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Preface
The Center for Hemispheric and Polar Studies in Chile has funded the production of Tangled destinies, a play written by Jason Kendall Moore, directed by María Angélica Luzzi, and performed by Daniela Meneses and the author. It opened on Saturday, 17 July 2010, in Valparaiso, Chile, where it will run through the first week of September. Set in Bethlehem, Paris, and Valparaiso, the play reflects the author's multicultural orientation, as a North American who studied in Australia and has acquired permanent residency in Chile.
Only Passion for the Antarctic, the third scene of Tangled destinies, deals with the frozen continent, and it is reminiscent of the one act play performed three years ago at the professional skills workshop organised by the Center (see Moore and León Wöppke 2008). An obsessive historian has not slept in days, trying to finish her book about Tierra de O'Higgins. This time she is interrupted by a stranger who embodies the least savoury aspects of his nation's 'enlightened self-interest' (see Gaddis 1987: 59).
As the Chilean character observers, it begs credulity that a publisher would dispatch someone to oversee the final revision of a manuscript. The success of theatre often hinges on the suspension of disbelief, and it can often be more effective when some things are left to the imagination. However, as this scene has been extracted from a larger work and is to be read rather than performed live, some elaboration seems warranted.
The North American 'imperialist' represents the historian's conscience, and thus their exchange constitutes her internal dialog with the past, reflecting her ambivalence toward, and strange attraction to, the United States. Rarely has the playwright felt such affection for one of his characters, and the ending makes her all the more irresistible in his perspective. Not only is she a true patriot and a serious academic; she is revealed to be as fallible as everyone else.
As Howkins (in press) writes in the preface to the bilingual collection of Moore's plays that is currently in press, theatre is capable of revealing many aspects of international relations that are often neglected by traditional forms of scholarship. The Center has chosen to publish the collection in the...