By Michelle Lopez, SCSU student and RBML Fall 2025 archives intern

In 2020, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired the papers of Puerto Rican playwright, director, educator, and cultural leader Myrna Casas (1934–2022). A major figure in Caribbean and Latina theater, Casas’s work addressed questions of identity, politics, and women’s experience through realism, satire, and elements of the absurd. Now fully processed and open for research, the Myrna Casas Papers document her long and influential career in theater and education.

I began processing the collection in September 2025 and felt privileged to work so closely with the papers of such an important Puerto Rican playwright. As a native Spanish speaker, I was also especially glad to be able to engage directly with the language of Casas’s manuscripts, drafts, correspondence, and other materials.

Overview of the Collection

The Myrna Casas Papers document Casas’s creative, professional, political and academic activities from the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first century. The collection reflects her work as a playwright, director, translator, and adaptor of dramatic texts, as well as her career as a professor and her involvement in theatrical institutions in Puerto Rico and abroad.

Materials include drafts and annotated manuscripts of plays – often preserved in multiple versions – alongside production files containing programs, photographs, design notes, and administrative documentation. Correspondence with collaborators, media outlets, theater companies, academic institutions, and students offers insight into Casas’s professional networks, while teaching materials such as student papers, dissertations, theses and other scholarly writing reflect her long-standing commitment to theater education. Her short period as a politician/legislator is also documented here, though very few documents were preserved.  Personal materials, including photographs and audiovisual media, document her international travel, family life, and professional activities.

Taken together, these materials provide a rich record of Casas’s theatrical output and her sustained engagement with theater as an artistic, pedagogical, and civic practice.

Creative and Intellectual Context

Several recurring themes emerge throughout the collection that help situate Casas’s work within broader theatrical and cultural movements, especially within Puerto Rico. Her plays frequently center women navigating social expectations, prejudice, institutional constraints, and political realities. Drafts and revisions illustrate how characters and themes evolved over time through sustained experimentation, revealing Casas’s creative process in remarkable detail.

Questions of Puerto Rican identity and cultural belonging appear throughout her writing, particularly in relation to the island’s political status and its cultural relationship to the United States. These concerns are often addressed through non-realistic forms, including satire and elements of the absurd. The collection also reflects Casas’s belief in theater as a form of public engagement. Materials related to productions, teaching, and institutional work demonstrate her commitment to theater as a space for dialogue, critique, and education, including efforts to engage Puerto Rican youth through community-based drama programs.

Arrangement and Processing

The collection was arranged to reflect both the breadth of Casas’s activities and the interconnections among her creative, teaching, and professional work. Drafts of individual plays often survive in multiple iterations, including early sketches, heavily annotated rehearsal drafts, and later revisions. These materials were grouped to allow researchers to trace the development of specific works over time, even when some loose or fragmentary pages could not be conclusively identified.

Personal and professional materials frequently overlap, reflecting the close relationship between Casas’s artistic practice and her roles as an educator and mentor. Preservation work was undertaken to stabilize fragile materials and support long-term access, including the removal of rusted fasteners and deteriorating bindings, and the rehousing of photographs and papers in archival enclosures.

Research Potential

The Myrna Casas Papers support research in theater and performance history in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean; feminist theater and representations of women on stage; Latino, Latina, and Latine cultural production; dramaturgy and creative process; and theater pedagogy and academic life. Because the collection includes both artistic works and extensive contextual documentation, it also lends itself to interdisciplinary research in literature, cultural studies, history, and performance studies.

Archivist’s Reflections

While processing the Myrna Casas Papers, I was struck by the extent to which Casas documented not only her own work, but also the people and institutions that shaped her professional and creative life. The collection reflects a sustained engagement with mentorship, collaboration, and artistic lineage, evident in the materials she preserved from colleagues, students, and earlier generations of Puerto Rican artists.

The papers also offer a material record of theatrical production before the widespread use of digital technologies. Correspondence, administrative and production logistics, and revisions conducted entirely on paper provide insight into the practical realities of producing and sustaining theatrical work across several decades. For students of theater history, these materials make visible the financial costs, administrative labor, coordination, and persistence required to bring plays from draft to performance.

By making the Myrna Casas Papers accessible, RBML supports ongoing scholarship and creative engagement with the legacy of a playwright and educator whose work shaped Puerto Rican and Latin American theater and influenced generations of students and collaborators.