Sergio Blanco’s Tebas Land: Staging an Authentic Fiction

Sergio Blanco’s play Tebas Land (2012) is an exploration of his concept of autoficción [self- or autofiction] in which Blanco shows how creative acts like writing and performance reflect the ways that truth and fiction coexist in our understanding of self and other, and in which identities and staged realities are relational rather than binary. The stage functions in Blanco’s work not as a place to arrive at the real reason or motivation for an event or its consequences, or amplify the context for unexplored histories to enter into the dialogue, but rather as a place where truth is always already fiction. Blanco sets up vectors where fact and fiction are constantly made, undone, and remade . Tebas Land features Oedipus’ infamous patricide as its point of departure, and Blanco uses this story to explore familial murder and the ethics of reconstructing it on stage, as well as the feasibility of re-presenting any “real” or performed act as authentic. Blanco toys with frameworks like theatre of the real, nested space and time, the act of watching and being watched, and objects that shift meaning and thereby defy documentary impulses to fix significance to context.