Three Plays

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and a cultural and political figure in Peru, explores the complexities of Peruvian society and the writer's imagination in three dramas. In The Young Lady from Tacina, history and fiction collide in a 100-year-old woman known as Mamae, as her grand nephew attempts to turn the rich but contradictory stories of her life into a single narrative. In Kathie and the Hippopotamus, a banker's wife recounts her travel adventures to a writer, but as he embellishes the tales with his own style and tastes, they transform into something altogether new and unexpected. Finally, in La Chunga, the regulars in a small-town bar trade speculations about what happened between the bar's female owner, a local pimp, and their shared object of desire, who has disappeared. Vargas Llorca introduces each play with a foreword that helps to place the action in context.