5 November 2010: Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba
5 November 2010: Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba
Trans. Carmen Zapata and Michael Dewell. University of Massachusetts Department of Theater, performing in the Curtain Theater. Directed by Toby Bercovici. Scenic design, Miguel Romero. Student actors except for a professional actor, Jeannine Haas, as Bernarda Alba, and Troy Pepicelli cross-dressed as the grandmother, Maria Josefa. 1 hour 40 minutes, without intermission.
Lorca’s grim tale of oppression in a Spanish village was very well mounted in this production by the UMass Theater Department. An all-female (except for one instance of cross-dressing — see above), mostly undergraduate, cast is very ably directed by Toby Bercovici. My guess is that Bercovici is a graduate student. Working with students without a great deal of acting experience and faced with the formidable emotional requirements of Lorca’s demanding script, he presented a clear, articulate course of action on a minimalist stage on which a very well rehearsed corps of actors moved with purpose and discipline.
The Curtain Theater is a so-called “black box,” which in this production was set up “in the round” — that is, audience on four sides of a rectangular playing space. The playing area consisted of a large rectangular platform and a second, smaller platform on top of it, the both painted white, creating a steps-up situation all around. On the second platform were a series of very tall chairs, constructivist in style, consisting of welded square rods, making up chairs with open backs and simple seats, made entirely of metal except for the seat itself, and capable of surviving very rough treatment. In the course of the play the actors not only moved the chairs from a supine or prone position to an upright one, but threw the chairs down forcibly onto the platform, which was hollow underneath, and which consequently gave up a loud, banging sound, often startling in its intensity. The actors used these chairs in many more ways than simply to sit on; they were used to punctuate action and emotion, to represent windows, ladders, or barricades, and even used as weapons: a formidable array of uses that presented palpable extensions of the arm, the hand, the head, and the heart. They could take on beautiful, spare artistic formations, sometimes precisely symmetrical; at other times they could represent the chaos characteristic of the ongoing dramatic action. It must have taken many hours of extra rehearsal to get this right, but get it right they did. It was a brilliant conception on the part of the designer, Miguel Romero.
The result was an added richness, an extra dimension of material, physical articulation of this increasingly intensifying action. The mother, Bernarda, ably performed by Jeannine Haas, who played the part with a noticeable limp (I don’t know if Lorca calls for this in his stage directions), is a woman terribly repressed and determined to pass this repression on to her daughters. A woman with an iron will, but marked as