CHOCRÓN, ISAAC

CHOCRÓN, ISAAC (1930– ), Venezuelan playwright, novelist, literary critic, and stage director. One of the most prominent figures in his country's theater, Chocrón held important positions in official institutions and taught courses at United States universities. He wrote a score of dramas, eight novels, and a number of critical essays. His dramatic strategies are avant-gardist and experimental, with the purpose of bringing the audience into active involvement with the intellectual, social, and emotional issues of his plays. Jewish conflicts involving generational gaps, life in a non-Jewish environment, and the search for Jewish-Sephardi root are among his themes in the plays Animales feroces ("Wild Animals," 1963) and Clípper (1987), and in his novel Rómpase en caso de incendio ("Break Glass in Case of Fire," 1975). In these, as in his play Escrito y sellado ("Written and Sealed," 1993), there is a search for Jewish spiritual answers to the plight of man faced with uncertainty, alienation, and fate. Chocrón's writing focuses on the existential issues of modern times, such as loneliness, the search for identity, sexual marginality, social ambition, and spiritual vacuum within the context of Venezuelan reality. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: D.B. Lockhart, Jewish Writers of Latin America. A Dictionary (1997); S. Rotker, Isaac Chocrón y Elisa Lerner (1992); E. Friedman, "The Beast Within: The Rhetoric of Signification in Isaac Crocrón's Animales feroces," in: Folio, 17 (1987); idem, "Playing with Fire: The Search of Selfhood in Isaac Chocrón's Rómpase en caso de incendio," in: Confluencia, 3:2 (1988). (Florinda Goldberg (2nd ed.)