The Reenactor as Stunt Double
In the scene titled “The Deaths of my Father,” Carla Crespo announces, “During my life I’ve heard so many versions of how my dad died that it’s as if he died several times, or he never died.
If my dad’s life were a film, I’d like to play his stunt double” (Arias, 2019, p. 61). In what follows, Carla describes the three versions of her father’s death that she heard while growing up. Her father, a militant member of the People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejercicio Revolucionaro del Pueblo, ERP) was killed in an armed confrontation when Carla’s mother was five months pregnant with her. For each description, actors reenact the death scenes according to what Carla says. For example, for the first death scene, Carla announces, “When I’m 6, my mum tells me my dad died in a car crash” (Arias, 2019, p. 62). Immediately, the actors assemble chairs onstage to make a car; they turn on a radio and a fan to make it look like they are driving and listening to the radio with the wind blowing through their hair. All at once, they let their heads fall to the side to represent the crash. In the second version, Carla describes how her father was killed by the military in an armed confrontation after getting caught trying to get weapons from a regiment. In this version, her father is wounded and heroically tells his comrades to retreat, staying behind and letting himself bleed to death. After Carla recites this version, the actors move the chairs out of the way and point their fingers like guns at each other, pretending to shoot each other and then collapsing to the floor. In the third and final version, Carla relates that when she was 20 years old, she read a letter that the ERP had sent her mother explaining that all of the wounded from the shoot-out had been taken prisoner and executed three days later. Upon hearing this last account, actors go to the back of the stage and fall on the floor onto a pile of clothing. Carla continues to explain that they cut off and kept the hands of the dead in order to identify the bodies, but that since it was summer, the hands decomposed and the military was unable to determine who the guerrilleros were. The bodies were buried in an unmarked mass grave in the Avellaneda Cemetery, 4.5 by 5 meters. At this point, Liza begins walking in a straight line, counting her steps to measure the dimensions onstage, and Mariano traces the space with a piece of chalk to mark the mass grave. Carla ends the scene by announcing that six years earlier, she had done a DNA test to see if it matched any of the bodies in the mass grave, and that she has just recently received the results confirming that he was buried there (Arias, 2019, p. 62).Similar to the scene in which Liza “remakes” the story of her parents into a movie, here Carla also has a directorial role, describing the different versions of her father’s death. Carla wears the same clothes her father wore as an ERP militant onstage, creating a doubling effect, but, as Perez (2013) observes, other performers play his friends or comrades, and “by doing so, the play states that the story does not belong only to Carla; she is not obliged to carry its weight all by herself” (p. 15). Carla emphasizes how important it was for the play to incorporate live testimony, and she refers to testimony as both the genesis of the work and the most significant part to convey to audiences (Perez, 2013, p. 12). This testimonial dimension is certainly of utmost importance in this scene, in which Carla shares with the audience the multiple stories of her father’s death and the definitive confirmation delivered by DNA analysis. Again here, though, as we have seen already in other examples, the testimonial form and style are unconventional. Though testimony typically takes the form of a first-person narrative, here it is collective and indexical, uninvested in evoking a literal past. Since the play presents several versions of her father’s death, reenactment and imagination of the event become inseparable exercises.
And yet, as Carla’s account deepens, we learn that indeed, in the end, one of the versions was confirmed by DNA analysis to be the “correct” one, retroactively turning it into a legitimate premise for reenactment. This kind of ambiguity between reinterpretation and reenactment highlights the versatility of reenactment and the fact that the practice is always to an extent constituted as fictional, even when evidence changes to support or discount certain versions of the past.One of the most striking lines from the play is from Carla when she announces, “If my dad’s life were a film, I’d like to play his stunt double” (Arias, 2019, p. 61). It is productive to think about this statement in relation to reenactment practices and particularly the desire of some reenactors to come as close to experiencing danger as possible without succumbing to serious harm. The context for this extreme reenactment is often the battlefield, where reenactors may be driven to demonstrate physical strength, resilience, or endurance. I do not wish to draw parallels between Carla’s expressed desire to be a stunt double in a movie about her father’s life and the desire of reenactors to experience extreme history. Rather, I seek to show how the circumstances and motivations surrounding reenactment differ, and to pose questions to expand the scope of what constitutes the forms and objectives of reenactment practice. In effect, I believe the “stunt double” is an intriguing metaphor for the reenactor, interested in identifying with the past, even experiencing the past, but always protected by the role of being a double in a version of history that, even if extremely violent, remains a simulation of past events. Once again I return to the impact of the familial in this play and the fact that Carla is talking about her father who was killed in a violent confrontation when she says she wants to be his stunt double. Interestingly, some of the common phrases reenactors use to describe what they are seeking, such as “touching time” or feeling a “period rush,” might apply to Carla’s case as well, but the dimension of personal loss makes this kind of stunt double a profoundly different one, linking the notions of “touching time” and the “period rush” to what Perez (2013) has identified in the play as a personal mourning (p. 15).