The Teatro Fronterizo’s White Whale: José Sanchis Sinisterra, Herman Melville, and Moby-Dick

• Autores: Ramón Espejo Romero
• Localización: Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies, ISSN-e 2516-8037, ISSN 2516-8029, Vol. 1, Nº. 1, 2019, págs. 31-44
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article deals with the Teatro Fronterizo’s 1983 stage version of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), focusing on the reasons why Sanchis Sinisterra and the Fronterizo were drawn to Melville’s masterpiece and on the way in which the proposal could be said to further the stated aims of the company. Judging by the critical response to the play and by Sanchis Sinisterra’s own admission, the show never fulfilled its aims and expectations. The article tries to disentangle why that was so, and finds a possible answer in the idea that Sanchis Sinisterra met a fate not unlike Ahab’s: he became obsessed with the idea of capturing the totality of the novel, and forgot to provide an artistic vision independent from it. He did not use the novel; he tried to serve it, with disastrous results and audience and critical failure. How much he learned from these lessons is briefly touched on in the article by looking into a subsequent version of Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’ (1853) staged by the Teatro Fronterizo in 1989.