Comedia Performance

Journal of The Association for Hispanic Classical Theater Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2014 www.comediaperformance.org

Comedia Performance Journal of the Association For Hispanic Classical Theater

Barbara Mujica, Editor Box 571039 Georgetown University Washington, D. C. 20057

Volume 11, Number 1 Spring 2014 ISSN 1553-6505

Comedia Performance

Editorial Board

Barbara Mujica – Editor Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Box 571039 Georgetown University Washington, D. C. 20057-1039 [email protected] [email protected]

Gwyn Campbell – Managing Editor Department of Romance Languages Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450 [email protected]

Sharon Voros – Book Review Editor Department of Modern Languages US Naval Academy Annapolis, MD 21402-5030 [email protected]

Darci Strother – Theater Review Editor Department of World Languages & Hispanic Literatures California State University San Marcos San Marcos, CA 92096-0001 [email protected]

Michael McGrath – Interviews Editor Department of Foreign Languages P.O. Box 8081 Georgia Southern University Statesboro, GA 30460 [email protected]

Editorial Advisory Board

Isaac Benabu Donald Dietz Susan Fischer Donald Larson Dakin Matthews Susan Paun de García Ángel Sánchez Jonathan Thacker Christopher Weimer

Editorial Staff

Cristi Killingsworth, Editorial Assistant [email protected]

AHCT Officers

Susan Paun de García, President Ángel Sánchez, Vice President Christopher Gascón, Secretary Sharon Voros, Treasurer Presidents Emeriti: Donald Dietz, Barbara Mujica, Robert Johnston

Editorial Policy

Comedia Performance is the journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, an organization devoted to the study of the comedia and other forms of early modern Spanish theater. Comedia Performance publishes articles on diverse aspects of performance of the Span- ish comedia and other theatrical forms. Appro- priate subjects for articles include, but are not limited to, historical or modern staging of the comedia, translating the comedia for the stage, performance theory, textual issues pertaining to performance, historical issues such as audience composition, corral design, costuming, blocking, set design, and spectator response. Comedia Performance does not publish text-based literary studies. Comedia Performance publishes interviews with directors and actors, theater reviews and book reviews in special sections.

Purchase Information

Comedia Performance is distributed without additional charge to members of the AHCT at the an- nual conference in El Paso, Texas. Individual copies may be purchased for $20. Non-members of AHCT may subscribe for $50 for three issues. Library rates are $30 per issue and $75 for a three-year subscrip- tion. Please contact Gwyn Campbell, Managing Edi- tor, at [email protected], for additional information. Send other queries to Barbara Mujica at mu- [email protected].

Advertising Rates

Comedia Performance accepts advertisements for books, plays, festivals, and other events related to theater. Rates are $100 for a full page and $50 for a half page. Send checks made to AHCT to Sharon Voros and camera-ready text to Barbara Mujica.

Submission Information

All submissions must be original and un- published. After publication, authors may solicit permission to reproduce their material in books or other journals. Articles may be in either English or Spanish and should be submitted electronically. No paper submissions will be accepted. Articles should use MLA style and not exceed 25 double-spaced, typed pages, including notes and bibliography. Send article submissions to: [email protected] Comedia Performance is a refereed journal. All submissions will be read by a committee of experts. Please submit articles to the appropriate editor. E-mails of editors are listed under Editorial Board. Guidelines for theater reviews:

1. Reviews should be between 3 and five pages long, including pictures. 2. Reviews should not include endnotes and bibliography. 3. Reviews should not include a detailed description of plot. For canonical plays, no plot summary is necessary. For lesser known plays, a two- to three-line synopsis should suffice. 4. Avoid minute descriptions of action, costume, lighting or sets. Avoid constructions such as, “And then Don Lope comes out and says...” Instead, comment on the efficacy of the blocking of particular scenes or the effect caused by costume and decor. Do not describe details of the performance unless you are going to comment on them. 5. Avoid structures such as “This reviewer thinks...” Re- views are by definition subjective. 6. One reviewer may not publish more than two reviews in a single issue.

CONTENTS

Performance Studies

Zayas’s La traicón en la amistad in English: Translation and Adaptation in a New Era Catherine Larson 1

Staging the Page: Performing Technologies of the Book in Massenet’s Don Quichotte Cory A. Reed 37

Incidental Music and Its Role in Three English- Language Comedia Performances Donald R. Larson 54

Un montaje ciberpunk de La vida es sueño de Calderón de la Barca en Duke University Alejandra Juno Rodríguez Villar 85

Stage Picture, Text and the Twenty-First Century Audience: Performance as the Final Element of Translation in Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer Ian M. Borden 112

Interviews

El director de la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico debe defender a Lope y a Calderón, no a sí mismo Purificació Mascarell 154

“La española inglesa” sube a las tablas en Almagro: Entrevista con Miguel Cubrero, actor y director de teatro Esther Fernández 180

Lope’s Fuenteovejuna through the Eyes of a Twenty-First Century Director: A Conversation with Lisa Abbot Michael J. McGrath 196

Theater Reviews 211

Book Reviews 248

Performance Studies

ZAYAS’S LA TRAICIÓN EN LA AMISTAD IN ENGLISH: TRANSLATION AND ADAPTA- TION IN A NEW ERA

CATHERINE LARSON Indiana University

In the last twenty-five years, María de Za- yas’s La traición en la amistad has emerged as an influential text in the field of Comedia studies. Moving from virtual obscurity into the spotlight, Zayas’s comedy has been reborn in multiple editions, translations, adaptations, and performances on both sides of the Atlantic,1 and it has been the topic of a significant number of scholarly studies and performance reviews, creating in the process new gen- erations of readers and spectators who have discovered the play. My own experience with La traición en la amistad is similarly multi-leveled: I have read insightful scholarly essays about the comedy, taught it, translated it to English (as Friendship Betrayed) for the bilingual volume that featured Valerie Heg- strom’s careful edition, written about it, and seen my translation performed by two theater companies with quite distinct approaches (a third company re-

2 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 cently produced a staged reading).2 Reading Cari- dad Svich’s A Little Betrayal among Friends, however, has taken me down yet another path, leading me to interrogate from a more nuanced perspective the complicated relationships existing between text and performance, translation and adaptation, theory and practice, as well as the often conflicting ways in which we talk about what contemporary audiences want, or what we think they want. Equally important are the connections between and among the translators, adaptors, and theater practitioners and the original writer, between the early modern play and its twenty-first-century embodiment—in print or onstage. Several issues guide considerations of the afterlife of a classical play, and recent research in the related areas of performance studies, adaptation studies, and translation studies has proven fruitful in connecting theory and practice.3 Moreover, critical approaches that focus on the degree to which a modernized version differs from or remains “faithful” to the source play no longer dominate the critical discourse of the field.4 Topics that tend to appear with increasing regularity in critical essays, performance reviews and translators’ notes include discussions of: what makes a play accessible and acceptable to modern audiences,5 challenges that face those who adapt the classics for English- speaking audiences, and the ways in which different companies have approached the contributions of the

