician, Philosopher), the Son and his Stepmother, the Nurse, the Maid, and the Priest. In various combinations they play out their minuscule dramas of lust and greed, interrupted only by the three Shadows, Red, Blue and Black, who debate the meaning of the dying man's existence. The play is of minor importance except for its anticipation of later themes, particularly La muerte no entrará en palacio, and for the author's willingness to use symbolic staging at a time when the theater in Puerto Rico was almost exclusively naturalistic in style.

Marqués' second play, Palm Sunday, was written in English in 1949 as an exercise for a playwrighting course at Columbia University. It is a straightforward realistic presentation of events which take place just prior to and during the Palm Sunday Massacre of 1937. The chief characters are the American police commissioner, John Winfield, his Puerto Rican wife Mercedes, and their son Alberto. The play suffers from stereotyping: Winfield is a bigot, and father and son are irrevocably estranged before the curtain rises. Rather than the tragic irony he might have achieved had his characters not been so fixed, Marqués presents in Alberto's death as a result of the massacre ordered by his own father, the wasteful and unnecessary result of blind stubbornness.

In his third play, El sol y los MacDonald, Marqués turns to a degenerate remnant of southern American aristocracy. The work is an odd mixture of obvious dislike for everything which the characters represent, with technical elements reminiscent of O'Neill and Faulkner: the long brooding, introspective passages, the desperate balance between semi-awareness of weakness and brassy compensatory flaunting of these weaknesses. A tendency toward rhetoric, the unrelieved degeneracy of the family and a virtual parade of incestuous desires are serious weaknesses, although there are effective moments.

El sol y los MacDonald prefigures the technical apparatus used so successfully in the later plays. Each act begins with a lengthy reflective soliloquy, relieved in the first and last acts by spotlighting of other characters to create double planes of reality. Lighting is also used to heighten tension: during the climactic equivocal embrace of Teresa and her son Ramiro, the focus of lighting shrinks while they are covered with a red spot. During the final commentary by Gustavo, a narrator-actor, the lighting gradually dims, until at the curtain only the garden is dimly lit, allowing the speaker's figure to be perceived vaguely. This is not trickery, but a conscious subordination of external reality to the internal reality which is the real matter of the play. It is also the first major use of these devices in the Puerto Rican theater, the first serious effort to combine the use of narrator-actor, flashback, simultaneous levels of action and monologue as flow of consciousness.

Marqués' dramatic maturity begins with La carreta, an unabashedly naturalistic portrait of the via crucis of a rural Puerto Rican family. The play has been a success on several occasions in Puerto Rico, and has been staged in New York and in Madrid. Its reception in San Juan is nothing short of apotheosic, and during a recent revival at the Fourth Theater Festival in May, 1961, it played to wildly enthusiastic houses for each of five performances. This success was due to three factors: certain real dramatic values in the play, a virtuoso performance by Lucy Boscana in the lead role, and a definite identification with the play by the audience. The three acts or "estampas," as the author calls them, correspond to three stations of the family's calvary. At each station it becomes morally weaker; at each station it suffers and loses a member. As the play begins, doña Gabriela and her three children, Juanita, Luis, and Chaguito, are preparing to leave their mountain farm driven by Luis' dreams of quick wealth in the city. At the end of the first act, they have left in a cart, whence the title, leaving only the grandfather, don Chago, who refuses to leave the land he loves for a world he no longer understands: "Yo creo en la tierra. Enanteh creía en loh hombreh. Pero ya sólo creo en la tierra." Act Two takes place in San Juan's infamous La Perla slum; Luis' dreams have evaporated. He is able to find only occasional work, Chaguito has become a petty thief, Juanita has been raped, and doña Gabriela lives in a nightmare of stench, filth, and corruption. As the act ends, Juanita has attempted suicide, Chaguito has been arrested, but Luis urges them toward the metropolis, New York. Act Three brings the family full circle. Luis, the apostle of the machine, is killed in an industrial accident, and Gabriela and Juanita vow to return to the island, to work the land and attempt to remake their lives. This is, of course, the key to the entire work. Luis, with his faith in progress and the machine, is the culprit; his failure as a farmer is due less to incompetence than to lack of love for the land.

This socio-economic orientation has contributed largely to the success of La carreta. A song of love for the land, eminently understandable in view of Marqués' own background in the provinces and his training as an agronomist, it echoes the fears of many Puerto Ricans about their island's future in the face of an increasing industrialization which many of them feel to be economically unsound. Coupled with their longing for political independence and a considerable resentment of the role of the United States in Puerto Rican history, this las led many to take La carreta as virtually a national drama, a sort of theatrical cry of independence.

