My chapter “Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo” has been published in the The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction edited by Graham Wolfe. In the chapter, I continue my digging into topics related to Argentine theatre, Buenos Aires, and the importance of looking at networks of people and things to really know what’s going on. I examine El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor, 1924) by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867–1928) and El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp, 1984) by Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky (b. 1939) as examples of how theatre-fiction provides access to a broader historical awareness of the intertwined genealogies of artistic work and private events that influence theatre but remain otherwise mostly invisible. Unrestrained by the immediacy of a staged performance, these works expand their scope to encompass whole lives and diverse locales: not only do both Blasco and Cozarinsky jump freely between the present and the past, but they also evoke a variety of places on both sides of the Atlantic spanning from the city of Buenos Aires to the Argentine provinces, from the tropical forest of Venezuela to the steppes of Eastern Europe.
On March 7, 2024 I presented a paper on the same topic at the Mid-Atlantic Theatre Conference in Madison, WI.
