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Christopher D. Gascón

Christopher D. Gascón, Modern Languages Department, had an article about a recent off-Broadway production in Spanish published in the journal Bulletin of the Comediantes (issue 69.1, 2017). The article, titled “Virués’s Theater of the Grotesque: Interrogating La gran Semíramis from Roman Chronicle to the New York Stage,” analyzes elements of the grotesque in the 1579 text by Cristóbal de Virués and in Diego Chiri’s 2015 production of the play at Repertorio Español in New York City. Integrating the perspectives of Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Foucault, the study concludes that Chiri uses the grotesque to reconcile contradictory elements of the work, and that Virués participates in the processes of distortion and degradation that have typified the production of the Semiramis myth, itself grotesque, throughout the centuries.