Bodas de Sangre (Miracle Theatre Group)

[February 6th, 2008]

Any show in Spanish is a tough sell to an English-speaking audience. One like Bodas de Sangre , Federico García Lorca’s weird 1932 tragedy, in which half the lines are sung and both Death and the Moon make personal appearances, is even tougher. But hear me out: If you have any taste for Lorca’s poetry, in English or Spanish, you won’t want to miss this production.

Miracle Theatre has attempted, admirably, to make the play a little less intimidating with projected supertitles (a technique they’ve refined to the point that the text keeps up more or less exactly with the spoken lines), but it’s still a challenging prospect. Lorca was a leading proponent of Spanish surrealism, and the rampant symbolism and fanciful imagery of the movement are here, too.

Only one of the characters even has a name, making for a vague précis: The Widow’s son gets married to a young woman who was once courted by Leonardo, the brother of the men who murdered the Widow’s other son and husband. And then things get ugly. And bloody.

Bodas grew out of Lorca’s childhood experiences in southern Spain, the same violent and anachronistic landscape that produced Pedro Almodóvar. You can hear Lorca’s voice popping up here and there in Almodóvar’s films: an outlandish lyricism that revels in the grotesque (“I found my son lying dead in the street, I plunged my hands in his blood and licked them because it was mine”).

Miracle’s artistic director, Olga Sanchez, has focused on bringing out the music in Lorca’s verse with haunting arrangements by Gerardo Calderón that span the breadth of Andalucia’s rich musical heritage. The music pulls you in, allowing you to overlook the production’s flaws.

And there are quite a few, the greatest of which is the double-casting of Nelda Reyes and Verónika Nuñez as young girls and old women. Twentysomething Reyes is fine in the former part, but her squinty, shuffling, hunchbacked performance as the Bride’s servant is a tasteless caricature of old age. The rest of the cast is better, though, and Bibiana Lorenzo’s viciously stylized turn as the Mother borders on the frightening.