SOURCE: “Reality, Illusion, and Alienation: Buero Vallejo's La Fundación,” in Hispanofila, Vol. 90, No. 3, May, 1987, pp. 47–62.

In the following essay, Halsey discusses Buero Vallejo's techniques for exposing the human condition in his La Fundación and other plays.

From En la ardiente oscuridad (1950) to La Fundación (1974) a paramount concern in the theater of Antonio Buero Vallejo has been alienation, our inability to face the tragic reality of the human condition. The dialectical struggle between tranquil blindness and painful awareness that occurs on both the socio-political and metaphysical levels characterizes all of Buero's dramas. However, it is in La Fundación that this struggle is seen in all of its complexity and where ideas presented in earlier dramas are developed most skillfully. Indeed this tragedy is one of Buero's most significant plays to date for both its ideas and dramatic technique. The reflections in the present paper constitute...