ABSTRACT
After her triumphant 2002 production of the Spanish classic La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba) in Buenos Aires’ celebrated Teatro San Martín, Argentine director Vivi Tellas set out to do something different. From the pinnacle of theatrical tradition, staging her experimental version of Federico García Lorca’s mythical play about mothers and daughters in a national theatre, she set out to explore the limits of the genre with her Proyecto Archivos (Archives Project, 2003–12). Following Bernarda Alba’s scripted cruelty, which belongs comfortably to the tradition of theatrical mothers like Medea and Mother Courage, Tellas proposed a new dramatic reflection on maternal relationships with her first Archivo, Mi mamá y mi tía (My Mother and My Aunt, 2003), in which she stages her own real-life mother and aunt. The wave of biographical plays that followed in Latin America, particularly those that focus on playwrights’ and actors’ mothers, proposes a rewriting of motherhood, in which the mother is not ‘other,’ but a subject with a life story beyond maternity.
