Dragún, Osvaldo

(1929–1999)

   Argentine playwright and theater director. He was one of the best-known playwrights in Latin America. The son of immigrants, Dragún was born in the province of Entre Ríos in an area settled mostly by Russian Jews known as the gauchos judíos—Jewish gauchos—whose existence so captured the national imagination in 20th-century Argentina.

   In 1945 his family moved to Buenos Aires, where he eventually joined the independent theater group Teatro Popular Independiente Fray Mocho, one of the first alternative theaters in the Argentine capital. His dramatic trajectory began in 1956 at Teatro Fray Mocho with the premiere of La peste viene de Melos (The Plague Comes from Melos), a play based on the United States’ invasion of Nicaragua. In 1961 he began a long period of residence abroad, which led him to collaborate artistically with theater groups in Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, the United States, and Cuba. In 1962 his play Milagro en el mercado viejo (Miracle in the Old Market) was awarded the Premio Casa de las Américas in Havana, one of Latin America’s most prestigious literary awards. He was awarded it again in 1966 for his play Heroica de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Heroic). Earlier, in 1957, he had produced one of his best-known plays, Historias para ser contadas (Stories for Theater), a series of seemingly simple dramas anchored in the social reality of Buenos Aires in the 1950s. It is one of his most anthologized works. In the 1960s and 1970s, he would produce several works for Argentine television.

   An innovative proponent of popular theater, Dragún had early in his career expressed his admiration of U.S. playwright Eugene O’Neill, although he was most often associated with the socially conscious theater of Bertolt Brecht. During the military dictatorship, Dragún was one of the early organizers of the Teatro Abierto Argentino in 1981, one of Argentina’s most important acts of cultural resistance of that period. He also became the leader of the collective. For Teatro Abierto, Dragún penned Mi obelisco y yo (My Obelisk and I, 1981), Al vencedor (To the Victor, 1982), and Hoy se comen al flaco (That’s It for the Poor Guy, 1983). In 1988 he helped found and was named director of the Escuela de Teatro de Latinoamérica y el Caribe (Theater School for Latin America and the Caribbean) in Havana, Cuba, a post he retained until his death. On that occasion, according to reminiscences published at the time of his death, one of the projects of the Cuban school was an exchange workshop between Latin American Theater folk and members of an indigenous Guaraní community in the remote Argentine province of Misiones.

   After the end of the military dictatorship, Dragún settled in Cuba and Mexico. It was while residing in Mexico that Dragún was named Director of Teatro Nacional Cervantes, Argentina’s national theater, by Mario “Pacho” O’Donnell, earlier a collaborator of Teatro Abierto and then Argentine Minister of Culture. The appointment of Dragún to the post generated controversy, centered mainly on the dependence of the Teatro Nacional Cervantes on the official cultural bureaucracy. The Teatro Nacional Cervantes, a gloriously Baroque-style 1921 building on Plaza Lavalle, very close to the legendary Teatro Colón, was soon granted economic autarchy by the government. As its director, Dragún organized theater tours to the Argentine interior as well as to the Maratón del Teatro Nacional Cervantes, a theater festival in which 14 theater groups from Buenos Aires and the provinces participated. He was also credited with implementing the Encuentro Iberoamericano de Teatro, which brought Latin American theater groups to Argentina.

   Dragún’s works have been translated in several languages and presented to audiences in the United States, Spain, France, Sweden, Mexico, Russia, and Bulgaria. Osvaldo Dragún died in Buenos Aires on 14 June 1999. His wake was held at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes.