THEATRE-COSTA RICA: Maternity Vindicated on Stage

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Maricel Sequeira

SAN JOSE, Jul 9 1996 (IPS) - The experience of pregnancy, from the first nauseas to the quiet happiness after the birth, is the theme of a play created and acted by the Costa Rican actress Ana Iztaru, which forces theatre goers to both laugh and think deeply.

This is almost an autobiographical account, based on the personal experience of the actress.

“Some of the characters are so real they should be paid royalties,” said Iztaru, like the conservative nurse who criticised the participation of the male partner at the moment of birth.

The play opens telling of the problems a woman has in getting pregnant at the time she wants to. “There is nothing easier than being 16 years old, single and sleeping with your boyfriend for getting pregnant,” she says.

From then on, she goes into the intervention of the in-laws in a pregnant woman’s life, a mechanism she uses to criticise how a woman becomes, in some cultures, merely a body to carry the baby, losing her own identity.

Pregnancy is an issue which is rarely dealt with in the theatre, and this is precisely why Iztaru took on the issue.

“I tackled it as it was the unnameable issue, for its absence, for being an issue which concerns the body, the sexuality of women, and because I am trying to talk about this – maternity – in other terms, not of sacrifice, death and illness, but as the enjoyment of the female body, a sign of courage, and an indestructible nexus with sexual desire,” she told IPS.

Iztaru said this play, which was given the Maria Tereza Leon prize in Spain in 1995 has a feminist outlook, “because it vindicates women and the admiration for a transcendent stage in her life when the male can be a supportive companion, committed to the process, and a loving father.”

“I am also aiming to fight against the machismo exercised by the women themselves, because there are women who go from victims to victimisers and discharge their frustration on other women, who they lead to believe that maternity is a biblical damnation,” she added.

Throughout most of the play, Iztaru describes the lack of a woman’s control over her own body, because other people take over her desire to be, or not to be, a mother.

When a woman becomes pregnant there is always someone ready to tell you all the horrible symptoms you are going to suffer and how your body is going to deteriorate.

“Your breasts are going to droop endlessly and they will never recover,” says one wellwisher, and Iztaru answers that for her the marks a pregnancy leaves on her body are signs that her body has been loved.

In this play, Ana Soto Marin, the true name of the author, revalues maternity: “They have told us that women have penis envy, but couldn’t it really be that men are envious of the female womb?”

The value Ana gives maternity comes to life when she walks around the small stage “looking with an expression which says ‘poor thing’ at the males, these inferior people deprived of a uterus.”

She also defends a woman’s right to grow old gracefully, “Could it be that men don’t get old, they don’t go bald and grow pot-bellied? Who ever says anything to them? Ahhh…but with women….”

The play is called ‘Baby boom en el paraiso’ (Baby boom in paradise), the third she has written.

The first, ‘El Vuelo de la Grulla’ (the flight of the crane), tells the story of a woman who wants to go out to work but her husband stops her, supported by his mother. In the end, the husband is forced to choose between supporting his wife or continuing to band with his mother. In the end he cannot break the umbilical cord.

The second, ‘Madre nuestra que estan en la tierra’ (Our mother who art on earth), it the story of complicated mother-daughter relationships within a Costa Rican family.

Despite these three plays and her work as an actress, Ana Iztaru said she feels better as a poet, a line of work which has brought her great national and international triumphs.

“My acting work is an ephermeral love, it is beautiful but ephemeral. That is its magic, but I feel more poet than anything else,” she said.

Baby Boom has brought Iztaru other satisfactions too. “The people come up to me after the show, they show me the photos of their children and tell me the story of their pregnancies. It’s like stepping over the threshold of their intimacy, and I like that.”

The play ends when the mother, with babe in arms, looks admiringly at her child, and is lost in a distant happy world where she realises she had fallen in love for ever.