Spanish Theater and Short Story Trends: Realism to Vanguard

Realistic Theater

Realistic Theater is a tendency in the theater of war. It starts with the story of Antonio Buero Vallejo's A Stairway and ends with Alfonso Sastre's Death Squad. They stage existential conflicts.

Key Features:

• Proposed scenarios reflect the harsh reality of Spain at the time, unlike bourgeois theater, which takes the audience away from that reality.
• It is a formally innovative theater, especially in the beginning, although, over the years, it eventually adopted its own dramatic resources from modern theater.
• It uses resources to achieve viewer identification with characters.
• To avoid censorship, it often used symbolic or allegorical elements to address issues such as lack of freedom and social injustice.
• It places its work in a specific space and time.

The Realist Group

In the late 1950s, a group of authors (Jose Maria Rodriguez Mendez, Carlos Muniz, Lauro Olmo, Jose Martin Recuerda, and others) intended to critically reflect on Spanish social reality. They started from a realistic conception of the stage, next to the resources of the grotesque and farce.

Vanguard and Experimental Theater

This includes a number of authors (Francisco Nieva and Fernando Arrabal) and independent theater groups that reject realistic theater techniques and incorporate innovations from the great scenic renovators of 20th-century theater into their works.

Relevant Characteristics:

• Rejection of Realism: The new theater has a symbolic or allegorical character.
• Themes: It is a theater that criticizes the social and political conditions in Spain at the time; hence, it denounces injustice, protests the lack of freedom, etc.
• The characters lack a psychological profile; they are dehumanized or caricatured and become symbolic characters.
• The dramatic action appears bleak; fragmented sequences unfold without a logical order.
• There is a new concept of stage space, which is designed with complete freedom; the seating area is integrated into the stage space.
• The theater was considered a total spectacle.

The Short Story

The short story is part of a large group with which the microtext shares the elimination of redundant and unnecessary frills, such as is frequent in modern art in general. It differs from other microtexts because it complies with the principles of narrative and brings to mind some genre features:

• Brevity
• Bonding with human nature
• Evocation of individual incidents
• Timestamps
• Statistical significance of the title
• Frequent intertextuality

Three Main Groups of Arguments:

• Those that rewrite the classics.
• Those that replace a speech with another invented one.
• Those that postulate what you remember from an existential or humorous perspective about the human being and the meaning of life.

Authors: Augusto Monterroso and Eduardo Galeano.