Every theatre production is a translation. The director must deconstruct and decode a written text and “translate” it into a body of auditory and visual signs that are intelligible to spectators. When the text is the product of a culture different from the spectators’, either because it was produced at a different historical moment or by an author whose frame of reference is alien to the audience’s, issues of transculturation arise. Carl Weber defines “transculturation” as “the deconstruction of a text/code and its wrenching displacement to a ‘historically and socially different situation’ “ (“AC/TC” 35). When the play in question was written by a person marginal to the traditional power elite – as in the case of any seventeenth-century woman dramatist – the transculturation process is complicated by the possibility that familiar codes may operate in unexpected ways. The July 2006 production of María de Zayas's Friendship Betrayed, directed by Karen Berman of Washington Women in Theater, is an example of how one director met successfully the challenges posed by an early modern woman-authored play. This essay focuses first on those aspects of the comedia that Berman had to deconstruct in order to accomplish the “wrenching displacement” essential to transculturation, and next on Berman's methods for transforming the work into a performance piece easily decodifiable for modern audiences.

The Play

Friendship Betrayed is a silly play about silly people. Fenisa, the central character, is a man-hungry minx hell-bent on accumulating as many suitors as possible. When her friend Marcia shows up with a portrait of her new love interest Liseo, Fenisa immediately decides to pursue him. At the same time, she wants to hang on to her current galán, Juan, formerly the suitor of Marcia's cousin Belisa, and also goes after Gerardo, Marcia's long-time admirer, as well as Liseo's friend Lauro. During all these shenanigans Liseo's manservant León, the gracioso, and Fenisa's maid Lucía make cynical remarks about the childish, self-indulgent pursuits of their betters.