"I write to change the concepts through which we see reality"

Sabina Berman is one of the most widely recognized and active playwrights of her generation both in her native Mexico and Latin America. She began receiving national recognition at an early age. Several of her plays have been translated and performed abroad, and she has received twenty-five national and international awards.

Among them, Bill/Yankee (1979) proposes identity as a creative process, focusing on the relationship between individual and national identities, and the influences which impinge upon their formation--a recurrent theme in Berman's production. Rompecabezas (The Puzzle 1981) utilizes the techniques of documentary theater to examine the official history and representations of the 1940 assassination in Mexico of Leon Trotsky through a theatrical puzzle, while exploring the questions of ethnic and national identity of the two principal characters. Aguila o sol (Eagle or Sun or Heads and Tails, 1984), which stages the encounter between Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma, injects the historical account with street-theatre and other popular forms such as mariachis, indigenous dances, and corridos. Herejía (Heresy 1983) depicts the Mexican Inquisition's persecution of Jews and challenges the notion of Mexico as a culturally homogeneous society. La Grieta (The Crack 1988) establishes the metaphor of a growing crack in the support wall of a new office building to call attention to Mexico´s social and political disintegration. For both La Grieta (1997) and Moliere (1999) Berman received the National Award for Director of the Year.

Other critically acclaimed plays include El suplicio del placer (The Pain of Pleasure 1986, included here), and Muerte súbita, (Sudden Death 1988). Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Villa and a Naked Woman 1993) was translated into English and French and, then, adapted for film and directed by Berman and Isabelle Pardan in 1996. Receiving major theatre and film awards, Entre Villa is comic view of contemporary relations between the sexes, these affected by the sediments of history and tradition. Drawing from another tradition of Mexico´s cultural repertoire--indigenous theatre based on oral tradition--Arux (1995) recreates of the myth of Arux, a Mayan midget-god. Staged in a jungle clearing in Xocen, Yucatán and spoken in Mayan and Spanish by 250 young indigenous actors, Arux captures and reproduces the vital presence of myth and ritual in the daily existence of Mayan culture while, simultaneously, injecting humorous political commentary. Perhaps Berman´s most controversial work to date is Krisis, a dark play based on the events in the life of ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari in which Salinas and his brother kill their nanny. The play exposes the corruption inherent in Mexican social and political systems.

Like other Mexican theatre practitioners of her generation, Berman´s work is characterized by its diversity. At times, universal themes or classic forms dig deep into the Mexican imaginary, history, and culture. She also traces the intersections of sexuality and politics within the patriarchal power structure that repeats itself at all levels of Mexican society. The interior problematic to which Berman refers is the personal struggle that women experience as they become more active and visible in Mexican society, participating in realms previously prohibited to them. 

El suplicio del placer (The Pain of Pleasure) that Berman most openly explores the concept of the gendered self as she destabilizes various popular, scientific, and literary myths. Explicit in this piece is the concept of "gender" as a social construction and a semiotic process in which men and women are encoded as social subjects. Berman foregrounds various processes through which the formulation of gender becomes embedded in social and power relations. A complex system of cultural, social, psychical, and historical differences constitutes both men's and women's consciousness and subjective limits. Importantly, she highlights the individual’s participation in the systems that both construct and censor. Berman offers neither clear-cut definitions, nor concrete political strategies, but rather engages in an exposition, making her audience aware that the theatrical performance they are witnessing is not unrelated to the real-life theater, their own performance, as men, as women, as social beings.

Begin this path: Sabina Berman (Mexico)

1. The Agony of Ecstasy: Four One-Act Plays on a Single Theme
2. Videos (Plays and Performances)
3. Other Resources
4. Bibliography

Comment on this page