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This essay argues that the search for a new audience, for new stories, and for a new aesthetics in the theater of Frank Disla is emblematic of the dialogue transnational Dominican theater practitioners have begun with the national “script” for Dominican culture and identity. I suggest that the insistent formal experimentation in plays about migration by Disla is suggestive of the transnational artist’s pursuit of new forms of political and artistic belonging. Not only do Disla’s characters explore the ontological condition of belonging to more than one society (or perhaps none), his own dramatic oeuvre occupies an unsure space in literary history as well.

This article examines the figure of Lucy Boscana who was cast as counterpoint archetypal mothers of the national family in René Marqués’s La carreta (1952) and Francisco Arriví’s Vejigantes (1958). I contend that Lucy Boscana’s repeat performances – over 800 of them – of the jíbara mother Doña Gabriela haunts the Puerto Rican stage to the extent that it eclipses the Afro-Puerto Rican mother Mamá Toña in the Puerto Rican cultural memory. My argument considers the use of blackface and the construction of the female body as object of the male gaze as central factors in the erasure of black subjectivity from the Puerto Rican stage.