This does not, of course, deny the theatrical excellences of La carreta, of which there are many, primarily a brilliantly designed first act which reflects accurately and without sentimentality the misgivings of the family in the face of its abandoning its home and tradition. The uneasiness of doña Gabriela, Chaguito's reluctance to wear shoes and his comic attempt to smuggle his pet rooster with him, Juanita's furtive efforts to bid goodbye to a local peón, all reflect the family's real desire to remain, but they are swayed by Luis' dream of the prosperity awaiting them. Only don Chago retains his perspective, don Chago who represents man's harmony with nature, counterpoised to Luis' blind faith in progress. The oscillation of mood is handled well; there is a moment of profound nostalgia for what each is losing. The act ending is dominated by the distinctive sound of cart wheels, becoming increasingly louder as the spell is broken and the characters rush to finish their preparations. Only when they have gone do we learn of old don Chago's intent; a man out of joint with his time, he plans to live out what life remains him on the land: "Cuando loh sombres noh patean entoavía quea la tierra pa dejarse querel." This authenticity of dramatic emotion—the characters were conceived while Marqués was in the mountains filming Una voz en la montaña in 1951—is enhanced by a series of off-stage sounds and by the use of concrete objects which effectively serve as objective correlatives to the emotion of the characters. Doña Gabriela's wooden figure of a saint and Juanita's model of a cart, given to her by the sweetheart she has left behind, are concrete objects which incarnate their basic unwillingness to leave, and are, at the same time, symbols of the tradition which they are abandoning. Opposed to them is the sound of cart wheels, the inexorable movement of change.

Unfortunately, the last two acts are not up to the same high standard, although there is effective use of the same techniques. Act Two becomes almost a series of individual scenes of degradation, and Act Three's episodic character is even more pronounced, with the intrusion of a series of characters who represent what Marqués regards as elements of modern society detrimental to the essentially Catholic-tropical-agricultural tradition represented by the family.

In Juan Bobo y la dama de occidente, he returns to this orientation, although the style is diametrically opposed. Actually, this one-act drama divided into three cuadros is not a play at all but a pantomime for a ballet libretto. Its purpose is specific: it is a direct attack on the universalist, cosmopolitan philosophy espoused by the University of Puerto Rico and its rector, Jaime Benítez. In a brilliant display of stage pyrotechnics, Marqués makes very clear his absolute rejection of any attempt to abandon the traditional bases of Puerto Rican culture.

Marqués' maturity as a dramatist is signaled by a remarkable work, Los soles truncos. It is, perhaps, his best performance in terms of integration of the technical elements with the theme: the shock of the collision of two cultures. It reflects again his absorption in the question of the reality of Puerto Rico and his rejection of a transplanted culture. After years of voluntary seclusion, three sisters, poverty-stricken, survivors of a wealthy and influential island family, are faced with a final dilemma. One has died, and the two remaining must arrange for her burial and themselves leave their home, which is to be destroyed in the name of progress. Rather than allow the detested outside world to intrude on an existence in which they have never permitted themselves to acknowledge the passage of time, they bedeck themselves and the dead Hortensia in the remaining jewels, which they have refused to sell even at the cost of hunger, and set fire to their home.

This allegory of time functions on three levels: time within the house, a deliberate effort to retain the customs of the past; time without, the real world which intrudes despite their efforts; and memory, a fantasy world which exists differently for each sister. These shifting levels are achieved by means of flashbacks and dream sequences, which are carefully integrated with special lighting effects, and by off-stage effects which are frequently keyed to onstage happenings. The external world is represented by the cries of street vendors and, later, by the deafening knocking of the police, but on a more subtle level, by the light which enters through the blinds. Emilia's constant closing of these blinds and her habit of protecting her eyes from even the slightest external lighting are effective dramatic devices. From this technique comes the play's title, since the three glass half-moons, or truncated suns, as the author calls them, are the three sisters. The doors are kept closed and the halfmoons are obscured by dust and time. Flashbacks are used to establish motives and key actions within the past and at the same time to maintain the illusion of simultaneous levels of time. Thus, through flashbacks we learn of Hortensia's voluntary rejection of the world because of a disappointment in love, we learn of Emilia's frustrated eroticism and Inés' recognition of her guilty love for her sister's fiance. But we learn of these not as incidents in a remote past, but as part of a past which, for the sisters, is present.

