SOURCE: "Theatre and Crisis: The Making of Latin American Drama," in Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America, University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 22-63.

In the following excerpt, Taylor examines the connection between politics and contemporary Latin American drama.

While commentators studying Latin American theatre generally recognize the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the quantity and quality of the plays produced from the 1960s onward, we still do not have a good name to describe the process (or perhaps multiple processes), or a very clear understanding of its (their) complexity or periodization. Various terms have been proposed. Beatriz Risk enumerates them in her work El nuevo teatro latinoamericano: Una lectura histórica: "theatre of identity, revolutionary theatre, committed theatre, historical theatre, theatre of violence, theatre of social criticism, documentary theatre, avant-garde, popular theatre"; she herself opts for "new theatre." Several studies have traced the...