Since its inception in 1975, the Siglo de Oro Spanish Drama Festival at the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas, has become both a venue for comedias in translation and for less canonical Golden Age plays. However, until 2003, when director David Pasto and his cast from Oklahoma City University mounted their production of Catherine Larson's translation of María de Zayas's La traición en la amistad, entitled Friendship Betrayed, the only other woman dramatist's work on the Chamizal stage was that of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. With this performance Zayas's comic sense took center stage. Known primarily for her narrative works, this writer is sometimes characterized, and perhaps not unjustifiably, as pessimistic (Soufas 148): “ni comedia se representa, ni libro se imprime que no sea todo en ofensa de mujeres” (“there is no play performed or book printed that is not offensive to women”) (Zayas, Tres novelas 205). Zayas's only extant play, however, presents a problematic view of women as transgressors and comics in a kind of subversion of any feminist project we might attempt to elicit from her, although her female characters initiate dramatic action and are responsible for its outcome (Wilkins 114). Pasto's production, a first for the Chamizal and a first for this translation, endeavors to come to grips with the ways in which a comic sense works in favor of women.

Zayas includes in her play a traditional gracioso role, León, and two female roles, Lucía and Belisa, who function in some sense as foils to him. The most important of these is Belisa, and she is my concern here. She is a lady, not a maid, unlike Lucía, servant to Fenisa, and though she is referred to as discreta, best translated as “wise” (Voros, “Fashioning” 161–2), Belisa is León's true female counterpart. Lucía, to be sure, does manage to get in choice comments on her mistress's multiple love interests, and in the end marries León, but Belisa assumes the role of comedic heroine, despite subservience to her cousin Marcia.