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This article examines what is at stake when performers and playwright critically transfigure oral histories when staging them theatrically. Representations of race and colonial history are integral to a nation's conception of its own cultural identity. These issues are at the forefront of many theatre productions in Cape Verde, an intensely creolized West African nation whose islands bear traces of the Europeans and Africans who have commingled there for centuries. The article examines two performances rooted in Cape Verdean history that challenge existing theoretical paradigms for the mimetic relationship between actors and the historical personae they portray onstage. Proposing the concept of the ‘historical imagination’, it explores how theatre artists self-consciously alter the local history they circulate to an international theatre festival stage and, concomitantly, how the theatre festival context and media coverage profoundly impact how national history is told within a global performance arena.

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This article suggests that Augusto Boal's play, A Lua Pequena e a Caminhada Perigosa , a documentary drama about Che Guevara's execution in Bolivia, is an example of "global allegory," differing from Fredric Jameson's notion of "national allegory" because it addresses specific political situations in multiple countries simultaneously. Local stage productions, however, transform global allegories into national allegories, since performances respond to varying political climates. Thus, the same allegory that condemned the Brazilian dictatorship of Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco when staged as part of the São Paulo Feira de Opinião in 1968 served to celebrate the PAIGC party's recent victory over Portuguese colonialism, as well as its installment as government in a one-party state, when performed as part of Cape Verde's Independence Day celebrations in 1977.