Tag Archives: Federico García Lorca

BERNARDA’S DAUGHTERS

Sisters gather at the family home in Flatbush to figure out what happens next (photo by Monique Carboni)

BERNARDA’S DAUGHTERS
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West Forty-Second St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 4, $37-$87
thenewgroup.org
www.nationalblacktheatre.org

Carlos J. Soto’s set is a harbinger of what is to come in the world premiere of Diane Exavier’s Bernarda’s Daughters, a powerful and moving coproduction from the New Group and National Black Theatre that opened at the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center this week. The audience sits on three sides of the staging area, a sparse room with several painted wooden boxes on the floor and the skeleton of a house, with only the frames of doors and windows, occasionally illuminated in a string of LED lights. While it appears that the five protagonists in the title can leave at any moment, just walk through the empty doors or even climb through the windows, they are trapped by both fear and legacy. For ninety minutes the characters discuss their futures, but it always ends up with them back in the house, their life at a standstill.

Bernarda’s Daughters was inspired by Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s last completed play, The House of Bernarda Alba, which he wrote in 1936, the year he died at the age of thirty-eight. First produced in 1945, the story has been adapted into a musical, an opera, a dance, and several films, with the location changing from Spain to Iran, India, Australia, the American south, and other places around the world, proving the universality of the themes.

Exavier’s version is set in modern-day Flatbush, Brooklyn (my hometown), where five sisters have gathered in the family home: Louise (Pascale Armand), Harriet (Alana Raquel Bowers), Lena (Kristin Dodson), Maryse (Malika Samuel), and Adela (Taji Senior). Their mother is in Haiti, attending the funeral of their father. The play begins with each sister delivering a brief introduction. For example, Louise, a city nurse who has a different mother but the same father as the other four, explains, “Each of us sisters is a room in our mother’s house, our grandmother a countryside. Intimate and immense. If you were to, say . . . put on a play about us, there would be no center-staged couch, no staircase, no fabrication of a gentrifying city just outside the windows, no nod to some ancestral land. Our city is dying and our city is inside of us. There are countries that are dying and those countries are inside of us. We are at the edge of living. We are the world we live in.”

Florence Delva (Tamara Tunie) is concerned about Adela (Taji Senior) in Bernarda’s Daughters (photo by Monique Carboni)

Outside, the noise of construction and protest pierces through their conversations; amid gentrification, there’s been another police shooting of a young, mentally ill, unarmed Black man. “They don’t see the people in the neighborhood. They live in those castles with the police as their front desk,” Adela says of the influx of white people flooding into the neighborhood. “They dial 911 like they’re out of toilet paper. ‘Excuse me, can you just?’ ‘Would you mind?’ It’s sick. I’m so tired of it.” Adela wants to join the march but can’t take action, instead watching it through the window, her face only a few feet from the audience, implicating us in what is happening to their community.

Louise and Harriet have a plan to use land their father left Louise in Jacmel, Haiti, to build a small vacation villa. They all discuss whether they will be moving out of the house — which their parents might have acquired under suspicious circumstances — or staying there with their grandmother, Florence Delva (Tamara Tunie), once their mother returns from her mourning period. When they find out what havoc their parents’ decisions have wrought, however, their lives are suddenly turned upside down.

“Louise, you know you can’t buy, you can’t rent, you can’t be dead here. Shit’s insane,” Adela says. Louise replies, “It’s ridiculous. Whatever happens, just don’t put me in Long Island.”

But as Adela says, “I feel like the house is killing us slowly. . . . You guys have to get out.”

Exavier fills the dialogue with poetic interludes and quotes based on writings and statements by James Baldwin, Louise Glück, Mary Ruefle, Trumbull Stickney, Morgan Parker, Kamau Brathwaite, Toni Morrison, and Florence Miller, whose husband was choked to death in Crown Heights by the police in 1978. In a compelling monologue about sex, sun, cats, and the dead, Maryse, who is a school librarian, says, “I love watching the sun on graves, illuminating names, how bright the light is, blazing the stone, and the sky so blue above recalling the color of bone.”

