Acevedo Hernández, Antonio (1886–1962)

Antonio Acevedo Hernández (b. 1886; d. 21 September 1962), one of the founders of modern Chilean theater and the originator of social theater. His first plays date back to 1913–1914, a period in Chile marked by the influence of European theater and the Spanish comedia. His primary preoccupation as a dramatist was to define the creative options of an autochthonous theater that could express the social problems and existential dilemmas of the marginated strata—campesino sectors and lower-class urban settlements—of a society in the process of capitalist modernization.

A man of humble origins, Acevedo Hernández was forced to make a living moving from place to place working various jobs, such as farmhand, manual laborer, office worker, and free-lance journalist. This rich and diverse living experience became the main thematic source for his dramas and comedias. He wrote approximately thirty plays that include a variety of forms ranging from sainetes and comedias to political and social theater, and even biblical dramas. Durán Cerda provides a useful classification of Acevedo Hernández's plays. His most important works are Arbol viejo (1930; The Old Tree), which presents the dramatic conflict between the ancestral wisdom of the campesino's world and the changing values fostered by urban society, and Chañarcillo (1933), an epic drama of miners' struggles for social justice in nineteenth-century Chile. In his autobiography Memorias de un autor teatral (1982; Memories of a Playwright), Acevedo Hernández describes his literary formation through an intimate account of the conflicts and challenges he was forced to confront in order to stage his works. He died in Santiago.

See alsoTheater .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Julio Durán Cerda, Panorama del teatro chileno, 1842–1959 (1959), pp. 56-62.

Juan Villegas, "Teatro chileno y afianzamiento de los sectores medios," in Ideologies and Literature 4, no. 17 (1983): 306-318.

Additional Bibliography

Pereira Poza, Sergio. Dramaturgia social de Antonio Acevedo Hernández. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universidad de Santiago, 2003.

                                             J. A. Epple