C. Larson 3 translators and adaptors who form part of the team taking a text from page to stage.6 Performances of classical theater bring together a host of partnering theater practitioners, each with essential roles in the interpretation of the text and the creation of meaning for new audiences.7 All of these topics move center stage when we consider the vastly different twenty-first-century productions of the plays whose source author was a seventeenth-century Spanish woman who, critics agree, never saw her comedy performed. Zayas’s La traición en la amistad offers useful examples of the possibilities that emerge when modern audiences are given the opportunity to sample a variety of contemporary incarnations and examine the issues surrounding their formation. Friendship Betrayed, a relatively literal translation, and A Little Betrayal among Friends, a translation and free adaptation, can help illuminate these issues as a seventeenth- century text inspires vastly different twenty-first- century performances. The Oklahoma City University production of Friendship Betrayed was well received by audiences on the home campus (February 2003) and in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (March 2003).8 Although the director followed the translation relatively closely, he was, of course, producing his own adaptation for the stage; as Pasto and others have observed, playtexts are a blueprint for performance.9 Scholarly studies and reviews of the per-

4 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 formance were quite positive, offering multiple perspectives on the production, acting, sets, and stage- craft. Williamsen notes two examples from the performance that generated the most—and the most varied—discussion. The first was Pasto’s invention: a third-act swordfight between Fenisa and Belisa. Williamsen asserts that some spectators approved of the swordfight as an effective technique to avoid having the scene devolve into the original’s chichéd catfight, while others preferred the type of physical- ity present in the source play (180). In like manner, she adds, some spectators saw the usurpation of the phallic sword as “in keeping with the spirit of Za- yas’s text; others felt that it went too far” (180). The debate generated by Pasto’s directorial decision is specifically mentioned by others analyzing the production. Sharon Voros posits that the swordplay “at- tempts to establish dramatic space as a privileged space for women in comedy” (“Zayas’s Comic Sense” 238). Anthony J. Grubbs asserts that “[t]he decision about staging a swordfight instead of the implied cat fight was driven by Pasto’s interpretation that the women, not the men, determined the resolution of the plot” (“Women” n. 13, 103), and Bárbara López-Mayhew suggests that “[t]he director justified the duel by literally interpreting Zayas’s message to women ‘to take arms’” (“From Manu- script” 179). The other element eliciting debate among reviewers involved the blocking of the final scene.

C. Larson 5

The question under consideration involves whether Fenisa should have been presented as meriting her punishment. Pasto’s interpretation, focusing on a strong and flirtatious Fenisa, might be viewed as an attempt to foreground the character’s central role, since “she alone among all the women remains free to explore her own desires” (Williamsen, 181). Oth- er critics, including López-Mayhew, have viewed Fenisa as receiving her just deserts; the ostracism she suffers leaves her humiliated and alone at the end of the play (“From Manuscript” 188). Ultimate- ly, critics tended to agree that Pasto’s production of Friendship Betrayed “privileges women in comic roles” (Voros, 238) and “highlights the importance of solidarity between women and the strong ties implied by female relationships” (Grubbs, 100). Three years later in Washington, DC (in July and October, 2006), director Karen Berman would approach Friendship Betrayed with another well-received interpretation/cultural translation of Zayas’s comedy, which varied significantly from Pasto’s production. It is clear that those who participate in producing and interpreting a classical play deal with cultural difference. Barbara Mujica’s cogent summary of the central issues at stake is especially relevant to this discussion:

Every theatre production is a translation. The director must deconstruct and decode a written text and “translate” it into a body of

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auditory and visual signs that are intelligible to spectators. When the text is the product of a culture different from the spectators’, either because it was produced at a different historical moment or by an author whose frame of reference is alien to the audience’s, issues of transculturation arise.10 (“Holly- wood” 240).

Berman analyzes her approach to creating a multi- leveled, cultural translation of Zayas’s play for a modern audience:

I’ve always thought that it was important to make a play relevant for its current audience. A play only exists in the moment of its playing and for the audience attending. There is no way to recreate the dynamics of Golden Age society and ensure the same reception. Instead, every play must be interpreted for its time, and within the context of the society receiving it—certainly a postmodern sensibility. . . . Translating a play from one culture to another, and one era to another, creates additional joys and challenges. Cultural translation is always diffi- cult and not always successful. The play, of course, was already mediated by Larson’s translation and choice of language. Next, it was mediated by the director and actors, and

C. Larson 7

finally, by the audience. In this complex layering of translation, one must consider the original authorship, purpose for writing, and audience reception. Once that dramaturgical research is done, the challenge is to find a way to translate the production to the ephemeral here and now. (Mujica, “Inter- view” 221-22)

Berman solved that challenge by determining that the rich madrileños who populate Zayas’s seventeenth-century play would have their counterparts in a twenty-first-century group of young people who are decadent, rich, shallow, spoiled and interested in sexual conquest: “We do have such an aristocracy in America, of course. The American ‘court’ is Hol- lywood” (Mujica, “Hollywood” 247). Mujica adds that the characters of Friendship Betrayed strongly resemble such female cultural icons as Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Madonna, as well as the characters from Sex and the City and Desperate House- wives (247). Her multi-racial, multi-ethnic cast gave the play a “modern, urban feel,” and the characters’ costumes accentuated their sexuality. As Hegstrom and Williamsen assert, in the Berman production, “Fenisa’s wild sexual appetite extends to all the female characters. All but the maid Lucía dress in 21st-century lingerie to advertise their sexual availa- bility. . . . Movement, gestures, and stage sets underscored the animalistic nature of their appetites”

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(“Dramaturgas” 8). The director’s focus on animalistic desire is seen in her use of three visual meta- phors to illuminate the relationships among her characters: “the hunt, the game, and the dance,” which culminate in a game/dance of musical chairs of the finale (Mujica, “Hollywood” 250). More than three years separate the two well- received productions, and the approach of Pasto’s university company contrasts with that of Berman’s professional troupe. Pointing to the fundamental difference between the Pasto and Berman adaptations for the stage, Grubbs suggests that Pasto foregrounded the concept of seeking harmony and support in friendships among women, while Berman focused on “the sexual nature of female relationships” (“Women to Women” 84). Using the same edition and translation of a 400-year-old play, the two directors produced quite different staged versions of Zayas’s comedy, illustrating by means of their sets, costumes, and staging decisions “how the performance of a work takes the script from page to stage, transforming it, and highlighting the messages embedded in the text and interpreted by directors and their casts and crews” (100). These two versions of Friendship Betrayed in performance illuminate the complex and often wide-ranging decisions involved in translating an early-modern, female-authored text for the stage. In July 2013, Friendship Betrayed was performed again in a staged reading produced by the

C. Larson 9

WSC Avant Bard Company in Washington, DC. The director, Kari Ginsburg, notes in an email exchange that the reading series in which the text was performed had been created in memory of an artistic associate whose efforts had led to the “rediscovery of previously forgotten and overlooked classic works,” adding, “Friendship Betrayed was the first title proposed after the reading series was established.”11 The demographically diverse audience at the single performance, she notes, enjoyed the piece. Echoing the comments of other critics, adaptors, and directors regarding the inspiration of contemporary cultural icons, Ginsburg continues, “My approach to the text was to combine a Sex and the City meets Real Housewives vibe, to keep it contemporary. I believe it was well received.” Of particular interest was the director’s response to a question regarding the special challenges and positive elements the company encountered in doing the reading. Ginsburg described the adaptations they had made to the text, as well as the reasons motivat- ing those changes:

We tried to keep the length of the reading close to 2 hours, including an intermission. Due to this restriction, I cut down the text. A lot of non-essential-to-the-plot cultural, artistic and literary references were excluded. Some of Leon’s speeches were tweaked. To maintain a contemporary feel to the text,

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some of the shorter lines were allowed to overlap or interject. The translation felt so current, having a modern tone or interpretation of the lines didn’t feel forced or awkward. . . . Really, the only challenge I expe- rienced was the length. But the themes, issues and characters are current and relatable.

