Painting on Stage

Painting on Stage is the first full-length study of image-text relations in the twentieth-century Spanish theater. It examines a series of dramas that express the theatrical tension between images and verbal language through their interrogation of the visual arts. Written by central dramatists of the twentieth century (Ramon del Valle-Inclan, Rafael Alberti, Antonio Buero Vallejo, Fernando Arrabal, Jeronimo Lopez Mozo, Francisco Torres Monreal, and Paloma Pedrero), each drama "stages" a painting or series of paintings and, in so doing, stages a central tension inherent in all theater and predominant in twentieth-century plastic art, that is, the tension between visual images and language.