Un niño azul para esa sombra is in many respects Marqués' best work to date. Michelín, the child protagonist, is the son of a former university professor, Michel, who has been imprisoned for his political activities. Upon his release, he is placed in the intolerable situation of either renouncing his ideas or depending for employment on his wife's wealthy relatives, since he is too proud a man simply to vegetate while living on his wife's fortune. Unable to resolve the situation, he leaves in order to fight elsewhere for his ideas. Michelín survives only because he is able to keep the past alive. Surrounded by an existence of cocktail parties and brittle, amoral sophistication, the child's dreams become more real than reality, and his mother's blundering attempt to shock him into accepting reality leads to his suicide. Again, as in Los soles truncos, Marqués makes use of flashback and daydream sequences to maintain cutaneous levels of time and to translate Michelín's psychological state into dramatic tension. A new device is the regression in time; Act Three, which chronologically follows directly after the action of Act One, is separated from it by Act Two, whose action takes place two years before. This is not, however, disruptive, since the events have already been outlined in Michelín's daydreams, and the temporal regression both develops the dramatic conflict and strengthens the illusion of coetaneity. Marqués again uses the concrete objects with which characters are identified. In this case it is the massive tree in which Michelín had played as a child, a tree which has been destroyed in order to enlarge the garden terrace. Michelín hovers constantly about the fence which has replaced the tree; it has become for him a symbol of his mother's abandoning his father. For the audience, the murder of the tree becomes a complex dramatic metaphor of Michel-Michelín, betrayed by a society which has turned its back on freedom and dignity. Unable to cope any longer with his situation, Michelín drinks poison and slowly climbs the fence, entwining his arms in it. Obviously, his death is not meant to be taken realistically. The deliberate resemblance to a crucified figure, the equation between tree and child, the eerie blue lighting of the final moments, are all designed to remove the meaning from the plane of reality and confer on it various levels of significance. Yet, such is the magic of the play that the extraordinary figure of Michelín continues to dominate it. He is a symbol of a dying culture, of a people sacrificed to a civilization which is not their own, but he never ceases to be a particularly appealing figure, doubly so in his mixture of childish innocence and lost naïveté.

In his next play, La muerte no entrará en palacio, Marqués attempted to trace the decay of a political figure who, if not modeled on Governor Muñoz Marín of Puerto Rico, bears some striking resemblances to him. The play is a complex blend of political satire and a conscious effort to create within the tragic form. It begins with a projection of the future in the form of a prologue spoken by Tiresias, the friend and former political associate of the governor, Don José, against the background of the ruined palace. Throughout the first act, Don José is treated with understanding and even some affection, although he is depicted as a man who has led his people along the wrong road. In the second act, he has changed radically; he has become a petty tyrant devoted to calculated histrionics and the preservation of his own power. An attempted assassination has converted the palace into an armed fortress, and the emotional pressures on his family are intolerable. His own daughter recognizes the impossibility of the situation and kills him.

The weakness of the drama lies in the second act, and it is both internal and external. The external weakness is the almost tract-like nature of certain passages, in which the author's sympathies win out over his sense of dramatic necessity. The internal weakness is the abrupt change in Don José during the interval between the two acts. He is transformed into an alternately pompous and terrified figure, without even the momentary grandeur we have previously seen. The ideals in which he seriously believed in the first act have given way before political expediency and immoral political repression. It is not that Don José is a thief or a traitor in the obvious sense; he is a materialist who believes that a full stomach is an end in itself. In this lies his treason; in this, also, lies the play's weakness. It is difficult to believe in the total degradation of a man who, until the end of the first act, has held to a large part of his old ideals, and who even now believes in the welfare of his people, albeit a welfare considerably different from that which he had earlier espoused. In Act I he is the stuff of which tragic figures come. In Act II he is a nervous, irritable, petty dictator.

Despite this weakness, La muerte no entrará en palacio is a highly theatrical piece, in which the author uses several devices not seen earlier in his work. One is the blackout during which a kaleidoscopic series of sound effects indicate a rapid passage of time while conveying to the audience some sense of what has happened during this time. Although it is employed somewhat excessively, it is very effective at the beginning of Act II where the words of Don Rodrigo, the leader of the independence movement, are contrasted with the tyranny of Don José. Another extremely effective moment is at the end of Act II. Don José, the representative of an obvious Northern power and various functionaries are gathered for the signing of a treaty. The stage is divided into two terraces. On one are Don José and his court of bureaucrats; on the other, their wives. Snatches of conversation and bits of action are used effectively to underline the basic falsity of the entire proceeding, the selfishness and hypocrisy which have collaborated in this act of treachery. The movement comes very close to stylized comic ballet, interrupted abruptly by the entrance of Casandra and the subsequent murder of her father.

