Dialogo del rebusque o la fantasía de la realidad (“Dialogue of the Scavenger or the Fantasy of Reality”) is based predominantly on Francisco de Quevedo’s seventeenth-century picaresque novel, El Buscón. The play narrates the trials of the protagonist, Don Pablos, during his return to earth from hell, which he makes with the permission of the devils and despite the objections of Quevedo. Using the Brechtian technique of “narrative interruption”, García constructs a complex work in which seventeenth-century Spain and present-day Colombia are tightly enmeshed. Originally performed in 1982, Dialogo del rebusque remains one of García’s most celebrated plays and has recently been revived in celebration of the 45th anniversary of Teatro La Candelaria.

“This [childhood] memory of Quevedo—funny, rude, lewd, casual, and profoundly plebeian—had stayed remained etched in my mind. When I had to confront the Quevedo introduced to us at the University, I was profoundly disappointed. I wanted to reclaim the Quevedo of my youth, and in this spirit I began the work of recreating a text that, in addition to the novel El Buscón, would come out of stories like ‘El alguacil [sic] endemoniado o el demonio enguacilado’, ‘gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo...’ as well as other poems and songs. Through this method I thought I could create our own Colombian version of the Spanish Quevedo. In the political language of the time, this would be called a ‘recovery operative’—one that recovered a Quevedo for our criollo imaginary. With Don Pablos, the job was easy, for he is a migrant traveling from here to there. He came to us with the conquest and stayed.”

There is no video documentation of this work.