Ginsburg’s comments, like those of the other directors of Friendship Betrayed, call attention to the process of creating a playable text. Some reinforce what academics often intuit about how contemporary audiences react when they go to the theater, as well as the decisions theater professionals consider and make in response; others highlight practical, performance-related details that tend not to rise to the level of explicit concern in analyses of theatrical productions. Cutting the length of early modern playtexts for performance, for example, continues to surface in discussions from both practitioners and critics.12 It is certainly clear, however, that as each of the directors adapted Friendship Betrayed for the stage, they dealt with many of the same issues, addressing some of them in similar ways and others from a wide range of approaches. The differences between and among these productions and those of A Little Betrayal among Friends provide additional points of comparison and contrast.

C. Larson 11

The Latina playwright Caridad Svich13 offers a decidedly different re-make of La traición en la amistad in A Little Betrayal among Friends, which she describes as “freely adapted/translated” in the printed version (5).14 The collection’s “Script History” states that the adaptation was “originally commissioned in 2006 by Airmid Theatre, New York (Tricia McDermott, Artistic Director)” (6); it premiered in 2011.15 Svich’s introduction to A Little Betrayal looks at Zayas’s source comedy from the perspective of a theater practitioner. She first discusses her perception of Zayas’s motivation: the source author “is contemplating how betrayal is possibly an inevitable part of opening your heart to another, be it friend, lover or stranger. . . . Zayas is seeking to unravel the knot of love itself and how it enters lives; she wants to examine the glory and simultaneous wreckage of love” (13-14). Svich then elaborates on this idea, adding her exegesis of the ways in which her free adaptation responds to Zayas and her text:

Love’s treason—its blessed and cursed treachery on our inviolate hearts—is the focus of this play. In this free adaptation (working from my own translation), I have cut entire scenes and characters from the original, changed motivations and intentions, and added new text—all, though, in order to meet what I believe are Zayas’ orig-

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inal purposes. Any free version will bear the mark of its author. And this case is no different. Zayas is interested in the machinations and inconsistencies of love and its pur- suit (and she reflects this both in content and form). My own interests as a playwright are attracted to the unexplained, irrational forces that govern passion and how those forces can disrupt relationships and the form of theatre itself. A Little Betrayal among Friends, thus, is my answer to Zayas.16 Love’s enchanting traición destabilizes the vision that we carry of ourselves and instead offers us the un-fixed possibilities of who we can be. It is in the spirit of possibility that I offer this text. (15-16)

This unique, self-referential analysis of the adaptor/translator’s role in the process of creating her script advances an intriguing look at both the relationship between source and new creation and the idea of writing as process. In a recent exchange, Svich comments further on her theater-oriented motivations for adapting Zayas’s play as she did, commenting, “I definitely wanted to tap into the tropes we recognize as an audience and play them up. . . . I hope another opportunity arises for me to work on the play in production. . . . I love being in the rehearsal hall with the work, and as a writer, that’s where I truly live” (“Re: Introductions”).

C. Larson 13

A Little Betrayal among Friends is, as Svich promises, a far cry from the more literal translation that I had created—and even from the Pasto and Berman stagings that used it as a springboard for their own creative interpretations of the text. The new play is set in the present, in a “cosmopolitan city full of secret alleys and unsuspecting mazes” (17). The list of characters and the author’s descriptions of them merit note:

MARCIA, sweet-natured young, upper-class woman with a feisty streak FELICIA [FENISA in the original], free-spirited, mischievous young upper-class woman DON JUAN, legendary bachelor and playboy LYSANDER [LISEO], the object of everyone’s affection, handsome young man, a cad LEON, his assistant, honest if a bit blunt GERRY [GERARDO], Marcia’s former lover, good-hearted, shy; also plays FELIX, Laura’s loyal confidant LAURA, Lysander’s former lover, impetuous and naturally high-strung (17)17

Svich’s adaptation begins much as did Zayas’s original: Marcia describes falling instantly in love with Lysander, and Felicia proclaims that she is ready to go after any man she finds attractive. Felicia also alludes to the game of love she plays with Don

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Juan, Svich’s metadramatic reincarnation of the in- famous Burlador:18

Don Juan can go to hell (as the writers and philosophers have pro- claimed for centuries) But before he does, let him have a good taste of me, Of Felicia, of glorious Felicia, And I am glorious and wondrous and everything a woman should and can be! (22)

Nonetheless, Svich makes clear that Felicia does not approach love as does her male counterpart—in Za- yas’s play or in Tirso’s text: “I love. Yes. All sorts. Yes. In that, we’re the same. But I see each love through to the end before taking another. I don’t mess about with constancy. When I have love, I re- vere it. I don’t squander it like you do” (30).19 In- deed, love and desire are discussed at great length among all the male and female characters in Svich’s comedy (“Why complicate things? It’s just sex” [35]), but, as in Zayas’s original, through the lens of their impact on friendship and on male/female soci- ocultural roles.20 In addition to these self-conscious references to other early modern plays and characters, A Little Betrayal is metadramatic on a number of other levels. The following exchange between Lysan-

C. Larson 15 der and Leon illustrates this literary/theatrical self- reference and the self-awareness of Svich’s Piran- dellian characters:

LEON: End of story. LYSANDER: What story? LEON: This story. You know, the one we’re telling, the one we’re in. This play called A Little Betrayal among Friends. LYSANDER: I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about. It is definitely not the end of the story. Leon, it hasn’t even started. (33)21

The number of self-conscious references to the theater, role-playing within the role, and the play within the play far exceeds what Zayas had originally created.22 Discussing a director’s perspective on the topic, Pasto has recently commented on the high level of self-referentiality in Golden Age theater, observing that modern audiences instantly understand when a director plays with conventions, and they invest more deeply in the play: “metatheater makes a play more useful for theatrical purposes” (“If You Build It”). Svich’s numerous playful re- minders of the artificial nature of the theater repeat- edly call attention to the tradition from which she is drawing, even as she confronts and modernizes it. A Little Betrayal among Friends also emphasizes Svich’s playful encounter with music. In

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Zayas’s play, Gerardo asks his musicians to sing a lament describing Marcia’s rejection of his love, proffering a parodic version of a lover singing (or hiring musicians to perform) outside his beloved’s window. Svich takes the use of music one step further with her original song, “Wreck Love,” which the stage directions call Laura’s “‘sunny’ song of heartbreak;”23 the lyrics include such memorable lines as “Love, love, you wreck me, / Like a spider (trapped) in a maze. / Love, love, you wound me, / And I’ll never be the same” (44). A Little Betrayal thereby tenders a postmodern take on Zayas’s musical parody. Seventeenth-century practice produced few written stage directions in drama texts apart from indications of entrances and exits. Svich, who generally follows Zayas’s model, does describe one specific, twenty-first-century stage property: “Ly- sander enters reading a text from Laura on his phone” (61). The anachronistic reference to the cell phone and text messages jars us, but even more so when we then learn that Laura’s message announces that she will be entering a convent. Svich’s pairing of contemporary technology and the outdated practice of removing dishonored women from society in such a manner draws our attention to the ludic nature of her adaptation. This technique is similar to the adaptor’s decision to combine discourse that reflects the register of early modern comedy (e.g., “Cupid, if you exist, give me strength, for clearly

C. Larson 17 everyone seeks my end” [70]) with modernized, casual exchanges (“Laura, I...I’m a jerk, okay? I do the wrong things, I say the wrong things, I behave badly and cause people, you, a whole lotta grief” [92])—at times, even vulgar expressions (“Heartless bitch” numbers among the more benign examples [93]). Svich’s updated riff on Zayas self- consciously takes on the original play’s physical staging and its discourse, characters, and central theme. María de Zayas’s play is, however, much more than the source of inspiration and rebellion for Caridad Svich. Although she cut and/or rewrote a great deal of the original text and eliminated several characters, thereby changing the ending and ultimate pairings of some of the couples, the heart of La traición en la amistad beats inside A Little Be- trayal among Friends. Many lines from the original remain in her translation, but even more, the essence of Zayas’s comedy regarding love, friendship and betrayal is central to Svich’s text. Although Svich had described this version as her answer to Zayas, it could be argued that there was little to answer to—or for. Always cognizant of the comedy that would be embodied onstage, Svich observes:

As free interpreter, adaptor and translator of this text, I have been faced with the dilemma of re-recording Zayas’s vision for a new age, but also making the play work on the stage.

