Repressive totalitarian regimes often conceal their atrocities by producing
official stories that underplay and/or erase dissent and violence. Similar
to dramatists who create and manipulate their material to affect an audience,
the State’s manipulation of the newspapers that publish these whitewashes
produce limits on seeing and knowing the truth. For the government, an
ignorant population is a passive and orderly population. However, the Argentine
playwright Griselda Gambaro challenges the smooth functioning of totalitarian
dramaturgy by showing the truth of the violent oppression in her play Information
for Foreigners. A chronicle of terror and torture in twenty brief scenes,
the play abrogates a safe, single, seamless narrative. The audience is
split into groups and led to several rooms of a house, each with a short
scene depicting acts of violence explained disingenuously by the Guide,
a tool of the State. By eschewing a single dramatic arc that compels the
audience’s attention from a darkened auditorium, the ambulatory, fragmented,
and episodic nature of the play permits a critical distance—a freedom that
is an anathema to an oppressive government. To view and believe only the
authorized version imposes limits on knowledge.
05/27: 1400