Spanish classic gets lost in rural Ontario setting
Blood Wedding
(out of 4) Written by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Erin Brandenburg. Until April 9 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca and 416-866-8666
Blood feuds, impossible desires, poetic symbolism: the challenge of staging Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1932 play in a contemporary Anglo-Saxon context is creating a stage world in which its elemental qualities resonate.
We have to believe in the passion that compels the Bride, wearing an orange blossom crown, to ride away from her wedding party on a stallion with her former love, Leonardo Felix. The Groom’s Mother’s curses against the Felix family should resonate in our guts. And when, in the final act, the Moon appears as a character, telling us that we cannot hide from the revealing light of its beams, this needs to not feel strange at all.
Soulpepper’s new production of the Spanish classic, directed by Erin Brandenburg, sadly does not succeed in creating such a compelling imagined universe. The concept seems to have been to set the play in somewhere familiar to audiences — 1930s rural Ontario — but at the same time to suggest connections to a more abstracted and mythic realm.
Guillermo Verdecchia’s new translation feels stretched, though, in its attempts to combine countryfolk plainspokenness with the frequent flights of mythical imagery Lorca’s play calls for.
The concept works more successfully in Anahita Dehbonehie’s designs. While, on the one hand, her homespun costumes extend connections to the local past, the frequently beautiful images created by the set suggest ideas and moods rather than specific locations.
Brandenburg struggles throughout in placing and moving actors around the stage: the onstage band (composer Andrew Penner, musicians Anna Atkinson and Richard Lam) look distractingly awkward when they’re not playing Penner’s original folk-inspired songs and background music. And, in a crucial scene, hanging strips of fabric meant to represent the woods obscure the audience’s view of the action.
It’s hard to know what comment Brandenburg is making by having the set stand largely unpopulated during a wedding party scene in which a lively dance is happening just offstage.
The actors, by and large, come across as at sea. Diane D’Aquila seems to be fighting between comic and dramatic impulses in her portrayal of the domineering Groom’s Mother, so that her anguished indecision at the highly dramatic moment of the Bride and Leonardo’s disappearance gets a laugh that totally disrupts the mood.
It is hard to square Colin Palangio’s grungy appearance and stooped posture with the passionate lover figure that Leonardo represents, and there is more connection between the Bride (Hailey Gillis) and Groom (Gordon Hecht) than between Gillis and Palangio.
When, at the wedding feast, the band inexplicably plays a cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” followed a few scenes later by the absurd sight and sound of a cloaked D’Aquila playing a Beggar Woman with her voice amplified through some kind of vocoder, the whole enterprise moves through melodrama into esthetic chaos.
Getting Lorca right is hard, but by all accounts the independent Toronto companies Aluna and Modern Times did just that in their production of Blood Wedding only a year ago, which went on to win six Dora Awards. The main outcome for me of seeing this unsuccessful production is to kick myself a few more times for missing that previous one.