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The solution of preferring prose over strict meter and rhyme scheme is not the only one toward addressing the play’s inherent un- conventionality and movable anchors. Un- like male writers of this period in dramatic history, Zayas’s work i[s]24 relatively un- known to theatre-goers and practitioners (though recognized by academics and scholars). So, in many ways, working on and staging this play is very much like staging a brand new play. Its precedents are unfamiliar, its situations, however, are not. (14-15).

In the sense that Svich was interested in opening early modern Spanish theater—in particular, a play written by a woman—to contemporary American audiences, we can see how her approach straddles the line between conventionality and its polar oppo- site, between creating a re-working that was truly a new play for a new age and “re-recording Zayas’s vision.” Svich’s translation/free adaptation was first produced by the Halcyon Theater Company at the Geenhouse Theater Center in Chicago (Lavina Jad- wani, director) as part of the “Alcyone Festival 2011: Remixed,” 9 June-10 July 10, 2011; the theme of the festival was the production of adaptations based on women-authored classical texts.25 John Beer, in Time Out Chicago, described this

C. Larson 19 production by characterizing both the original text and the remixed tradaptation:

A Little Betrayal Among Friends (Caridad Svich) The original Born into an aristocratic family in 1590, María de Zayas y Sotomayor de- fied convention by penning comic, salacious plays and novels during Spain’s Golden Age. Her 1632 play La Traicion en la Amistad is “a romp,” according to translator and playwright Svich. The romantic comedy could count in its own right as an artistic remix; in it, Sotomayor responds to Tirso de Molina’s influential portrait of the inveterate seducer Don Juan, creating her own female libertine, Fenisa. The remix Svich’s contribution began as a straight translation, and her “free adaptation” remains the most faithful to its source of the festival offerings. Familiar to Chicago audiences for her riffs on Greek tragedy, Svich has significantly built on her predecessor’s sketchy depiction of Don Juan and Fenisa’s love-hate relationship: “I love the sauciness of it,” the New York–based playwright says.

In a video clip on Svich’s website, the director offers noteworthy commentary on this first staging of

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A Little Betrayal. From her insider’s perspective, Jadwani describes the play and what she hopes to accomplish; it is clear that she is talking about a production that is in the final stages of preparation. As was the case with various productions of Friend- ship Betrayed, the director defines the play as an encounter between (or a combination of) other texts—original and adapted—from other times and genres: it is “a mix between Dangerous Liaisons and Don Juan;” she adds, “we’re pitching it as Cru- el Intentions meets Gossip Girl” (“Alycone Fest- Betrayal Cast”). Jadwani refers to receiving Svich’s input for the “young and sexy” casting and emphasizes the stylistic approach the company is using: “We’re leaning into a very modern, a very heightened text.” Unfortunately, there is little critical response to the production,26 although one reviewer asserted that a better inspiration for the production would have been Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde rather than Zayas’s La traición (“What might’ve been a vicious, delicious La Ronde-like sex comedy falls flat”); he found the dialogue tedious and saw nothing in the characters’ behavior “to suggest a 21st- century response to romantic intrigue” (Adler, “A Little Betrayal”). The contrast between the director’s vision and the reviewer’s reaction offers insight into the process of creating theater, despite such opinions on the relative success of the performed adaptation.

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The same summer, A Little Betrayal was performed not in an urban, indoor setting, but out- doors at a state park on Long Island (specifically, the Nissequoque River State Park in Kings Park, NY, with a run from 27 July-14 August, 2011). Di- rector Tricia McDermott explained her perspective on the play: “This is Airmid’s most modern piece to date. Even though it is originally from the early 1630s, our translation brings the original story to life in a very contemporary and eclectic fashion. That’s reflected in the text, the costumes and the set” (Henninger, “Spotlight”).27 Steve Parks’s performance review underscores Svich’s transformation of Zayas’s Spanish Golden Age classic: the update “takes digital-age liberties with its prescient- ly feminist inspiration” in “an R-rated time warp” and “a Renaissance Sex and the City.”28 This description of A Little Betrayal as a twenty-first- century Sex and the City echoes earlier discussions of the zeitgeist of Friendship Betrayed: “Today, we deplore the lifestyles of our celebrities. We judge their behavior to be outrageous, irresponsible, infan- tile, and stupid. And yet, like the public in Zayas’s time, we are fascinated by our moneyed elite” (Mu- jica, “Hollywood” 247). Svich wrote the commissioned play with the expectation that it would be staged. As an active theater practitioner, she was acutely aware of the issues that impact both her creative process and the business of getting works produced. She revealed

22 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 her perspective on these issues in a conversation (later published) in which she describes the process of translating/adapting the play Huddersfield by the Serbian Uglješa Sajtinac, which recalls her work with A Little Betrayal among Friends.29 Adam Versényi, the editor of the journal publishing that conversation and an organizer of the conference at which it took place, observes, “Svich engaged in a wide ranging and stimulating conversation about her process. . . . The conversation also raises a number of issues related to both performance and audience reception of theatrical translations” (3). In response to questions regarding “how translations can still live as viable programming decisions and production for theater companies” (16), Svich asserts,

. . . it feels like: what are you doing? What is the purpose, beyond the literary purpose, and beyond the exchange with the writer? Which is, of course, quite beautiful, but it also feels like you’re in this strange no-man’s land. . . Who is your translation for? Who’s your audience? How is your work serving? It’s serving the field in some way, but it’s also not serving the theater in some weird way. [My work is] made for performance, because the act of seeing work in translation widens the dialogue. (17)30

C. Larson 23

As Caridad Svich makes clear, a staged production is her ultimate goal; the performance of the translation/adaptation serves—defines—theatrical communication, building connections between the text and the audiences who see it come alive. These comments, from the woman who fashioned a raucous comedy from the fabric of a play written four hundred years earlier, draw attention to what happens in the process of making theater. Svich and I were able to participate, albeit in quite different ways, in the process of interpreting our predecessor’s comedy about love and betrayal for what would ultimately culminate in theatrical adaptations; as a result, we helped increase the number of people able to learn about Zayas and her play. Williamsen has suggested that for the most popular woman-authored plays, success begets success: “Research informs translations, translations increase productions, productions stimulate more translations, more adaptations, more productions and more research. . .” (“A Vibrant Circle”). She further avers that the relatively recent translations and productions of La traición en la amistad have increased interest in Zayas tenfold, and, like Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa and Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer, are now opening the canon as the texts increasingly appear on MA and PhD reading lists, in course syllabi, books, and journal articles, and in even more translations and productions.31 Friendship Betrayed and A Little Betrayal among

24 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014

Friends illuminate Williamsen’s description of the “vibrant circle” that highlights the second layer of translation and adaption: the one intended for performance. Translated, adapted, and published using two vastly different approaches, Zayas’s La traición en la amistad has undergone additional modifica- tion and interpretation for English-speaking audiences by those theater professionals who transformed the playscript for performance, with each version ultimately culminating in productions that brought the seventeenth-century, woman-authored comedy to twenty-first-century, English-speaking audiences. The relative success of each production is, of course, open to critical debate. One thing, however, remains abundantly clear: each retelling of Zayas’s comedy, as well as the commentaries of the theater practitioners who have transformed the written text for the stage, add to and enrich its script and performance histories, widening the dialogue and informing future discussions and performances of her play.

