‘¡El cuento no es el cuento! ¡El cuento es quien lo cuenta!’: terms of subjectivity in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Quíntuples (1985)

Resumen

Luis Rafael Sánchez's two-act play presents a series of monologues delivered by the six members of a fictional Puerto Rican show business troupe, The Morrison Quintuples. Their performance supposedly takes place in front of the participants at a Conference on Family Affairs. Each of the quintuplets presents an improvised speech about his or her experiences of life as a member of the Morrison family. Being the master performer and head of the family, Papá Morrison is the last to speak, as a would-be representative of the consistent paternalism of Puerto Rican culture (Gelpí 1993). Ultimately, the Morrison family comes to represent the Puerto Rican nation, in another manifestation of a metaphor central to Puerto Rican cultural discourse. This metaphor presents Puerto Rico as a family (Gelpí 1993: 1-60, 65, 84-85, 158).