Triana was born in Bayamo, Cuba («the cradle of Independence») in 1932. He studied in Cuba, was inspired by Martí as a student. He became a friend of the writer Virgilio Piñera in 1952 and published some poems in the literary magazine Ciclón. He sympathized and participated with the incipient revolutionary movement and, after the attack on Moncada (1953), was warned to leave the country. He left for Spain in 1954, spent two years at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and started attending and working in theatre. In order to have the opportunity to see actors and directors at work, he swept the stage for a theatre company. He saw plays by Beckett and Ionesco, which impressed him, and started writing plays: Un incidente cotidiano (which he destroyed) and El Mayor General hablará de teogonía (The Major General Will Speak of Theogony, 1957). He acted in Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors and Piñera's The Slaves. Inspired by Piñera's Electra Garrigó, he wrote Medea en el espejo (Medea in the Mirror, 1960) upon his return to Cuba after the revolution. These plays were followed by Parque de la fraternidad (Fraternity Park, 1962) and Muerte de un ñeque (Death of a Thug) in 1963. La noche de los asesinos (Night of the Assassins, published in English as The Criminals) was written in 1965 and won the Casa de las Américas award in 1966. Ceremonial de guerra (War Ceremonial) was written between 1968 and 1973 (recently published for the first time by Ediciones Persona). Revolico en el campo de marte (Frolic in the Battle Field), written in 1971, premiered at the Bentley Theatre, Dartmouth College, in 1981. Palabras comunes (Worlds Apart, 1979-86) was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon Avon in 1986. Triana lives in Paris with his wife, Chantal.

In Abelardo Estorino's interview with Triana and Vicente Revuelta, director of the award-winning production of Assassins, Triana claims he began a three-act version of the play in 1958 («Destruir los fantasmas», 6). In an interview with Ramiro Fernández-Fernández, «José Triana habla de su teatro» (38-39), Triana states that a one-act version of Assassins began taking shape in his mind as early as 1957-58 and that it depicts the prerevolutionary miasma, the need to find a solution to national problems; he could complete the play only with the triumph of the revolution, with «the national consciousness that the revolution has given our people, that has allowed our people to move forward». Thus he was surprised that critics considered the play antirevolutionary. Fernández-Fernández (40) attributes the critical misunderstanding of the work to an «unfortunate distortion» on the part of bourgeois critics unable to comprehend the avant-garde, which is then appropriated by «reactionary critics, who impose an interpretation alien to the possibilities offered by the text».

Terry L. Palls, in The Theatre in Revolutionary Cuba, compares Assassins to theatre of the absurd, which poses existential rather than social problems. Frank Dauster («Game of Chance», 168) stresses that Triana's works «are rooted in a critical sense of Cuban reality», and although he associates them with theatre of the absurd, he qualifies the term with a quote from Julio Miranda's article «José Triana o el conflicto»: «The fact [is] that the absurd has not been utilized in Cuba as an instrument of metaphysical investigation, with reactionary results à la Ionesco and Beckett, in which the nothingness winds up filling the stage with its oppressive negativity, but rather [as] an effort at a sociopolitical search for a judgement of an antihuman order of things, absurdly sanctioned by law and custom and penetrated, as such, absurdly, by the new theatre».