NOTES

1 Recent Spanish editions of the play include those of Melloni, Hegstrom, González Santamera and Doménech, Soufas, and López-Mayhew. See Amy R. Williamsen’s “From Page to Stage” and Hegstrom and Williamsen’s “Dramaturgas of the Spanish Empire” for information on multiple Spanish- language productions of La traición en la amistad in Chile and Spain. Of particular interest to this study are the performed

C. Larson 25

translations/adaptations of La traición en la amistad: Friend- ship Betrayed and A Little Betrayal among Friends (freely adapted/translated by Caridad Svich). 2 Friendship Betrayed has been performed by Oklahoma City University (2003, directed by David Pasto), Washington Women in Theater (2006, directed by Karen Berman), and WSC Avant Bard (2013, Kari Ginsburg, director of a staged reading). Pasto, an actor, director, playwright, translator and theater historian, has produced several plays by early modern authors, including his translation of Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa, The House of Trials. Berman is the co-founder (with Sidra Rausch) and artistic director of Washington Wom- en in Theater, a not-for-profit theater company whose objec- tive is “to provide women writers, composers, and directors in the Washington, DC area and beyond the opportunity to showcase their work” (Mujica, “Interview” 217). She has directed more than seventy productions in venues from the Smithsonian to off-Broadway (“Karen Berman”). Ginsburg is an actress with a wide variety of credits in the Washington, DC area; she is a member of the WSC Avant Bard Company. The reading was described by the company “as a means to test-drive [this and other plays] for future seasons and to bring attention to under-produced works that capture classic themes” [“Reading Series”]). 3 See Jonathan Miller, The Afterlife of Plays (1992) and Sub- sequent Performances (1986). Miller speaks of a director’s role in staging the classics for modern audiences in ways that may not resemble the plays’ origins: “We who are thought to be the destroyers of these works are in some odd and paradox- ical way really the sponsors of their immortality” (“Afterlife” 36). 4 See my discussion of the fidelity debates in “Terms and Con- texts.” 5 For a discussion focused on audience reception, see Charles Ganelin’s “The Art of Adaptation.” Dawn L. Smith also re-

26 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014

minds us that response to the original print (or manuscript) version or the translation of a play may be quite different from that of spectators in an audience, who are reacting to the col- laboratively produced performance onstage: “A reader can always reread a passage, turn to the footnote, or look else- where for further explanation of an obscure reference. The performance text loses its audience if it is not immediately understood, either through language or gesture, or both” (“Translation and Fluidity” 106). 6 The Comedia in English (Susan Paun de García and Donald R. Larson, eds.) and The Spanish Golden Age in English (Catherine Boyle and David Johnston, eds.) examine the variety of issues involved in staging early modern plays. Both collections describe the model employed in the Royal Shake- speare Company’s 2004 productions in English of four translated plays. Teams combining a director, translator and academic advisor worked together to unite the strengths of both academics and theater professionals. Ten plays were translated literally, four directors chose which play each would direct, and writers then produced stage versions from the literal translations selected (Boyle and Johnston, “Introduction” 11). 7 As Robert Stam asserts, adaptation “can be seen as an or- chestration of discourses, talents, and tracks, a ‘hybrid’ construction mingling different media and discourses and collabo- rations” (“Introduction” 9). 8 Williamsen observes that the performance at the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso “engaged spectators, elicited laughter and provoked lively discussion afterwards” (“From Page to Stage” 180); see also Sharon Voros’s detailed analysis of the production (“Zayas’s Comic Sense”). 9 Pasto elaborated in an e-mail that a former theater professor had said that “a script was no more a play than a score was music, or a blueprint was a building” (“Re: A question”).

C. Larson 27

10 Mujica further notes that when, in addition, that author is female, the transculturation process is particularly complicated (240). 11 All citations related to Ginsburg emanate from an e-mail exchange (“Re: Friendship”). 12 See especially Matthew D. Stroud’s “The Director’s Cut.” 13 Svich describes herself as a playwright, songwriter, editor, and translator. She has published and seen produced numerous plays, adaptations, and translations; of particular interest to this study are her translations/adaptations of early modern Spanish dramas, The Spanish Golden Age Plays. Svich is the recipient of a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theater (“About Me”). 14 In an e-mail communication, Svich described her free adaptation as “my riff on Zayas de Sotomayor, although the project began, for me, as a translation project” (“Re: Introductions”). 15 In her interview with McDermott, Frances McGarry describes the company’s mission: McDermott “pioneered the idea of a production company that would be specifically devoted to classics by women. Founded in 2000, Airmid Theatre Company creates a safe home for women artists, igniting broad public recognition of the essential contribution women have made to the worlds of theatre and dramatic literature.” 16 At precisely this point, Svich’s website adds a revealing sentence to this analysis from the published introduction to A Little Betrayal: “Perhaps it will be seen by purists as a literary betrayal, but my hope is that it is seen as a loving new rendering based on Zayas’ intentions.” The idea of intentionality, often antithetical to most modern discussions of literary analysis and interpretation, is freshly approached and embraced by this translator/adaptor. Even more interesting is Svich’s oppo- sition of “purists/literary betrayal” and “loving new rendering/source author’s intentions.” 17 Perhaps because, from the beginning of her project, Svich had envisioned her adaptation as a text for performance, she

28 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014

used only seven characters, three women and four men, and cut six others. In addition to several minor characters, including servants and musicians, Svich eliminated the fourth major female role, that of Belisa, who is the beloved of Don Juan in La traición en la amistad. This decision would, of necessity, change the pairings of the various couples at the end of the comedy and alter the original text in a significant way; see Voros’s discussion of Belisa’s important role as “comedic heroine” in Zayas’s play and Pasto’s staging of it (230). 18 FELICIA: You’re like out of some book. DON JUAN: I’m Don Juan. What do you expect? FELICIA: I expect you’d want to be free of your story. DON JUAN: We’re born with one story, we die with one story. (29) 19 In yet another reference to Tirso’s Burlador de Sevilla, Feli- cia emphasizes: “I do what I want with love. / I toy with it, I flirt with it, I let it fill me, I banish it. / Love is my servant. Not the other way around. / Cursed be the woman who loves only one man” (68). Although in her introduction Svich hints that she does not necessarily agree with studies that have examined connections between the Burlador and La traición en la amistad (“I think Zayas was after something more in this play than simply one-upping Tirso” [14]), her adaptation not only points to Tirso’s text but incorporates additional allusions to it, explicitly transforming Zayas’s galán, Don Juan, into Tirso’s Don Juan Tenorio. 20 LYSANDER: Leon, monogamy is a myth. It’s an impossible myth. Men aren’t expected to. . . LEON: Be decent human beings? (62) 21 Later, when Lysander fears losing his heart to a woman, Leon replies, “What heart? Are you in some other play now? Are you Romeo all of a sudden?” (40). Felicia and Don Juan’s exchanges also reflect similar metatheatrical allusions: FELICIA: Spare me the drama. DON JUAN: But, honey, we’re in one.

