14 November 2009: de Molina, Marta the Divine
Translated and adapted by Harley Erdman. Umass Theater, Rand Theater. Directed by Gina Kaufmann
A thoroughly delightful and very funny adaptation of a play by the prolific Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina, author of some ninety surviving plays out of an unknown total. There is a certain formulaic quality to the play. If it were an Italian playwright in question, one could make certain references to pasta machines churning out delightful but predictable semolina concoctions that needed only a few minutes in boiling water to be palatable. As it is, although I do not know of a Spanish equivalent, the formula is safe in the hands of a master. Melina had a good idea and spent a very productive weekend on it. The good idea was to write a play with a central character, a woman who wants to rebel against the few, colorless conventional choices available to most women in this society, without having to pay any price at all. The resourceful Marta is capable of responding to any challenge by disguising herself, telling what are in grave moral situations called lies, pitting fools against one another, biding her time without ever seeming in the least passive, and otherwise demonstrating her talent for seizing the main chance. The actress playing Marta, Monica Giordano, is fully up to the challenge, as much as her character is. More round than sylph-like, in another ten or fifteen years she will be fully up to such roles as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, Volumnia, Queen Katherine, and other commanding, self-asserting women of such ilk.
This is a way of saying that Molina’s play would be somewhat bland without a strong actress playing the title role and, for that matter, a clear-sighted, imaginative director to pick up all of Molina’s signals, written originally for a company of actors who were very used to doing that and running expertly with them. That director also must be someone who is confident enough of her abilities to have a really good time with the script and to encourage all her actors to do the same. This was just the third performance, but already it seemed that all the kinks had been thoroughly ironed out; the timing was faultless from beginning to end, and the actors had all relaxed into their parts.
The characters are type characters, of a kind that reminded me of the characters of the Italian commedia dell’arte: nicely inhabitable by performers who are used to playing the same role in a number of marginally different guises, using the special business, the body language, the gait, the vocal mannerisms that go with the role. (Perhaps the most memorable example of that, in a crowded field, was the servant Inés, who had a delightful way of walking pidgeon-toed up on her toes, her forearms held at bosom-level and the hands dangling from the wrists, all the while with a perpetual empty-headed “I’m just a servant but I’m good at my work” smile on her face.) And so we have the resourceful heroine, the si