Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater by Carla Della Gatta (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater by Carla Della Gatta
• Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez

LATINX SHAKESPEARES: STAGING U.S. INTRACULTURAL THEATER. By Carla Della Gatta. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023; pp. 265.

For too long, a decidedly multicultural Shakespearean analysis that foregrounds European and white ontologies has marked Latine adaptations, appropriations, and concept productions of Shakespeare plays. One of the most detrimental consequences of this ethnocentric analysis is the occlusion of the impact of Latine directors and their work on US theatre. To alleviate this obscuring, Carla Della Gatta offers Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater, a text that frames Latine Shakespearean performance not as foreign, but as integral to the fabric of US theatre. The text refreshingly employs both Latine and Latin American theorists to examine over 140 Latine-themed productions staged in both large repertory and small community venues across the United States from the 1950s to the present. Through meticulous research, the text acknowledges, validates, and values the presence, influence, and contributions of Latine theatremakers in the [End Page 404] United States through ethnographic, archival, and textual analysis.

The text begins with an introduction to its central idea, defining it as "Latinx Shakespeares," or "textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx" (1). Helpful to those wishing to understand more about the history of mobilizing Shakespearean performances in communities of color is the text's inclusion of the initiatives implemented by Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1960s, including the Spanish Mobile Theater unit and the Festival Latino. Latinx Shakespeares focuses on adaptations both textual and performative that inject Shakespearean characters, plays, and stories with Latine-minded aesthetics, strategies, sounds, and techniques.

The first chapter, "Division: The West Side Story Effect," provides the text's most incisive intervention, which gives a name to "the staging of difference of any kind in Shakespeare" (29). The West Side Story effect is also developed in later chapters as it pertains to various Shakespearean adaptations. Ultimately, the chapter focuses on the way West Side Story's legacy has informed subsequent Shakespearean stagings inclusive of race and ethnicity throughout theatre history. It also features a fascinating section underscoring the fact that West Side Story's original conception had nothing to do with Latine culture, because the central conflict was to be between "(New York-based) Catholics and Jews at Easter/Passover" (31). In its entirety, this chapter problematizes the idea that Shakespeare and the Latine community cannot resonate.

Chapter 2 explores the complex concept of aurality and the even more difficult task of "hearing ethnicity" (79). With strong analysis of the 2005 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet at Florida State University and the 2011 Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of Measure for Measure, Della Gatta illustrates how both productions exemplify "semi-bilingual theater." This chapter examines some ways that ethnicity arises from Latine Shakespeares' mobilization of sonic phenomenology, which includes bilingualism in English and Spanish. One specific type of bilingualism discussed in this chapter is code-switching, or the act of a speaker's shifting to a different language often due to a lack of mastery of one of the languages. For Della Gatta, "A focus on aurality extends Shakespeare studies' historical emphasis on rhetoric and poetry to other elements of the aural soundscape" and can also complicate the "heavy theorization of visual signifiers in the theater" (60). The author explains this approach by coining the term auralidad not as a direct translation of aurality, but to indicate elements that result from the interaction of Latine cultures with Shakespearean characters, texts, or stories. The chapter's approach to Latine theatre remains insightful, but Della Gatta's voice is overshadowed in parts, mainly because of the high frequency of citations. Nevertheless, the chapter is attuned to the fact that staging English plays in Spanish can both reify a colonial legacy and enable a modicum of linguistic justice where actors are empowered to express themselves in their language of choice.

In chapter 3, "Identity: Remapping Latinidades," Latinidad expands into the more capacious notion of Brownness that operates independently of "government-based parameters of race and ethnicity" (80...