Resisting ‘Bad Scripts’ in Atabal Creación Artistica’s Yo no quiero ser Desdémona: Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean.

I use Diana Taylor's concept of 'bad scripts' to explore an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello by Atabal Creación Artística, A.C. (Atabal) that premiered in Querétaro, Mexico, in March 2019. Atabal's Yo no quiero ser Desdémona (I don't want to be Desdemona) was collectively created under the direction of Angélica Rogel and was mediated in the press as a response to the epidemic of violence against women in Mexico (Benítez 2019). Following Taylor, I ask: How can a production that features of representation of feminicide call attention to gender-based violence without reinscribing the victim role to women? Can a staging of Desdemona's story be radical? Is Atabal's production, by nature of its source material, always already a 'bad script'? Focusing on three separate moments in the play, I argue that in its positioning of gender as performative and its avoidance of the trope of victimhood, Yo no quiero ser Desdémona avoids playing into a 'bad script.' The play does not provide audiences with ready or easy solutions to the problems of gender-based violence in Mexico, nor does it concretely center the larger systemic issues contributing to gender-based violence. However, I argue that through its careful attention to gender in casting and staging as well as the highly specific use of props, it incorporates activist discourse about feminicide and resists casting women as perpetual victims.