ABSTRACT
The urban experience is usually presented in the Puerto Rican theater as an exile, whether from the land to the city or from the island to New York. This exile has been a frequent, indeed almost an obsessive theme, and there is hardly a dramatist who has not dealt with it in some fashion. A good deal of attention has been paid to some of these plays, especially to Francisco Arriví’s introspective intellectuals and René Marqués’s tormented visionaries of a past that never was. However, few have noted that the earliest dramatic versions of this exile are earlier than we might expect, and that there have been fundamental and important changes in the manner in which this exile is presented.
