SOURCE: Southerland, Stacy. “Elusive Dreams, Shattered Illusions. The Theater of Elena Garro.” In Latin American Women Dramatists. Theater, Texts, and Theories, edited by Catherine Larson and Margarita Vargas, pp. 243-62. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Southerland traces Garro's manipulation of time and reality throughout her literary canon.

Regarded as one of the most important contemporary Mexican authors, Elena Garro, born on December 11, 1920, in Puebla, Mexico, is perhaps best known for her unique and diverse representations of vastly different perspectives of reality. Her distinctive ability to manipulate—often erase—the boundaries separating those realities from mere illusion forces her audience to question appearances. In fact, the most comprehensive study of Garro's work, A Different Reality, edited by Anita K. Stoll, focuses on the writer's appropriation of traditional semiotic systems, to which she attributes alternative meanings in order to create a discourse better suited to the expression...