Theater Mirror Review
The House of Bernarda Alba
by Federico Garcia Lorca
Translated by Emily Mann
Directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques
Costumes and Set Designed by Loann West
Fight Director Dan Zisson
Properties by Eileen Rooney
Stage Manager Vladimir Aseneta
Assistant Stage Managers Tricia Dunphy & Eileen Rodney
Bernarda...............................................Cheryl Dedora
Angustias.................................................Hilary Fabre
Magdalena.............................................Phyllis Rittner
Amelia........................................................Julia Soyer
Martirio..........................................Marianna Bassham
Adela............................................................Cal Levis
Maria Josefa............................................Ann Leacock
Poncia...................................................Ann Carpenter
Maid........................................................Gail Gilmore
Prudencia............................................Elizabeth Kurtz
Beggar Woman.........................................Julie Hurley
Girl.......................................................Eileen Rooney
Woman 1..............................................Tasha Mignott
Woman 2.................................................Ida Rudolph
Woman 3............................................Penelope Morel
Woman in Mourning................................Loann West
Woman in Mourning............................Kimberly Luck
Woman in Mourning.............................Victoria Kurtz
The uninterrupted hour and a half experience of this play begins even
before the house-lights dim. There onstage is a stern, solid,
rectilinear row of eight hard chairs across the center of the stage,
with a straight row of three more against each side wall, all as
inflexibly upright as the mud-yellow spotless walls that nonetheless
betray six jagged cracks in their gleaming surfaces. On each wall hangs
a sensuously crucified Christ, the long porcelain limbs luminous as in
El Greco. A huge cross veiled by a scrim dominates the back wall, while
through two exits into a hallway at the back two other religious
pictures hang, one a ceramic virgin, her heart and feet bright with
blood. This is a recital hall in which Federico Garcia Lorca's play ---
beginning with a funeral and ending in a death --- is performed like a
perfectly orchestrated double string quartet, with every note perfectly
and precisely placed.
In this spotless, airless "House of Bernarda Alba" the matriarch, her
five daughters, their aunt, and six mourning neighbors are clothed in
black. Only significantly subtle bits of lace about the collars betray
individuality or reveal a peep of fevered flesh-tones. Only mad Maria
Josefa, Bernarda's mother, wears wedding-white; only a rebellious
youngest of five daughters briefly dons a dress of dark green; only the
white of bedclothes rips the somber fabric of morality and mourning
eventually assunder. For this is a play of subtleties in which the fall
of an arm, the placement of a figure within a crowd, the merest hint of
changed inflection is as telling as a gun-shot. There are surprises,
yes, but never any accidents. Director --- no, conductor Danielle Faute
ux Jacques has seen to that.
Bernarda Alba is an admired breeder of fine horses, proud of position
and insistent that nosy neighbors must know nothing of incidents within
her walls. For her a mere glance at a man is a sin of fornication, a
funeral fan of any color but dead black an abomination deserving a
beating, and courtship can be only midnight conversations between
window-bars, and then only with parental approval. Is it any wonder her
maids tattle and gossip, her mad mother suckles a swaddled lamb longing
for more babies, her daughters squabble and swelter with suppressed
sexuality, and the kicks of her stallion nearly shatter the walls when
he is in heat? Lorca clearly read the searing grip religion had on sex
and morals in small-town Spain, and the inflexible autocracy it forced
on prideful family heads.
This TheatreZone production --- though only a handful are TheatreZone
regulars --- is such a well-knit whole that it feels sinful to separate
anyone for individual praise. Each fills a role, however large, that is
one strand of an unbroken fabric, one voice in a symphony, and those who
react to a speech are no less acting than the speaker herself. This is
theater at its best, theater as it should be.
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