ABSTRACT
Latinx William Shakespeare’s origins can be traced to West Side Story, which debuted in 1957, and this trend has grown rapidly in the last decade alongside the cultural influence of Latinxs in the United States. By invoking Ophelia to express the experience of a rape survivor, Josh Inocencio joins a feminist tradition of reproducing Shakespeare’s heroine to give voice to those who are marginalized or victimized. Latinx Shakespeare productions such as Ofelio reckon with Shakespeare’s cultural primacy, often regarded as an impediment to the flourishing of Latinx theater. As Elizabeth Klein and Michael Shapiro suggest, attending to local productions can challenge dominant understandings of “what ‘Shakespeare’ is or what ‘Shakespeare’ should sound like”, problematizing received notions of Shakespeare’s universality. Inocencio’s Ofelio rejects this history of whitewashing Ophelia and instead interrogates Shakespeare’s cultural supremacy and, more broadly, white Anglo hegemony.