C. Larson 29

FELICIA: Last I checked this was a comedy. DON JUAN: Comedies about love are always tinged with tragedy. […] DON JUAN: I would never throw myself at Gerry. FELICIA: Really? I seem to remember a scene or two in a distant draft… DON JUAN: That scene was cut. […] DON JUAN: Please. We have to keep this respectable. FELICIA: Why? DON JUAN There are children in the audience. (71-72) 22 See Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama, and Perception. 23 Svich notes at the beginning of the play that she will supply the melody upon request. 24 Here and in other places in which I cite Svich’s printed version, I have corrected minor errors and regularized capitaliza- tion. 25 “Remixed” reflects Halcyon’s mission: “The theme for the Alcyone Festival 2011 was Remixed, creating new works by women based off of classical texts by women. We presented five new works using/adapting/sampling/re-envisioning . . . remixing classical plays written by women from Hrosvita (c. 935 to c. 1002) through 1800. The Alcyone Festival 2011 cel- ebrated both new and (really) old writers and showed how the lineage of female playwrights over the past thousand years can inspire and inform contemporary audiences and artists” (Hal- cyon, “The Alcyone Festival”). See images from the production at “Alcyone 11Press Photos.” 26 The small number of performance reviews and critical articles discussing Svich’s play in its two 2011 productions may reflect both their relatively recent staging and the fact that their performance venues have not tended to draw large groups of academics, as might be the case with a performance at the Siglo de Oro Drama Festival in El Paso, TX.

30 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014

27 Several images from the performance are available online (see Gillen, “Kings Park Patch” and Parks’s review); in addition, Parks describes the set: “[a] faux stucco urban set frames the sexual intrigue beneath shade trees.” 28 In yet another allusion to the same cultural icon, Parks concludes, “Sex and the City with an ineffectual Mr. Big (Don Juan) makes for a one-sided battle of the genders. Ladies get the first and last laugh.” 29 Published as “A Conversation with Caridad Svich” in The Mercurian, the discussion took place via Skype at “Theatrical Translation as Creative Process: A Conference/Festival,” held at the University of North Carolina and at Duke University in April 2013. 30 Versényi then comments on the US theater structure, which privileges directors over translators, adaptor, and playwrights in getting plays staged; directors willing to take a translation to different theaters will likely be more successful than writers advocating for themselves and their plays. Svich replies:

… for the moment, I think that is true. A director pitching a work often makes work happen, regardless of the genre. Translation, new play, classic, you name it. But I wonder if there’s a different model we can make that bypasses that structure. [pause] Just posing that question, I’m not saying that we have an answer right now, but I’m just wondering if we can be proac- tive about how to create a different model. (19)

31 Focusing attention on the value of productions that feature the plays of early modern women dramatists, Williamsen and Hegstrom assert, “only in performance do the works realize their full potential. These women-authored plays—often dismissed as ‘unrepresentable’—challenge preconceived notions regarding the intersections of gender, ethnicity, race, class and sexuality, thus making them particularly fruitful territory for

C. Larson 31

the interrogation of postmodern subjectivity. . . . Directors and actors who welcome ‘fresh’ material often remark how relevant these works seem today” (“Dramaturgas” 16).

Works Cited

Adler, Tony, rev. “A Little Betrayal among Friends.” www.chicagoreader.com. 19 June 2013. Web. “Alcyone 11 Press Photos.” 11 June 2011. www.flickr.com./photos/halcyonth. 20 June 2013. Web. Beer, John. “Alcyone Festival Remixes Works by Women from the 19th Century and Earlier.” Time Out Chicago. 8 June 2011. www.timeoutchicago.com/arts- culture/theater/14796593/alcyone-festival- remixes-works-by-women-from-the-19th- century-and-earlier. 11 Sept. 2013. Web. Boyle, Catherine, and David Johnston, eds., with Janet Morris. The Spanish Golden Age in English: Perspectives on Performance. London: Oberon, 2007. Print. Erdman, Harley, and Susan Paun de García. Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Ad- aptation. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis. Forthcom- ing. Print. Ganelin, Charles. “The Art of Adaptation: Building the Hermeneutical Bridge.” Prologue to Perform- ance: Spanish Classical Theater Today. Ed. Louise and Peter Fothergill-Payne. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1991. 36-48. Print.

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García, Susan Paun de, and Donald R. Larson. The Co- media in English: Translation and Performance. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2008. Print. Gillen, Tom. “Photos: A Little Betrayal among Friends.” 16 Aug. 2011. Kings Park Patch. www.kingspark.patch.com. 20 June 2013. Web. Ginsburg, Kari. “Re: Friendship Betrayed Reading.” Message to the author. 13 Sept. 2013. E-mail. Grubbs, Anthony J. “Woman to Woman: Performing Relationships in Two Stagings of Friendship Betrayed.” Comedia Performance 5.1 (2008): 83-107. Print. Halcyon Theater. “The Alcyone Festival.” www.halcyontheatre.com/alcyone. 20 June 2013. Web. Hegstrom, Valerie, and Amy Williamsen. “Dramaturgas of the Spanish ‘Empire’: A Contemporary Per- formance History.” Erdman and Paun de Gar cía. Print. Henninger, Linda. “Spotlight—A Little Betrayal among Friends.” 26 July 2011. http://kingspark.patch.com/groups/arts-and- entertainment. 17 May 2013. Web. Hornby, Richard. Drama, Metadrama, and Perception. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1986. Print. Jadwani, Lavina. “Alcyone Fest-Betrayal Cast.” “A Lit tle Betrayal among Friends.” http://caridadsvich.com/plays/fulllength/a-little- betrayal-among-friends. 11 Sept. 2013. Web. “Karen Berman.” www.gcsu.edu/theatre/berman.htm. 13 Sept. 2013. Web.

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Larson, Catherine. “Found in Translation: María de Zayas’s Friendship Betrayed and the English- Speaking Stage.” García and Larson. 83-94. Print. ---. “Gender, Reading, and Intertextuality: Don Juan’s Legacy in María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad.” INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 40-41 (1994-95): 129-38. Print. ---. “Terms and Concepts: The Adaptation of Classical Texts for the Stage.” Erdman and Paun de Gar- cía. Print. López-Mayhew, Bárbara. “From Manuscript to 21st Cen- tury Performances: La traición en la amistad.” Comedia Performance 1.1 (2004): 174-91. Print. McGarry, Frances. “An Interview with Tricia McDer- mott.” 9 January 2012. www.francesmcdermott.com. 17 June 2013. Web. Miller, Jonathan. The Afterlife of Plays. University Res- earch Lecture Series, Number 5. San Diego: San Diego State UP, 1992. Print. ---. Subsequent Performances. New York: E. Sifton/Viking, 1986. Print. Mujica, Barbara. “María de Zayas on the Washington Stage: Interview with Karen Berman.” Comedia Performance 4 (2007): 217-32. Print. ---. “María de Zayas’s Friendship Betrayed à la Holly- wood: Translation, Transculturation, and Production.” García and Larson. 240-53. Print. Parks, Steve, rev. “A Little Betrayal among Friends.” Newsday.com. 3 August 2011.

