Phyllis Zatlin

From Night Games to Postmodern Satire: The Teacher of Paloma Pedrero

In the past decade, Paloma Pedrero has become the most staged Spanish woman playwright internationally. Starting in the mid-1980s, she achieved recognition for a series of two-character, metatheatrical plays, which were characterized by their colloquial and humorous dialogue and their emphasis on conflicts related to questions of personal and sexual identity. Six of these works appear in a 1999 collection, appropriately titled Juego de noches. Nueve obras en un acto. In her early period Pedrero also wrote two works with larger casts and more complex structures; she has continued that current in the 1990s while exploring a variety of theatrical approaches, such as psychodrama and postmodern satire. Her emphasis on feminist themes culminates in several plays that visually deconstruct gender.