The Hand and the Hen

In The Hand, a calm and retired man suffered a strange and bizarre mutilation of his right hand
when he sticks it out of the window to find out if it is raining. This action repeats itself some time after with his left hand, and finally with his head. Going beyond the typical depiction of the police genre in almost all of Josseau’s plays as present here, having ingredients of absurd, enigmatic and inexplicable anecdotes, it is possible that a metaphorical interpretation related to Chilean events during a period where people disappeared, were tortured and mutilated existed without a possible culprit.
In The Hen, on the other hand, the absurd and distorted operate in a more “realistic” way and its logic has both solution and continuity. The play is the story of a calm and talkative intellectual man whose wife is violated both mentally and physically by the neighbor. This neighbor is an intellectual who is a renowned and noted pacifist who maintains an intimate relationship with intellectuals of his time and is considered a brilliant lighthouse of humanism in a tormy contemporary world. But precisely that contemporary horror – according to the play- is twice perverse, since this fine intellectual not only attacks the neighbor’s woman on the street, but also rapes her in her own house and ends up doing the same with the outraged husband.