Ramón Griffero is a highly influential and radical Chilean playwright and director, former Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Chile. His plays from the late 1980s to the present have been essential components in the resurgence of contemporary Chilean theatre. He is the founder of the theatre company Teatro Fin de Siglo and El Trolley, a cultural space for resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship. As a professor, he has given classes at the Department of Theater, University of Chile, among others in Chile, as well as internationally. Adam Versényi is Chair of the Department of Dramatic Art at UNC-Chapel Hill, US, and Senior Dramaturg for PlayMakers Repertory Company. He is the author of Ramón Griffero: Your Desires in Fragments and Other Plays, Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture From Cortés to the 1980s and The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays, among others. He has written widely on Latin American theatre, U.S. Latino/a theatre, dramaturgy, theatre production, and theatrical translation. He is founder and editor of The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review.
"Adam Versényi translates and edits an eminently useful edition of Griffero’s theory of the dramaturgy of space. A text that originally emerged out of the urgent need to expand the dramatic and scenic alphabet in the Americas to decolonize dramatic discourses, Versenyi’s translation makes available to an English-speaking audience the collected reflections of what Griffero called ""the artifice of the dramatic structure.” As one of the most important voices of Latin American theatrical creation, this updated edition of Griffero’s seminal text includes exercises designed to help the reader institute a practical application of his theory, while sharing his ideas and ethical, political, and cultural positions towards scenic creation. A necessary book for all artistic creators and scholars. * Analola Santana * Playwright-director Ramón Griffero’s The Dramaturgy of Space encapsulates a forty-year career spent conceptualizing, writing, directing, and teaching for the stage. Through reflections, exercises, video links, and photographs, Griffero immerses the reader in his refreshingly spatial approach to theatrical creation; and in the process the Chilean artist ably demonstrates ‘that not everything that comes from the periphery is a mechanical reproduction of ad hoc models from the centre’. Adam Versényi’s translation is a most welcome addition to the Theatre Makers series. * Jean Graham-Jones *"