ABSTRACT
La nona and De a uno manipulate dramatic space in order to comment on the complex relationship between the public and private spheres during the Proceso. In the society of fear created by the military during the Proceso, Argentina's citizens chose not to see the violence that surrounded them, just as the protagonists of De a uno remain ignorant of the ever-growing population under the table. Both La nona and De a uno draw on the space of the kitchen and its related activities to implicate those members of the middle class who opted for omission, silence, and complicity with the discourse and actions of the dictatorship. In both works the supposedly isolated private sphere represented by the family kitchen, long the favoured site in costumbrist and neo-realist theatre, is ultimately characterised by death despite the protagonists' efforts to displace this destruction onto what they perceive to be an entirely separate, public sphere.