Marqués latest play, the recently published La casa sin reloj, is described in the subtitle as a "Comedia antipoética en dos absurdos y un final razonable." It is Marqués' first comedy and marks a return to the realistic idiom. As the play begins, two detectives force their way into Micaela's home in the absence of her husband Pedro. They are searching for nationalists in the wake of an armed assault on the Fortress (which, by no coincidence, is the name of the residence of the residence of the Governor of Puerto Rico). These are, however, oddly matched detectives. One is brusque, business-like, obviously delighted with his work, while the other becomes absorbed in a novel and makes comments on Micaela's state of undress. After their departure, the house is again invaded, this time by the object of their search, the nationalist José. The remainder of the first act is devoted to the peculiar and comic relationship which develops between Micaela and the intruder. The act is pervaded by a deliberately out-of-focus absurdity, in which the spectacle of José's housecleaning or the involved discussion of the comic possibilities inherent in the selection by Micaela of furniture for the apartment in which Pedro keeps a mistress are both typical and oddly diverting. The second act, however, rapidly develops a different orientation. Although Micaela continues to amuse and perplex both the audience and José, who is revealed as Pedro's brother, it becomes apparent that she is radically unhappy, disturbed by a lack of any sense of being. She feels herself to be outside the realm of normal existence; with no sense of guilt or deep emotional ties, she exists in an atemporal, rootless world. It is only when she and José recognize that they are in love that she begins the search which leads to both their disaster and her salvation: the search for guilt, for involvement, the guilt which will make her a member of the human race. She finds this guilt in the murder of José. This is not a new theme for Marqués, although it is the first time that it has been given major treatment. It is an important theme of several short stories, notably "El cuchillo y la piedra," "En una ciudad Ilamada San Juan," and "La muerte." The last is of particular note; it is the drama of a minor bureaucrat whose life has withered under the daily barrage of an unimportant job and a conventional marriage. Suddenly, for no logical reason, he takes an action which is incoherent in terms of his entire life: in a student parade upon which the police have opened fire, he seizes the banner of Puerto Rican independence. Even as the police fire on him, he realizes the secret of his action: "Era el acto de actuar lo que le salvaba." "En una ciudad Ilamada San Juan" is even more explicit. A young Puerto Rican kills an American Marine in rage at the latter's contemptuous attitude, but the murder is only the immediate manifestation of the fundamental confusion of the Puerto Rican. He is confused and disturbed by the schizophrenia of his island, unable to determine a course of action which will give his own life some meaning: "¿Cómo dar con el asidero si sus manos se mantenían laxas, impotentes para el gesto salvador de agarrarse a su circunstancia y exprimirla, torturarla, hasta obtener de ella su más íntima autenticidad?" It is in this context that Micaela's action becomes comprehensible. She is searching for her own authenticity; she is, like Michelín of Un niño azul para esa sombra and the three recluses of Los soles truncos, a dramatic metaphor of what Marqués regards as his confused nation.

The two themes of time and guilt are of fundamental importance in Marqués' theater. They play shifting roles, but underlying them is the meaning of what he is attempting to do. Repeatedly, time is seen as the destructive force, as the vehicle of change which his characters resist doggedly, if unsuccessfully. The world has gone mad, and man is left to seek some stability….

This change is inevitable in some cases, but frequently it is related to the political content of the works. The decay of the family in Los soles truncos is due not only to time but also to the alien civilization which time has forced on them. The disaster of La carreta is due to Luis' infatuation with a new mechanistic civilization which he does not really understand, and Marqués makes clear that he feels that the only hope for these people is to return to an older way of life. As María Teresa Babín has pointed out, "El resto de la familia de don Chago vive desvinculado del pasado feliz, agobiado por la miseria, la hipoteca de la tierra, arrastrado a una existencia nómada en una época deslumbrada por el progreso material de la isla." Time has worked its destructive change in La muerte no entrará en palacio; the ideals which had led the three dreamers on their magnificent pilgrimage through the mountains have been betrayed. The Philosopher is dead, the Poet is an artifact out of the past, the Politician has been corrupted. Un niño azul para esa sombra shows the same lethal effect of time; Michelín's suicide is the direct result of his recognition that the past is irretrievably gone.

In La casa sin reloj, Marqués seems to have evolved toward a somewhat different concept. Where previously he had seemed to say that time is necessarily evil and destructive, in this latest play he has added an element. Even though Micaela was content in her atemporal existence, she was little more than a vegetable—a singularly delightful vegetable, admittedly, but a vegetable nevertheless. Only through the double-edged sword of love and action can she truly live. Only through guilt can she find redemption.