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long-island.newsday.com/things-to-do/theater/a- little-betrayal-among-friends 1.3073031?p=502584. 25 June 2013. Web. Pasto, David. “If You Build It, They Will Come: Open- ing the Canon through Translation, Production and Performance Tourism.” AHCT Symposium on Golden Age Theater. Camino Real Hotel, El Paso. 9 Mar. 2013. Panel presentation. ---. “Re: A question or two.” Message to the author. 19 June 2013. E-mail. “Reading Series/WSC Avant Bard.” http://wscavantbard.org/gaurav-gopalan-reading- series/. 30 June 2013. Web. Smith, Dawn L. “Transformation and Fluidity in the Translation of Classical Texts forPerformance: The Case of Cervantes’s Entremeses.” García and Larson. 95-107. Print. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation. Ed. Rob- ert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. New York: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. http://adaptation391w.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files /2012/08/Stam-Intro-Theory-and-Practice-of- Adaptation.pdf. Web. Stroud, Matthew D. “The Director’s Cut: Baroque Aes- thetics and Modern Stagings of the Comedia.” Comedia Performance 1.1 (2004): 77-94. Print. Svich, Caridad, trans. and adapt. A Little Betrayal among Friends. The Spanish Golden Age Plays. Santa Catalina Editions/NoPassport P, 2012. 5-95. Print.

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---. A Little Betrayal among Friends. http://caridadsvich.com. 26 April 2013. Web. ---. “About Me.” http://caridadsvich.com. 26 April 2013. Web. ---. “Re: Introductions.” Message to the author. 9 Aug. 2013. E-mail. Versényi, Adam, ed. “A Conversation with Caridad Svich.” The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review 4.2 (2013): 5-21. Web. Voros, Sharon D. “Zayas’s Comic Sense: The First Per- formance in English of La traición en la amistad.” García and Larson. 229-39. Print. Williamsen, Amy R. “A Vibrant Circle.” “If You Build It, They Will Come: Opening the Canon through Translation, Production and Performance Tour- ism.” AHCT Symposium on Golden Age Thea- ter. Camino Real Hotel, El Paso. 9 Mar. 2013. P anel presentation delivered in absentia by Kerry Wilks. ---. “From Page to Stage: Readers, Spectators, Expecta tions and Interpretations of María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad.” Heroines of the Golden StAge: Women and Drama in Spain and Engl- and 1500-1700. Ed. Rina Walthause and Mar- guérite Corporaal. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2008. 167-88. Print. Zayas, María de. La traición en la amistad. Teatro de mujeres del Barroco. Ed. Felicidad González Santamera and Fernando Doménech. 31-172. Madrid: Asociación de Directores de Escena de España, 1994. Print.

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---. La traición en la amistad. Ed. Bárbara López- Mayhew. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003. Print. ---. La traición en la amistad. Ed. Alessandra Melloni. Verona: Facultà di Economia e Commercio, 1983. Print. ---. La traición en la amistad. Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age. Ed. Teresa Scott Soufas. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1997. 273-308. Print. ---. La traición en la amistad/Friendship Betrayed. Ed. Valerie Hegstrom. Trans. Catherine Larson. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1999. Print.

STAGING THE PAGE: PERFORMING TECHNOLOGIES OF THE BOOK IN DON QUICHOTTE

CORY A. REED The University of Texas at Austin

During the winter of 2011, Seattle Opera staged a new production of Jules Massenet’s Don Quichotte (1910), which can aptly be described— with all deference to Cervantes’s hidalgo—as ingenious.1 Focusing its scenic attention on the physical and mechanical re-creation of book imagery onstage, Linda Brovsky and Donald Eastman’s production offers a highly distinctive and unique aesthetic concept while acknowledging implicit, and even subliminal, commonalities between this post- Romantic opera and its Cervantine forebear that are not usually apparent in either the libretto or the work’s traditional performance history. While the Seattle production does not suggest that Massenet’s sentimental re-imagining of Don Quixote is, to quote Cervantes, “cortada del mismo artífice y del mesmo paño que la primera” (621), it goes far to challenge the common critique of this opera as hav-

38 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 ing no basis in Cervantes at all.2 Both Massenet’s opera and the 1904 play by Jacques Le Lorrain that inspired it transform Cervantes’s anachronistic chivalric hero into a starry-eyed lover whose rejection by a much younger woman precipitates his ultimate disillusionment. Yet the staging concept of the Seattle production manages to preserve these distinctions while simultaneously infusing the story with a refreshing, over-arching visual reminder of the metaliterary self-referentiality of Cervantes’s novel. By setting Massenet’s re-envisioning of Don Quixote’s story literally on Cervantes’s desktop, the Seattle production creates characters who leap from the pages of books to interact with oversized tomes of chivalric fiction, inkwells, salt cellars, and quill pens, performing a drama constructed on both material and metaphorical foundations of literature, which are physicalized and foregrounded as the main components of stage scenery. The conceptual goal, according to director Brovsky, is to represent scenically the power of the human imagination by staging a story that springs from the imagination of the protagonist as a reader of books, and to localize the opera’s transcendence in the imagination of the audience, who likewise are readers.3 The effect is to visually communicate underlying connections with Cervantes’s novel while allowing Massenet’s music and Henri Cain’s libretto to coexist in the same performance space as a discrete work of art. In short, this production creatively reintroduces Cervantes

Reed 39 into the audience’s consciousness without under- mining the integrity of the opera as a unique work of its own. Don Quichotte is often dismissed by scholars of early modern literature as an exoticized or costumbrista treatment of stereotypical Spanish culture as seen through the rose-colored lens of the post-Romantic French aesthetic, much in the pattern of Bizet’s Carmen. Massenet’s opera, in this view, is undeniably more French than Spanish in its poetic and musical expression. And while the context of the opera’s composition and early performance history firmly situates it within French cultural traditions, it also can be rewarding to view this work as an example of what Anthony Close has called the Romantic approach to Don Quixote more broadly defined, which reconfigures Cervantes’s comic madman as a tormented and frustrated idealist facing a cruel and unforgiving world that has forsaken the chivalric values of fidelity, honor, self-sacrifice, and courage. As unfaithful as Massenet’s opera may be to the Cervantine original, it evidences the legacy of Romanticism after which, as Close has written, it becomes impossible for the modern reader to divorce the figure of Don Quixote from the almost existential idealism that emerges during that age. The opera, in its focus on the spiritual transcendence of Don Quixote’s love for Dulcinea and the impossibility of attaining his dreams, also can be understood as initiating a musical-dramatic tradition

40 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 that culminates in the much better known Man of La Mancha (1965). The action of this opera is simple and straightforward, in keeping with the operatic tradition of reducing literary complexity to a sequence of reflective moments that allow the principal singers to emote musically. In the Seattle production, the structural simplicity of the work lends itself well to the representation of scenic tableaux that encourage the audience to reconcile book-based scenery with the opera’s story and music. The result is a coher- ent, complementary system of imagery that visually references Cervantes while performing Massenet. The production opens with a portrait of Cervantes projected on a downstage scrim alongside a manuscript page bearing the phrase “with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind,” translated from the first chapter of Cervantes’s novel.4 As the lights rise upstage, the scrim projection becomes translucent, gradually giving way to a view of the entire stage dressed as Cervantes’s desktop, on which there are multiple volumes of chivalric fiction (some standing on end, others lying on their side), inkwells, quill pens, and salt cellars. The visual effect is to establish Cervan- tes’s manuscript as the imaginative product that emanates from the tools of writing that adorn his desktop, which in turn holds a collection of the very chivalric books that inspire Don Quixote in his im- agined life as a knight errant. As the chorus and

Reed 41 dancers fill the stage, they give the illusion of min- iature characters emerging from, and interacting with, the chivalric books themselves, very much reminiscent of Gustave Doré’s 1863 illustration of Don Quixote in his library.

