Never underestimate the power of a classic to communicate across time, cultures, and language in new and urgent messaging. We have Producing Artistic Director Hugo Medrano, the longest serving Artistic Director of a company in Washington’s now crowded field of professional theatres, to thank for bringing us this work from Spain’s Golden Age. He directs a production that speaks about power turned to tyranny, swift reversals of fortune stirring social discontent, vulnerability of women in a society where male aggression goes unchecked, and the plight of the individual traversing such a system where reality keep shifting. Life indeed seems a dream as we wake up every day to a new “reality.”
Playwright Nando Lopez has adapted the heroic scope of the original play, La Vida es Sueño by Pedro Calderón de la Barca into a muscular, serviceable work for GALA Hispanic Theatre’s stage. He pays homage to the great Calderón, keeping some of the flowery poetic passages and long declamatory monologues, but then pushing the action forward almost cinematically, which only adds to the dream-like quality of changing realities. He has taken seriously the artist’s responsibility to wade into and excavate a work and shed light on the remarkably resonant themes to today: our city as a situation room in constant flux.
Power turns to tyranny. We see its effects early in the play when the character Rosaura comes to a powerful ‘capital’ of a kingdom and sees a man chained behind bars. Through no fault of his own, Segismundo, we learn, has been kept in this cage since an infant, so paranoid is the King, his father, on being ousted.
It is an indelible image, and actor Daniel Alonso de Santos makes himself into a ravaged creature, with the penetrating eyes and pale, blueish contorted torso of an El Greco. There is also the sound that becomes a kind of musical motif in the play, as the bars of the cell are slid open and clang shut layered with the clanking of Segismundo’s chains.
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The play also features seemingly arbitrary reversals that prove disruptive and disturbing. Segismundo’s journey serves as a warning. When we treat a human being as less than human, we create a monster. When Segismundo is released by his father, who tries to reinstate his son to his princely role and re-integrate him into society, Segismundo acts out enraged, violent, and vengeful. The burden is on him to rehabilitate himself and learn how not to mirror the tyranny and abuse he’s been shown.
The character of Rosaura projects a modern woman, especially in her struggle in a series of identity “makeovers” to be recognized on her own terms. First, we see her disguised as a stiff male courtier. It turns out she is trying to redeem her honor and find the opportunity to confront her abuser, who raped and abandoned her. Then she becomes a kind of lady-in-waiting to King Basilio’s niece Estrella. Actress Soraya Padrao snaps her fan open, covers her face all but her flashing eyes to hide her identity, and flirts with Astolfo, the cause of her suffering. Then she finds herself once more entangled physically and fighting off his aggression.
Honor is a big deal in much of Spanish classical theatre; honor and loyalty to king, to country, and to family. Women must not stain their honor and bring shame to their family. It’s not something that translates easily to American society. But credit to actress Padrao, she draws us in. In her career Padrao has moved throughout theatre, film, and television industries. At her best in this work she is naturalistic and emotionally affecting, as if well prepared for close ups. She creates strong physicality in her portraiture of this multi-faceted woman. However, she doesn’t consistently share with her eyes the character’s thinking process nor energetically fill the theatre.
La Vida es Sueño / Life is a Dream closes October 13, 2019. Details and tickets
Two actors in this cast are particularly adept at energetically filling the “size” needed to pull off classical theatre, although their work is very different. Mel Rocher plays Clotaldo, the man in whose custody Segismundo has been raised. Rocher has been assigned a complicated role but he fills every moment with something both physically and emotionally compelling. Even the way he strides onto the stage made me believe he is from a world and time where passions ran large and the stakes demanded everything. His work never feels stiff or pompous, and he clearly communicated his divided loyalties to king and to his ward Segismundo. He and Padrao carry one of the best scenes of the play in their fiery confrontation where speeches become rapid-fire, broken lines of exchange.
The other character is Rosaura’s companion Clarin. Venezuelan actor Delbis Cardona, a GALA company member, approaches the role with a lot of physical and otherwise broadly-styled comedy. He stands out for his freedom and physical ease, much like an athlete with home park advantage. Did he play the clown too broadly? I thought his choices worked in the context of a character who counters a world of constantly changing realities with humor and positivism. Cardona, in the classical ‘side-kick’ role, is the one who can most freely break the fourth wall to share with us, with a wink and a nod, that his is a survival technique. He is Everyman. So when he is killed, it shows another layer of dream-shattering reality. He who never held any malice became pawn and victim to the vast ambitions of others.
Timothy Andrés Pabon plays the King Basilio. He handles the heightened language and speeches well. He has a devilish challenge to make this character work. I’m not sure how he could better justify Basilio’s obvious cruelty towards his own son. Ultimately, he gets boxed into a formal, less than 3-dimensional creature.
The rest of the cast members served the show earnestly, but things got somewhat bogged down. The convolutions of the plot, how Rosaura’s former seducer (Peter Pereyra) was maybe vying for the kingdom with Estrella (Catherine Nunez) and might or might not end up with this cousin as his wife were mind-bending (all too Faustian in portraying Poland’s (the setting but really Spain’s) incestuous royalty. The romantic line up at the end was not really prepared for and less-than satisfying at best.
Music helps underscore the long speeches and gives this classical work an almost operatic heft.
The set by Milagros Ponce de León created a classic frame, similar to a Shakespeare stage, which grounded the different worlds of the play. The Inner Below provided the lowly Segismundo’s cave-like cell. The second story balcony provided the high court world of King Basilio. Two staircases on either side of the stage represented for me the slippery snakes-and-ladders in-between world for those struggling to ascend or more often slip (or be shoved) back down.
Jesús Díaz Cortés gives us some beautiful lighting, bathing everything at times in musty golden light as if bringing back the glories of 17th-century Spain then using a cooler, dark palette to reveal the abominations to human rights that world also held, where most people could not steer their own destinies. Nitsan Scharf’s projections deepened the dreamlike atmosphere with troubling flashes that one could barely hold onto before they were gone.
In the end, however, it is Segismundo who defines the play’s essence for me. He is like a two-headed creature, part Caliban and part not sprite-like Ariel, more Miranda. As a monster, he has to ward off the deadening, also traumatic effects of incarceration. Then, when he finally sees the light and feels love, he must find his way independently forward and summon up poetry and awe, like Miranda crying “O brave new world.”
Medrano has given us a powerful meditation on our times. We must not settle for a false delivered dream nor sink into cynicism and despair but rather shatter the illusions and claim the reality for which we would fight and in which we wish to live.
La Vida es Sueño (Life is a Dream). Written by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Adapted by Nando López. Directed by Hugo Medrano. Scenic Design by Milagros Ponce de León. Lighting by Jesús Díaz Cortés. Costumes by Moyenda Kulemeka and Eric J. Davis. Projections by Nitsan Scarf. Fight Director Casey Kaleba. With Daniel Alonso de Santos, Delbis Cardona, Leo Delgado, Camilo Linares, Catherine Nunez, Timothy Andrés Pabon, Soraya Padrao, Peter Pereyra, and Mel Rocher. Produced by GALA Hispanic Theatre. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