Later, Harriet says, “You really think I love love so much? You don’t know anything. I’m mourning it! I’m so far past love I never even stood a chance. I was born beyond it. We all were. Love — in this fucking country? My womb was full of rocks. That’s what bodies like ours think of love: babies made of stone. . . . I really think we are the end of it all. And I think that’s what makes us so goddamn American. Because this stupid country is like the waking end of a crazy-ass fever dream. And you trying to out-America everyone you lay down with because the only way to have a little power is to step on somebody else’s back is just wrong! But even worse than that, it’s useless.” Meanwhile, the words free and freedom appear seven times in the play, ideals that seem to be just out of the characters’ reach.

The actors portraying the sisters are outstanding, with native Brooklynite Dodson standing out as the boisterous Lena. The women believably argue and share personal intimacies like real sisters; however, Obie winner Tunie (Building the Wall, Familiar) has her hands full as the over-the-top Florence, who hearkens back to the old days in Haiti but is overdrawn here. The curtain at the rear of the stage feels unnecessary, but Rodrigo Muñoz’s costumes meld Brooklyn with Port-au-Prince, and Marika Kent’s lighting and Kathy Ruvuna’s sound are effective, particularly the never-ending commotion going on outside.

Directed by Dominique Rider with a clear connection to the characters, Bernarda’s Daughters is a potent look at what the Haitian community in New York City has, what it’s lost, and where it might be heading. Like Adela proclaims, “I keep telling you guys. It’s a different Brooklyn out there.” She’s not just talking about Flatbush.

YERMA

An unnamed woman (Billie Piper) and her partner (Brendan Cowell) consider starting a family in Simon Stone’s sizzling Yerma (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through April 21, $40-$135
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Australian director Simon Stone puts domesticity and obsession under a microscope in the blistering, no-holds-barred Yerma, which opened last night at the Park Avenue Armory. His adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s radical 1934 drama, part of the Spanish poet and playwright’s seminal Rural Trilogy that also includes Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, digs deep into the heart and soul of a woman who wants to have a baby but is having trouble conceiving. In a coproduction between the armory and the Young Vic, Stone moves the play to modern-day London, where a thirty-three-year-old blogger identified only as “her” (Olivier Award winner Billie Piper) and her forty-three-year-old partner, international businessman John (Brendan Cowell), have just bought a three-floor apartment. At first the couple is deliriously happy with their life, thrilled to be free of bourgeois expectations, when the woman suddenly and surprisingly decides she wants to have a baby, but John’s enthusiasm is questionable. They have difficulty conceiving, and soon all kinds of connections to sex and reproduction appear, from her pregnant sister, Mary (Charlotte Randle), married to a philanderer, to a former boyfriend, Victor (John MacMillan), now father of a two-year-old, who gets a job at her office. Her twenty-one-year-old assistant, Des (Thalissa Teixeira), talks about her extremely active sex life while the woman’s mother, Helen (Maureen Beattie), can’t stop complaining about raising kids. In none of the situations is having children and being a parent ideal; instead, each person faces their own demons. Over several years, as the woman battles infertility, she descends into an ever-more-difficult struggle to maintain balance in her life as madness threatens.

Two sisters (Billie Piper and Charlotte Randle) evaluate their situations while their mother (Maureen Beattie) looks on in Park Ave. Armory production (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Yerma unfolds on Lizzie Clachan’s spectacular stage, reconfigured specifically for the massive fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which has previously been transformed in dazzling ways for productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Matt Charman and Josie Rourke’s The Machine, and Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth, among other plays, art installations, and music events. The audience is seated on risers on two sides of the stage, a horizontal space encased by glass, making everyone a voyeur peering into someone else’s personal life, as if turning the woman’s blog into a physical reality. The woman is trapped within the glass structure, which evokes her mind; she is the only one who ever makes contact with the walls, except for when her mother washes it early on, not wanting to get involved too much in her daughter’s problems. Each side of the audience can see the other through the glass; at first it looks like it could be a reflection, but it’s not, equating everyone, as if the story we’re all experiencing could be happening to any one of us.

