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Socialist Action /April 2001

'Kiss of the Spider Woman'

Argentina Yesterday...

By GAETANA CALDWELL-SMITH and MICHAEL SCHREIBER

SAN JOSE, Calif.-Manuel Puig's play, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was presented here by Teatro Visión last month.

Teatro Visión, which had been presenting plays over the years in theaters all around San Jose, now has a permanent home at the Mexican Heritage Plaza, in a largely Hispanic area of the city. We attended a "pay-what-you-can" matinee, which Teatro Visión organizes to encourage low-income people to attend the theater. A large group of high school students and working-class adults were in the audience.

"Kiss of the Spider Woman" takes place in Argentina of the 1970s, which at the time was under the terror of a military dictatorship. The "Dirty War" carried out by the ruling junta resulted in the deaths or "disappearances" of some 30,000 opponents of the regime.

The setting is a prison cell. Occupying the cell are two men who would probably never have come into close association in ordinary life. One, Valentin (played by New York-based actor George Castillo), is the member of a leftist underground group. The other, Molina (played by El Teatro Campesino and Mime Troupe veteran Luis Oropreza), an effeminate gay man, is expressly uninterested in politics.

While Molina is attentive to his companion and often exuberant in character, Valentin is withdrawn. We learn later that Valentin, in mistaken devotion to what he considered to be revolutionary principles, broke away from the woman he loved because she had come from a "bourgeois" background.

The jailers refer to Molina as a "degenerate," recognizing that his flamboyant life style is, in its own way, an affront to the military regime. Nevertheless, they are forced to tolerate and even coddle Molina, in order to make use of him as a snitch against his cellmate. They hope that he can pry information from Valentin, which the authorities could then use to arrest his leftist comrades.

The prison wardens fail to take into account, however, that the bond that repression had established between the two prisoners would soon blossom into love.

The play opens with Molina describing-and acting out-the plot of an old movie, "The Panther Woman." In time, Valentin is swept up more and more into Molina's tale. Eventually, the movie and its people-especially the romantic cat woman herself-become part of a dream life intimately shared by the two cellmates.

In this production, while Molina is telling the story, the 1940s film, "Cat People," by Jacques Tourneur, is dimly projected onto a large panel. We found this distracting at first, but Oropreza's rendering of the text soon overcame the magnetism of the faded, silvery images.

The film story is about betrayal as well as love. In effect, it presents a foreshadowing of Molina's betrayal of Valentin, as well as his own betrayal by the military authorities. And likewise, Valentin-although unwittingly-is induced to betray his political principles, his comrades, and his idealistic young girlfriend.

The set, created by Leigh Henderson, allowed the actors room to move between the beds, set at angles, as they went about their daily chores and diversions in the confines of their cell. The warden, commandingly portrayed by Tony Murrillo Jr, was seen in his "office" above the stage, reached by wooden steps. Here we learned that he was setting up Molina to snitch on Valentin. To dispel Valentin' s suspicions, the warden contrived a ruse of visits from Molina' s non-existent mother.

Through Molina's constant solicitousness and a strangely staged sex scene-with the actors dimly lit, fully clothed, and standing spoon-style downstage-Valentin bonded with Molina. He grew dependent on him physically, emotionally, and psychologically so that when Molina told him he had been released (a strategy devised by the warden), Valentin divulged information to him about his comrades, asking Molina to contact them.

Molina sealed his betrayal with a kiss, the one thing he asked Valentin to give him before he left prison. The play ended with the fate of one revealed by the other, in monologues describing murder, torture, pity, sorrow and regret, a distinct parallel with Molina' s film story.

Manuel Puig's 1976 (the year of Argentina's military coup) book, "Kiss of the Spider Woman," was translated into English and published in the United States in 1979. The novel was redone as a play and, in 1985, made into an acclaimed movie.

In their respective times, the novel, the play, and the film were considered breakthroughs. Little had been written or dramatized by the major media that dealt not only with homosexuality but the plight of political prisoners in South America. This was so especially at a time when the U.S. government sponsored and trained right-wing, military regimes in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and other countries in the region.

Socialist Action /April 2001