Scheduler's statement that the Cubans had no theatre was simply not true. George Woodyard, in «Perspectives on Cuban Theater», describes the intense theatrical activity in Cuba following the revolution; «In the five years preceding the Revolution, only 30 plays were staged, many of them because February of 1958 had been designated Cuban Theater Month» (42), but the political transformation was accompanied by a cultural one. Theatrical activities were organized by the National Council on Culture, which put playwrights, directors, actors, and technical and artistic staff on salary and funded productions. The Casa de las Américas and the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba held competitions and festivals to encourage, stage, and publish theatrical works. Collective theatre groups (creación colectiva) such as the Conjunto Dramático del Oriente, founded in 1961, offered training in theatrical production, history, and analysis. Aside from producing international and Latin American plays, the group resuscitated the teatro de relaciones, «a dramatic form which was developed in Cuba by the oppressed classes and used since colonial times until its disappearance in the early 1950's»; this theatre searched «for its roots in the past as a means of establishing direct communication with the people within the framework of the Revolution» (48). The Grupo Teatro Escambray, started in 1968, developed a Marxist-Leninist program consistent with the ideological aims of the revolution itself and traveled to rural areas to work on specific local issues and political problems. Many groups like this formed in the late 1960s and continued working into the 1970s -La Yaya, Grupo Teatrova, Grupo Teatro Estudio, Grupo Yarabey, etc. However, as Mario Beneditti noted, theatre in Cuba was experiencing a «serious crisis. The first time I came to Cuba, in 1966, there was sustained theatrical activity, with various good quality companies. On my second visit, in 1967, I saw a couple of high-level shows, like, for example, Unos hombres y otros, an adaptation of stories by Jesús Díaz, and La noche de los asesinos, by José Triana..., But then came the collapse» (qtd. in Woodyard, «Perspectives», 49; the suspension marks do not represent an omission from the text). Woodyard advances several hypotheses for the decline of theatre in Cuba, among them the intellectual intolerance (exemplified by the Padilla affair in 1968 and UNEAC's disagreement over Arrufat) and the gradual institutionalization of the Cuban revolution.

Triana and Taylor, «Entrevista», (in Taylor, Imagen, 116).

«Declaración de la UNEAC», in Arrufat, 11-12. A highly charged dialogue (in which Triana was directly involved) concerning «revolutionary» and «antirevolutionary» art took place in Cuba in the 1960s. The uproar surrounding the «José Antonio Ramos» (UNEAC) award to Arrufat's Los siete contra Tebas and Padilla's Fuera del juego in 1968 shows the political questions surrounding aesthetic representation of ambiguity and ahistoricity. Triana (who had already won Cuba's Casa de las Américas award with La noche de los asesinos in 1965) and two other members of the UNEAC committee supported the awards for Arrufat and Padilla, while the remaining two members denounced the works for ideological reasons that could also have been applied to Triana's Asesinos: «Its antihistoricism is expressed through the exaltation of individualism even in the face of the collective needs of the people in a period of historical development, as well as in its circular, repetitive -rather than linear, ascendent- concept of time. Both attitudes have always typified right-wing thinking and have traditionally been used as instruments of counter-revolution».

Page numbers for Assassins refer to Dauster, Lyday, and Woodyard, 9 dramaturgos hispanoamericanos, vol 1. Again, translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Turner (83) distinguishes between ritual and secular ritual or ceremony: Ritual «does not portray a dualistic, almost Manichean, struggle between order and void, cosmos and chaos, formed and indeterminate, with the former always triumphing in the end. Rather it is a transformative self-immolation of order as presently constituted, even sometimes a voluntary sparagmos or self-dismemberment of order in the subjunctive depths of liminality».

«Man grows through antistructure, and conserves through structure», 114. Turner (24-25), like the eminent anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), distinguishes three phases in the ritual process -separation, transition and incorporation. «The first phase of separation clearly demarcates sacred space and time from profane or secular space and time... It includes symbolic behavior -especially symbols of reversal or inversion of things, relationships... During the intervening phase of transition... the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few (though sometimes these are most crucial) of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states... The passage from one social status to another is often accompanied by a parallel passage in space, a geographical movement from one place to another. This may take the form of a mere opening of doors or the literal crossing of a threshold which separates two distinct areas... The third phase... "incorporation" includes symbolic phenomena and actions which represent the return of the subjects to their new, relatively stable, well-defined position in the total society». Turner, From Ritual to Theatre.

From Adrian Mitchell's adaptation of Triana's Assassins, published as The Criminals, trans. Pablo Armando Fernández and Michael Kustow, Drama Review 14/2. (Winter 1970): 122.