Provoking Intimacies: Staging Las relaciones de Clara in Havana

This article examines the blurring of distinctions between audience and actor in Cuban director Carlos Díaz’s creative 2007 staging of Las relaciones de Clara (written by Dea Loher, 1999) in the musty rooms of a colonial home. Using queer theorist Leo Bersani and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ theories, I investigate how a proliferation of intimacies creates a sense of sameness that is rooted in physical proximity and discomfort. This essay shows how re-imagining the possibility of physical intimacies can produce a shared hopefulness between audience, play troupe and the nation. What makes these theatrical intimacies relevant in a contemporary Cuban context is how they resist the state’s persistent attempts to fabricate its own version of a unified society. (BW, Article in English