Un poquito más de Danubio: Virgilio Piñera y el revisionismo absurdo

Abstract

Virgilio Piñera is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of absurdism in Cuba, but his place within the broader global tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd remains contested. Piñera wrote his seminal play Falsa alarma in 1948, prior to the opening of Eugène Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve, but he expanded the text by incorporating a number of prototypically absurd passages on the occasion of the play’s first run in 1957. In comparing the original Falsa alarma with the revised version, this article attempts to settle the lingering question of Piñera’s status as progenitor of the absurd by charting his stylistic evolution and exploring his connections to the intellectual circuits of that time period.