Plays

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and a cultural and political figure in Peru, explores the complexities of Peruvian society and the writer's imagination in three dramas. In T he Young Lady from Tacina , history and fiction collide in a 100-year-old woman known as Mamae, as her grand nephew attempts to turn the rich but contradictory stories of her life into a single narrative. In Kathie and the Hippopotamus , a banker's wife recounts her travel adventures to a writer, but as he embellishes the tales with his own style and tastes, they transform into something altogether new and unexpected. Finally, in La Chunga , the regulars in a small-town bar trade speculations about what happened between the bar’s female owner, a local pimp, and their shared object of desire, who has disappeared. Vargas Llorca introduces each play with a foreword that helps to place the action in context.

A collection of extraordinary, playable translations from across the Latin American continent, including a new Mario Vargas Llosa play In La Chunga by Mario Vargas Llosa a young gambler down on his luck lends his girlfriend to the lady bar-keeper for the night to pay off a debt. Four years later the girl has neither been seen nor heard of, and the gamblers meet to speculate on the events of that fateful night. In Paper Flowers by Egon Wolff, Eva, a lonely middle class woman puts up a tramp for the night out of the kindness of her heart, only to find that he intends to occupy her life as well as her house, reducing her once and for all to his state. Medea in the Mirror by José Triana is an extraordinary re-setting of the Medea story in the Cuban revolution of 1959. As Maria, a young mulatto takes her revenge on Julian for abandoning her for someone else - the play becomes a mirror for the events that took place when Castro ousted the Batista regime.