Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
“The House of Bernada Alba”, adapted by Emily Mann from Federico Garcia Lorca’s play of the same name, opened at the Ballard Underground on Friday, May 5th. Considered by many as a martyr of the Spanish Civil War, Garcia Lorca was a very important early 20th Century Spanish poet and playwright. Like his surrealist friend, the painter Salvador Dali, Lorca was gay.
The play opens after the funeral of the second husband of a control-freak matriarch, Bernada Alba. The situation of her adult daughters, all living at home, runs contrary to Southern-European Catholic custom of that time. At the age of 18 a girl of a certain class was either placed in a suitable, arranged or semi-arranged marriage or packed off to a convent to become a nun. Motivated solely by maintaining her own power, the mother tries everything to prevent her daughters expressing any kind of sexuality, and has adamantly refuses to facilitate courtships or arrange marriages. She keeps them virtual prisoners, both physically and psychologically; telling them not only how they should think and what they should feel but also gives them explicit instruction as to how to repress all their emotions and impulses. Like the present day Vatican and the Protestant Evangelicals, the mother tries to control the most uncontrollable and most powerful aspect of life: sexual attraction. Lorca used this setting as an allegory for how families and society in general repress homosexuality, and how thoroughly destructive that repression is.
Although it is easy to interpret this play as an allegory about political repression, it was actually completed 29 days before the end of the short-lived Second Republic (1931-1936) which was a mildly socialist progressive democratically-elected Republic. The power of the Catholic Church and landowners was curbed and women got the right to vote and to divorce for the first time. ( N.B. French women didn’t get the vote until 1946) In short there was a lot of optimism about liberty, but that liberty was under threat from the right, who eventually overthrew the Republic and ushered in a 40-year dictatorship under General Franco. Still, it was not terribly easy to discuss homosexuality, so like Oscar Wilde, Lorca placed the discussion about the repression of homosexuals in a different setting.
The play itself is uneven, the exposition is overly long, wordy and unimaginative. As a result it takes a long time for any real dramatic tension to develop but when it does, it is gripping. The play also ends too abruptly and does not tie up all the loose ends. I would say that it is a first draft, and unfortunately the author was killed at the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, so he never had an opportunity to rework it during rehearsals. In fact, he probably never even had a staged reading. (N.B. it was first produced in 1945 and his works were banned in Spain until 1953 )
Although it is fairly didactically written, and has no comic relief, I actually found a great deal of humor in how blatant the control-freak mother was, and the directness of her orders actually amused me. Anyone who has had a Catholic mother or mother-in-law, or has been in a repressive educational institution will recognize the power hungry main character. It is not the best play Garcia Lorca could have written but because of his importance in 20th Century Spanish Literature, it has historical value, as well as a lot of meaty roles for women.
It is a tribute to the excellence of the performances of the entire cast, particularly Ruth McRee as Bernarda Alba and Gina Marie Russel as Martririo as well as the direction by Charles Waxberg and Roy Arauz, that this otherwise unfinished play could hold the audience’s attention.
“The House of Bernada Alba” by Federico Garcia Lorca, adapted by Emily Mann, produced by Arouet Theatre Company. Ballard Underground Theatre, 2222 NW Market, Ballard, Seattle. Thurs-Sat. May 4-19, 2012. at 7:30pm; ASL Interpreted Performance; Tickets or call (425) 298-3852
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