At certain angles, the actors are reflected multiple times; thus, it is often possible to see four or five ghostly, unformed versions of Piper, visible far off to the right and left and across to the other side of the audience. It is a powerful dramatic effect that makes her deepening issues that much more universal. The lightning-fast set changes by lighting designer James Farncombe occur in sudden blackness as magisterial arias echo loudly throughout the space and a monitor announces the next chapter, which have such names as “Conception,” “Disillusion,” and “Deception,” followed by phrases both descriptive and ominous. In addition, the characters are mic’d in such a way that their voices seem transcendent as they echo above them. (The gorgeous music and sound design is by Stefan Gregory.) It’s a testament to Stone and the exceptional cast that they do not let the complex staging overwhelm the intimacy of the story. Nothing is done simply for show or to merely revel in the magic of theater; every aspect of the production has been ingeniously crafted to organically intersect into a wholly involving and shattering experience that will leave you physically and emotionally exhausted as well as thoroughly exhilarated.

A couple’s relationship evolves and devolves in Yerma at the Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

In her North American stage debut, Piper (The Effect, Treats) is electrifying as her character devolves from a fun-loving, sexy, multifaceted woman into a mental wreck falling into the lower depths of the human condition; it is a brave, bold, unforgettable performance that leaves it all out on the stage and on the glass, literally and figuratively. Cowell (Life of Galileo, The Dark Room) marvelously complements her as John, maintaining the mystery behind the man’s fears and desires as he reacts to his partner’s gut-wrenching unpredictability. As a collective unit, the cast displays the wide range of emotions associated with pregnancy, from conception, the morning after pill, and abortion to motherhood, postpartum depression, and separation. It never lets up for a second throughout its one hundred minutes, with no detail extraneous; an early discussion of a certain sexual position only later lends insight into John’s unspoken feelings about potentially becoming a father, and even the characters’ names have been carefully chosen, with biblical and historical references or descriptions of who they are and what they want. And yet Toneelgroep Amsterdam veteran Stone (The Wild Duck, Miss Julie) has opted to not call the woman “Yerma” even though that is the title of the play — the name is shouted out only once in Lorca’s original — emphasizing her lack of identity without a child while reminding us again that she is us. It’s a terrifying prospect, brought to life in this stunning, brutal production.

LORCA IN NEW YORK: A CELEBRATION

Multiple locations
April 5 – July 21, free – $25
www.lorcanyc.com

In 1929-30, Spanish poet and playwright Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (1898-1936) lived in New York City, where he studied at Columbia, writing the surrealist play The Public (El público) and the seminal book Poet in New York, which includes “Nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge”: “No one sleeps in the sky. No one. / No one sleeps. / The creatures of the moon sniff and circle their cabins. / Live iguanas will come to bite the men who don’t dream / and he who flees with broken heart will find on the corners / the still, incredible crocodile under the tender protest of the stars.” In the preface to Pablo Medina and Mark Statman’s translation of the book, Edward Hirsch concludes, “The testament he left behind is a fierce indictment of the modern world incarnated in city life, but it is also a wildly imaginative and joyously alienated declaration of residence.” The great writer’s time in Gotham is being honored with “Lorca in NY: A Celebration,” more than three months of some two dozen special literary events being held in the city that was, for a brief time, Lorca’s home. The festival kicks off April 5 with the opening of “Back Tomorrow: Federico García Lorca / Poet in New York” in the New York Public Library’s Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery; running through July 20, the free exhibit features original manuscripts, letters, photos, drawings, and more. On April 7 at 7:00 ($10), La Bruja, Simply Rob, Los Gitanos Juveniles, Anthony Carrillo, Raphael Cuascut, Angel Rodriguez Sr., Julio Rodriguez, Mario Rodriguez, and Alex La Salle will gather together for “Lorca Extravaganza” at Bowery Poetry Club for an evening of musical and spoken-word interpretations of Lorca’s writings and his personal favorite songs. On April 8 at 6:00, Gonzalo Sobejano will deliver the free lecture “Memoria de Lorca, A través de mis años en la Universidad de Columbia (Memory of Lorca, Through My Years at Columbia University)” at Columbia, followed by a cocktail reception.

