Shakespeare appropriation and queer Latinx empowerment in Josh Inocéncio’s Ofélio

Josh Inocéncio’s one-act play Ofélio, first performed in Houston, Texas, in 2017, tells the story of a queer Latinx student who visits a medical clinic after having been sexually assaulted by his instructor, a white graduate assistant. Before any dialogue is spoken, the doctor pulls a “little purple flower” from the mouth of Ofélio, the eponymous protagonist (Inocéncio n.d.). ¹ The flower affirms Ofélio’s connection to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, recalling the flowers with which she is so closely identified. Later called a pansy, the flower possesses additional Shakespearean resonances, both to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s (Shakespeare 2017) love-in-idleness, which is wounded by Cupid’s arrow, and to the flower that grows from Adonis’s blood in Venus and Adonis. These secondary parallels highlight themes of sexual violence present, though muted, in Hamlet (Shakespeare 2016), and Inocéncio’s rendering of Ofélio asks us also to consider the patriarchal oppression that Ophelia herself faces.