The Liminal Interstices of Buero Vallejo’s "Aventura en lo gris"

In this essay, Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage and scholarship by Victor Turner are used to construct a theoretical framework for analyzing Antonio Buero Vallejo’s Aventura en lo gris as a work of liminality. Van Gennep’s original conception of the three stages of rituals performed in small-scale societies as part of rites of passage serves as the foundation for exploring how the characters and spectators of Aventura en lo gris, as “passengers” or “initiands,” fare on their journey through those stages. In traversing the limen, we discover its power as a space that is both creative and dangerous, and in which we are invited to self-reflect and transform or succumb to our baser selves.