The legacy of Federico García Lorca and his book POET IN NEW YORK will be celebrated in wide-ranging multidisciplinary festival

On April 9 at 7:00 ($15), Instituto Cervantes will host “Lorca’s Universe,” a concert with guitarist José María Gallardo del Rey and violinist Anabel Garcia del Castillo. On April 16 (and continuing through May 30), “Lorca in Vermont” opens at the CUNY Graduate Center, examining Lorca’s time spent in Vermont with Philip Cummings; in conjunction with the opening, Joan Jonas, Caridad Svich, Christopher Maurer, Ben Sidran, Mónica de la Torre, and Eliot Weinberger will come together on April 16 at 6:00 (free) for the panel discussion “Interpreting Lorca” in CUNY’s Martin E. Segal Theatre. On April 19 at 7:00 (free), Jose García Velasco will deliver the lecture “Lorca, Dalí, Buñuel & Eternal Youth: Life in the Residencia de Estudiantes” at Instituto Cervantes. On May 1 from 2:00 to 9:00 (free), “After Lorca: A Day of Poetry and Performance” at CUNY features LaTasha Diggs, Rob Fitterman, Eileen Myles, Judah Rubin, Sara Jane Stoner, Aynsley Vandenbroucke, and the Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group offering their own responses to Lorca’s legacy. On June 4 at 7:00 ($25), Live from the NYPL director Paul Holdengräber hosts “Celebrating Federico García Lorca.” Overnight on June 4-5 (free), David Bestué will make his way through the streets of the city, creating “an echo to Lorca’s poems” in honor of the 115th anniversary of the poet’s birth. On June 5 ($25), “Words and Music: Patti Smith and Friends” will present “A Birthday Concert for Lorca” at Bowery Ballroom. On June 10 at 8:00 ($8), an all-star group of writers will gather at the Poetry Project for “Poet in New York: Reading Lorca”; among the participants reading from the book will be Paul Auster, Aracelis Girmay, John Giorno, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mónica de la Torre, and Frederic Tuten. On July 9 at 1:15 at the NYPL (free), Sharonah Fredrick will discuss “Lorca, Jews, and African-American: From Romance to Racism or Simple Misunderstanding?” And if that weren’t enough, there are other events as well, including a walking tour, a film series, and more, all organized by the Fundación Federico García Lorca, which is run by Lorca’s family, and Acción Cultural Española.

VITAL VOX: A VOCAL FESTIVAL

The fourth annual Vital Vox Festival, which explores the far-reaching capabilities of the human voice, is back after Hurricane Sandy canceled fall performances

Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave.
March 25-26, $15, 8:00
917-267-0363
www.vitalfoxfest.com
www.roulette.org

The fourth annual Vital Vox Festival, dedicated to exploring the seemingly limitless range and power of the human voice, was scheduled to present a half dozen cutting-edge performers over the course of two nights at Roulette in Brooklyn on October 29-30, but Hurricane Sandy silenced the festivities. Not to let Mother Nature get it down, the festival will now take place March 25-26 at Roulette. Monday, March 25, will consist of a cappella jazz and blues singer and composer Philip Hamilton’s “Vocalscapes: Solitude” for voice, percussion, and electronics; excerpts from New York-based, Uruguayan-born audiovisual artist Sabrina Lastman’s “An Encounter with ‘El Duende,’” which pays tribute to Federico García Lorca using voice, movement, sound, bowed psaltery, megaphone, and visuals; Loom Trio’s “Music from Erosion: A Fable,” with Raphael Sacks, Kate Hamilton, and Sasha Bogdanowitsch playing excerpts from the 2012 multidisciplinary theatrical production; and San Francisco-born, Brooklyn-based violinist, composer, vocalist, and poet Sarah Bernstein’s Unearthish, a duo with percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. Tuesday’s program features Lisa Karrer’s “Collision Theory: Works and Premieres for Voice & Multi-Media,” a collaboration with partner David Simons that will include her “Meeting Max: Vocal Experiments with Interactive Video Mixer” and his “The Opera Within the Opera,” with electronics, triggered Theremin, and keyboard; multidisciplinary artist, composer, and teacher Bodganowitsch’s “Timbre Tree,” an excerpt from a song cycle involving live looping and processing, dance and movement, text, and such instruments as the syrinx, fujara, koncovka, halo drum, and karimba, featuring the Loom Ensemble (Andrew Broaddus, Helen Joyce, Sacks, Hamilton and Michael Bauer); and San Francisco-based Pamela Z’s “Works for Voice, Live Processing, and Video,” with excerpts from “Memory Trace” along with other short pieces.