This paradox is an underlying theme of all Marqués' work. It is as though all his characters suffered from a monumental guilt complex, forever in search of the sacrificial death through which alone they may expiate their sins. As early as El sol y los Macdonald, Ramiro is conscious of the incestuous nature of his relationship with his mother, and Gustavo dwells morbidly on his own obvious sexual desire for his sister. Oddly, in La carreta only Luis, who is really responsible for the family's disaster, seems impervious to a pervading sense of guilt. Los soles truncos is a virtual panorama of the same guilty feelings. Inés' renunciation of the world, while supposedly an act of abnegation in order to accompany her sister, is in fact expiation of her own guilty love, while Emilia is alternately obsessed by and ashamed of her erotic fantasy world. The conflagration which ends the drama is, on one level, their deliberate rejection of an intolerable world. On another plane, however, it is Eliot's fire sermon, purification through sacrifice.

This preoccupation with guilt and sacrifice is at the center of Un niño azul para esa sombra. Michelín is the scapegoat; he must bear the full weight of the guilt of family and society. His identification with Christ in the final scene is intentional; he is, for Marqués, a symbol of a guilt-ridden people, at once betrayed by their leaders and conniving at their own betrayal. It is this awareness of his own treachery which lends some degree of humanity to the figure of Don José in the second act of La muerte no entrará en palacio. This preoccupation with betrayal and guilt is frequently related to a Christ-figure. Michelín's autocrucifixion is the most obvious example, but there are many others. In Los soles truncos, Inés reflects the unspoken desire which haunts the two living sisters: "Inés va lentamente al fondo. Se acerca a una de las puertas cerradas. Apoya la frente sobre la puerta, luego extiende los brazos como si quisiera abrazarse a la puerta, y solloza asi, como crucificada sobre las hojas que no han de abrirse jamás." In La muerte no entrará en palacio, the disenchanted Alberto, son of the governor's oldest ally, hints at the same obscure wish:

ALBERTO: ¡Qué Vía Crucis para un conductor de pueblo!

DON JOSÉ: ¡Basta!

ALBERTO: ¡Qué calvario!

DON JOSÉ: ¡Déjame! ¡Vete!

ALBERTO: Si lo único que le falta es el sacrificio final.

DON JOSÉ: (a gritos) ¡Cállate!

ALBERTO: Si casi está usted pidiendo la crucifixión.

This attitude is common in the short stories, as well. In one of the best, "Otro dia nuestro," the imprisoned Nationalist leader is repeatedly identified with Christ. As the story develops, however, we realize that the sympathetic old man is himself responsible for this identification. He suffers from an advanced Christ-complex, complete with a strong death wish, and his failure becomes clear to him only when he realizes that he is not of this time, that his entire concept is psychologically unworkable. Interwoven with the basic substance of the stories, the conflict between two cultures, the strange insistence on sacrifice recurs. Even the Judas-figure of "El delator" is obscurely pleased by the suffering he causes himself, and in "En la popa hay un cuerpo reclinado," the protagonist resorts to murder and self-mutilation. Furthermore, these attitudes are not unconscious on the author's part. He gives the key to his attitude in his prologue to the anthology, Cuentos puertorriqueños de hoy:

El pesimismo, imperante en nuestra literatura narrative desde finales del siglo pasado, se acentúa en los jóvenes escritores. La pupila observadora del creador se hace cruelmente incisiva, penetrando más allá del superficial optimismo de la actual vida pública puertorriqueña para descubrir síntomas perturbadores en el cuerpo social. Dentro de esta perspectiva pesimista merece destacarse el impulso de autodestrucción que caracteriza a un buen número de personajes literarios puertorriqueños. Hay en la nueva literatura narrativa una alarmante cantidad de suicidas, bien literales o potenciales. Los amantes de las estadísticas podrían relacionar el hecho literario con una realidad social que les revelan los números: Puerto Rico es el país católico con más alta incidencia de suicidios en el mundo. Ambos fenómenos—el estadístico y el literario—quizás tengan su raíz sicológica en la agudización, durante los últimos años, del complejo de culpa inherente a un pueblo colonial que no ha logrado el hallazgo de una salida airosa a su secular encrucijada.

This, then, lies at the heart of Marqués' work. His theater is a complex and peculiarly suggestive metaphor for a people he regards as guilt-ridden and obsessed with a desire for self-destruction. The measure of his ability as playwright is the fact that out of this material, he has created plays which are not only one of the achievements of the Puerto Rican theater renaissance, but among the most distinguished in Latin America today.