Rodolfo Usigli

Rodolfo Usigli Wainer was a Mexican playwright, essayist, and diplomat. He has been called "the father of Mexican theater" and "playwright of the Mexican Revolution." In recognition of his work to articulate a national identity for Mexican theater, he was award the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes in 1972.

Biography

Usigli was born to an Italian father and a Polish mother in Mexico City. In his early childhood, he enjoyed many plays to which his parents took him. His father aspired for him to go to music school, and Usigli spent a year in the National Conservatory of Music before deciding that his real passion was theater. He studied drama at the Yale School of Drama from 1935-1936 on a Rockefeller scholarship, later becoming a professor and diplomat. During his time as a diplomat in 1945, he met George Bernard Shaw in London. After returning to Mexico from the U.S., he established the Midnight Theater and also became a member of the literary circle that formed around the journal Contemporary. During the 1930s, he directed radio dramas.

Theatre

Usigli’s theatre focuses largely the history of Mexico and satirizing his contemporary Mexican society, and how the Mexican middle classes were betrayed, politically and socially, by the Mexican revolution. His plays reflect a sense of the hypocrisies of life after the revolution, both criticizing society and offering models to emulate. He called for a national theater movement that would reflect the truth of the Mexican experience and express the Mexican spirit.
He is perhaps best known for his 1938 play El gesticulador, which critiqued social issues ravaging Mexico, such as misuse of power that the bureaucracy had gotten from the Revolution of 1910. The play was censored by the Mexican government and banned, raising Usigli's reputation.
In 1942, Usigli published another work of scathing quality. In Family Dinner at Home, his intended targets were the apex strata of the Mexican social structure. Usigli experimented with crime fiction in the novel, Ensayo de un crimen, which in 1955 was adapted into a film, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, by Luis Buñuel. Usigli also wrote several essays on history, art, and theater. He was also an occasional poet, writing modest but interesting poems.
The award-winning Usigli believed the objective of theatre was to tell the truth about society. He was known for his strong representation of women in plays.
Usigli designed strong female characters in several of his plays. Two of Usigli's protégées, Rosario Castellanos and Luisa Josefina Hernández, became important female voices on the Mexican stage. He was also a strong influence on his pupil Jorge Ibargüengoitia and on Josefina Niggli.

Selected works

Plays

Tres comedias impolíticas, 1935

El niño y la niebla , 1936
Otra primavera
Medio tono
Mientras amemos , begun 1937-38, completed 1948El gesticulador, 1938La familia cena en casa, 1942Vacaciones La mujer no hace milagros
La función de la despedida, 1949
Los fugitivos, produced 1950, published 1951
Jano es una muchacha, 1952
Las madres, 1960
The Corona Trilogy:
* Corona de sombra, 1943
* Corona de Fuego, 1960
* Corona de Luz, 1963

Poetry

"Conversación desesperada, 1938
"Sonetos del tiempo y de la muerte", 1954
"Tiempo y memoria en conversación desesperada", 1981

Novels

Ensayo de un crimen, 1944

''Obliteracion''

Nonfiction

México en el teatro, 1932Caminos del teatro en México, 1933Anatomía del teatro, written 1939, published 1967Itinerario del autor dramático, 1940Juan Ruiz de Alarcón en el tiempo, 1967Ideas sobre el teatro, 1968

''Imagen y prisma de México''

Memoirs

Conversaciónes y encuentros, 1974

* translated into English in a critical edition as You Have Nothing to Learn from Me: A Literary Relationship Between George Bernard Shaw and Rodolfo Usigli, 2011