The Seams of a Cuban Contemporary Playwriting. Autofictions and Prosthesis in Rogelio Orizondo’s Work

Abstract

The article explores the dramatic work of Rogelio Orizondo (Santa Clara, 1983) and suggests a search focused on autofiction as a discursive device. By analysing the play Ayer dejé de matarme gracias a ti Heiner Müller (2010), it provides the generational connective perspective between the playwright’s poetics and his dramatist colleagues. To do so, this play is presented as a model through its structural development, as a reflection of an aesthetic project shared by the graduates of the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). The article seeks to characterise the construction of the autofictional device in Rogelio Orizondo’s poetics, shed light on the intertextual relations between Heiner Müller and the Cuban playwright, and showcase the effect of a prosthetic memory in the generation of the Novísimos, of which the playwright forms part. With a structure based on Orizondo’s view of the theatre tradition and its autoreflection in the layers of his writing, he returns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to commit to a recontextualisation focused on issues distanced from the original, this time of a socio-political nature in Cuba. The research shows how the play by the English dramatist works as a jack of all trades to describe the resistance of a generation of playwrights who assume the prosthesis of other temporalities and geographies to filter their own aesthetic, ethical and political questionings.