ABSTRACT
This chapter studies what the author terms Latine Off-Off-Broadway. It analyzes the work of María Irene Fornés and Latine theater artists whose involvement in the Off-Off-Broadway movement has gone largely unnoticed: Magali Alabau, Manuel Martín Jr., and Roberto Rodríguez Suárez. Although Fornés is seen as an Off-Off-Broadway progenitor, no one has analyzed her first play, La viuda (The Widow). This chapter presents how transculturation was at work in their theatrical productions. It demonstrates how their retooling of themes and aesthetics coming from non-US traditions, namely Latin American and European avant-garde theaters, were key to their theatrical processes. However, it was that aesthetics and the use of Spanish language that remained unreadable to English-language critics who pushed their work away from Off-Off-Broadway. The first section reads Fornés’ La viuda relating it to other works from her Off-Off-Broadway period to demonstrate how La viuda contains the theatrical techniques and language used by Fornés in her later work. The second section is devoted to Martín’s early work as an actor, director, and playwright to demonstrate how he, alongside Alabau and Rodríguez within their networks of their Puerto Rican and Anglo Off-Off-Broadway contemporaries, latinized Off-Off-Broadway.
