Jose Triana and the Tragic Mode: Three plays

Abstract

In three early plays, the Cuban playwright José Triana (b. 1931) chose to emulate the most notable Greek tragedians. But he opted for assimilation of technique rather than crass imitation, seeking to portray the social, political and religious aspects of his island's society in tragic terms that aligned his works with the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who had similarly viewed their societies. Triana saw parallels between 1950s Cuba and ancient Greece; he used the tragic framework but without eschewing the characteristics of the land and people he was depicting. Consequently, he wrote the three plays assessed here – El mayor general hablará de teogonía (The Major General Will Speak on Theogony, 1957), Medea en el espejo (Medea in the Mirror, 1959), and La noche de los asesinos (The Night of the Assassins, 1964) – as contemporary pieces in the tragic mode.