ABSTRACT
Hay cosas de las que no se habla. Si digo que estoy con indigestión, nadie pregunta detalles. Es feo. Y la tortura es fea. [There are things you don’t talk about. If I say I have indigestion, no one asks for details. It’s ugly. And torture is ugly.] (Felipe Agüero, quoted in Verdugo, De la tortura no se habla [We Don’t Talk about Torture])
No line clearly demarcates the boundary between allegorical and testimonial theater: Allegory does not conceal everything and testimony does not tell all. Some allegories, like Gambaro’s Atando cabos, slip into a testimonial mode, and many testimonial plays, including some of Juan Radrigán’s best works, rely on allegory for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. So how can one distinguish the Latin American testimonial genre known as testimonio from allegory, and what is at stake in that distinction?