POSTPONED: VITAL VOX: A VOCAL FESTIVAL

The fourth annual Vital Vox Festival explores the far-reaching capabilities of the human voice

VITAL VOX FESTIVAL: VOX ELECTRONICS
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave.
October 29-30, $15, 8:00
917-267-0363
www.vitalfoxfest.com
www.roulette.org

The fourth annual Vital Vox Festival, dedicated to exploring the seemingly limitless range and power of the human voice, will present a half dozen cutting-edge performers over the course of two nights at Roulette in Brooklyn. Monday, October 29, will consist of a cappella jazz and blues singer and composer Philip Hamilton’s “Vocalscapes: Solitude” for voice, percussion, and electronics; excerpts from New York-based, Uruguayan-born audiovisual artist Sabrina Lastman’s “An Encounter with ‘El Duende,’” which pays tribute to Federico García Lorca using voice, movement, sound, bowed psaltery, megaphone, and visuals; and San Francisco-born, Brooklyn-based violinist, composer, vocalist, and poet Sarah Bernstein’s Unearthish, a duo with percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. Tuesday’s program features Lisa Karrer’s “Collision Theory: Works and Premieres for Voice & Multi-Media,” a collaboration with partner David Simons that will include her “Meeting Max: Vocal Experiments with Interactive Video Mixer” and his “The Opera Within the Opera,” with electronics, triggered Theremin, and keyboard; multidisciplinary artist, composer, and teacher Sasha Bodganowitsch’s “Mirror Upon Mirror,” a song cycle involving live looping and processing, dance and movement, text, and such instruments as the syrinx, fujara, koncovka, halo drum, and karimba; and San Francisco-based Pamela Z’s “Works for Voice, Live Processing, and Video,” with excerpts from “Memory Trace” along with other short pieces. [Ed. note: The Vital Vox Festival has been postponed because of Hurricane Sandy; new dates will be available shortly.]

TERESA’S ECSTASY

Carlotta (Begonya Plaza) and Andrés (Shawn Elliott) explore sex and religion in TERESA’S ECSTASY

Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Through April 1, $61
212-989-2020
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

Something strange happened after we returned to our seats following a brief stroll outside in the beautiful fresh air of a lovely end-of-winter evening during intermission of Teresa’s Ecstasy, running at the Cherry Lane through April 1. It was like we had walked back into a different play. What had been a warm, intimate, and engaging story suddenly turned acidic, mean-spirited, and convoluted. Thank goodness the dreadful second act is much shorter than the tender first. Playwright Begonya Plaza stars as Carlotta, a writer who has returned to Barcelona to get her husband, Andrés (Shawn Elliott), to finally sign their divorce papers and to research a magazine story she is doing on St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun of Jewish ancestry who, as Carlotta notes, “overcame death-threatening illnesses, defamations, ethnic and religious genocide by the Spanish Inquisition, reformed her own church, founded over a dozen monasteries, and all the while writing works, masterworks, of literature.” But Andrés, a painter, has no time for organized religion and mysticism. “She’s part of an institution that excludes, kills, exploits, and brainwashes people into complacency,” the painter says. “God is an invention to control the masses for power and wealth.” While that is not necessarily an original argument, the debate works well between the passionate Carlotta and the gentle, easygoing Andrés, even when they are joined by Carlotta’s editor, Becky (Linda Larkin), a sharp-dressed elitist blonde who is immediately at odds with Andrés. But when Becky and Carlotta return from Avila in the second act, they are transformed in such a way that is utterly unbelievable, delivering clichéd diatribes on sex and religion as Andrés turns nasty and rotten, completely undermining everything that was so well established in the first act. Elliott, who had been in the midst of an unforgettable performance, his every movement a work of art, from his arms, hands, and head to his soft eyes that gaze into the audience, stumbled badly over one line, as if he couldn’t get himself to say it out loud in public. Meanwhile, Plaza forces in references to Cat Stevens and Federico García Lorca that feel out-of-place and downright unnecessary. Directed by Will Pomerantz, Teresa’s Ecstasy features tantalizing foreplay that fails to reach a satisfying conclusion.