Chapter 1: Latinx Shakespearean Films
This is an excerpt from Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater (2023) by Carla Della Gatta. To read it in its full context, click on the link. The book can be purchased on all major sites that sell books and it is FREE to download.
HOW THE SHARKS AND THE JETS CHANGED THE CAPULETS AND MONTAGUES
What West Side Story helped reveal is that Shakespeare is not the playwright of universality; he is the playwright of cultural difference. Shakespeare’s place in American culture both reflects and shapes the dramatization of divisions between cultural and linguistic groups. But it is the premise of West Side Story, rather than the Shakespearean play itself, that informs the dramaturgy of so many subsequent Shakespearean performances and films. West Side Story does not have this same resonance in Latinx theater, and it is not Latinx theater; Latinx theater engages Latinx experiences and identity, while West Side Story offers representation. Linda Saborío argues that “a performance of difference, then, provides a site from which subjects can effectively challenge essentialist, hegemonic, and patriarchal orders through a defiance of the body as signifier of fixed identities and a rescripting of the oppressive language used to define it.” A performance of difference can break down stereotypes and the systems of categorization that uphold them. Doing so through Shakespeare, rather than through works by Latinx, can result in culturally appropriative performances that invoke stereotypes, but they can also serve as a step in the process toward healing (see chapter 5). Integrating cultural-linguistic division into Shakespearean storytelling, the West Side Story effect illuminates the desire for a subtext that Shakespeare does not offer, closing off possibilities for a perceived universality of human experience and instead establishing division based on inequality as the norm. It is precisely the fundamental lack of necessary difference in Romeo and Juliet, a feud of equals, that points toward this massive shift in which the story can no longer be told without the importation of difference. Plays such as Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and others do not transform over time in the same way, as they have cultural division within their storylines. West Side Story removed the “and” from Romeo and Juliet, its titular antithesis, yet ultimately created a story of greater divide. (p.51)