The Dance of Los Juan Ranas, or the Hyperbole of Metatheatre

Abstract

This paper focuses on a dance piece that, like much of seventeenth-century Spanish short theater, is characterized by its marked metatheatrical nature. Los Juan Ranas, by an anonymous author, has recently been reedited—and thus rescued from its almost inevitable centuries-long ostracism—with a precise commentary that does not explore the density and omnipresence of its peculiar over-theatricalization.

Eight actresses, appearing under their real names, wish to replace Juan Rana, the acting mask of Cosme Pérez, the most famous comic actor of the period. Challenged to do so by three renowned actors who will serve as judges, all of them wish to “become Juan Rana” by imitating his extraordinary acting skills.

The hypothesis of this paper is that metatheater, through various formalizations—theater within theater, intertextual references, and explicit mentions of the actor’s work—establishes an orientation of meanings whose axial point revolves around actresses and actors who play themselves.

Although everything ends in revelry and dancing to celebrate the birth of the Infante Felipe Próspero, this fact does not manage to obscure that the true tribute was being paid to Juan Rana and, behind him, to the celebrated comediennes, capable of showing with great flexibility the complex and multiple identity of the actor par excellence, exalted by both the people and royalty.

Faced with such a hyperbole of metatheater, the text destabilizes the boundaries between illusion and reality. In a comic key, this remarkable yet apparently innocuous minor piece points to one of the central questions that obsessed the seventeenth century.