All images courtesy of Rozarii Lynch

At this moment, Dulcinée enters atop a balcony constructed of a stack of horizontal books connected to a staircase. Dulcinée, a very real woman and courtesan in Massenet’s post-Romantic vision, coquettishly yet poignantly evaluates her life as an “old maid” at the age of twenty, left with no options for love but those available through her re- luctantly chosen profession (as expressed in her aria “Quand la femme a vingt ans”). Here it is interesting to note that Massenet gives his heroine, grounded in the material and economic realities of prostitu-

42 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 tion, the name of the idealized Dulcinea rather than the peasant Aldonza Lorenzo from Cervantine tradition. Bruce R. Burningham has observed that Mas- senet’s Dulcinée is in fact a composite figure who exhibits elements of several of Cervantes’s female characters, including the flirtatious Altisidora and the manipulative Duchess, but primarily the freedom-loving Marcela (20). Brovsky, in her interpretation of Dulcinée, perceives these same Cervantine echoes, understanding her character as a combination of Marcela, Altisidora, and the earthy Aldonza, and acknowledging the influence of Cervantes’s strong female characters on her directorial choices for this production (Jenkins 11).

After the jaded Dulcinée flirts with a pair of suitors, Don Quichotte and Sancho arrive on the scene, distributing alms to the poor and attracting a

Reed 43 parade of mocking followers. As the procession weaves in and around the oversize books, the onlookers immediately acknowledge a transcendent beauty (“beauté merveilleuse” in the libretto) within the knight’s soul that momentarily overshadows his reputation as a madman (Cain). Don Quichotte perceives in Dulcinée his ideal woman and pledges eternal devotion to her in the aria “Quand apparais- sent les étoiles,” which casts Don Quichotte as a spiritual dreamer and establishes a thematic association between Dulcinée and the heavenly stars. The star motif is later depicted quite literally as a brilliant night sky on the cyclorama for the opera’s final scene. In his initial encounter with Dulcinée, Don Quichotte, standing on the stage floor, casts his idealizing gaze upward toward her as she poses on what amounts to a pedestal constructed of books, evoking commonplaces of both chivalric fiction and the courtly love tradition. Dulcinée demands proof of the love of her “héros superbe,” and playfully sends him off on an impossible errand to retrieve a stolen pearl necklace from the bandit Ténébrun. None of this, of course, is in Cervantes’s novel, although the subsequent encounter with the bandits is broadly evocative of the encounter of Don Quixote and Roque Guinart in Chapters 60 and 61 of Part Two.5 Sancho then delivers a satirical aria on the perils of loving women (“Comment peut-on penser du bien”), a misogynistic diatribe that echoes Le-

44 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 porello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and serves as a musical counterpoint to Don Quichotte’s expression of the transformative power of love. This scene is blocked using stacked tomes of chivalric fiction and inkwells as acting spaces upon which the characters climb, recline, and rest their props (including Don Quichotte’s armor and the basin-helmet), and it leads directly into Don Quichotte’s attack of the windmills. At this moment in the production, the quill pens and inkwells draw the full focus of the audience’s attention. As the stage begins to darken, subtly at first, the emerging shadows of the quill pens extending outward from the inkwells come to represent the windmills in the audience’s imagination, just as the windmills transform themselves into giants in Don Quichotte’s mind. The cyclorama now a brilliant crimson, the knight charges his im- agined adversaries with raised lance as he desper- ately cries, "Dulcinée! Dulcinée! pour toi, ma Dame de Beauté!" (Cain). This scene marks the one overt reference to Cervantes in Massenet’s opera, and the highly imaginative staging of this iconic man- machine encounter among the pre-technological writing implements of quill pen and ink emphasize not only Don Quixote’s anachronistic revival of medieval chivalry in the modern era, but also how he figuratively writes his own destiny upon the foundation of the chivalric books that surround him. In this multi-layered confrontation of pen and sword

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(or rather, lance), the power of the pen emerges tri- umphant.

In the final scene before intermission, Don Quichotte and Sancho are ambushed by Ténébrun’s bandits.6 Here, the silhouetted books recede into the background to suggest a deep forest, juxtaposed with other, more realistic trees. As Sancho flees, the bandits capture Don Quichotte and carry him to their camp, the focal point of which is a burning campfire made of normal-sized books that clearly references both Inquisitorial book-burnings and au- tos de fe. Don Quichotte, himself a literary creation and a product of books, is about to be martyred. Bound to a tree and awaiting his execution, his arms spread Christ-like (and suggesting the passionate existentialism expressed by Unamuno in his 1914 Vida de don Quijote y Sancho, usually translated as

46 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014

Our Lord Don Quixote), Don Quichotte sings a stir- ring elegy to the power of love, commends his soul to God, and derives enough strength from his devo- tional contemplation to miraculously break his bonds. The bandits are themselves spiritually transformed by the knight’s devotion and they release him so he might return the necklace to its rightful owner. After the intermission break, Don Quichotte returns to Dulcinée, triumphantly handing her the necklace and then proposing marriage, which earns him renewed ridicule from the chorus of onlookers. Dulcinée is moved to sympathy. Taking Don Quichotte aside, she undeceives him, explaining her profession and describing her refusal of his proposal as a gesture of true love. The melancholy knight, disillusioned, reminds Sancho of his promised island, which in Don Quichotte’s final aria (“Prends cette île”) is transformed into a metaphor for pursu- ing one’s dreams. Literally reaching for the stars that shine above him, Don Quichotte dies in San- cho’s arms, surrounded by piles of books of all shapes and sizes.7 The enormous books, which constitute the foundation of the scenic design for this production, are themselves marvels of stage machinery. Four- teen feet tall, mounted on wheels, and constructed using shipbuilding techniques, they are arranged in a variety of placements and patterns on the stage, serving as both acting spaces and literary backdrops to the stage action. Faint traces of gold leaf adorn

Reed 47 the spines as titles and decorative embellishments (in a process that involved applying gold leaf first, then a layer of texture, to create an “embossed” look). 8 The titles reveal these books to be a verita- ble collection of the chivalric romances found in Don Quixote’s library (and discussed during the scrutiny of his library in chapter 5 of Part One), including Amadís de Gaula, Belianís de Grecia (the source of Don Quixote’s nemesis, the enchanter Frestón), Olivante de Laura, Palmerín de Oliva, Tirant lo Blanc, Felixmarte de Hircania, Plátir (consigned to the flames by the priest and barber), and Monserrate (Cristóbal de Virués’s epic, praised by Cervantes). The books thus double as both Cer- vantes’s library (as the production artists assert) and Don Quixote’s library. As stage machinery, these giant chivalric tomes become a rather literal evoca- tion of the “máquina mal fundada de estos ca- ballerescos libros,” which Cervantes critiques in his prologue to Part One. [Image 5] The Seattle production deftly transforms books into acting spaces, both literally and metaphorically. Serving as walls, trees, balconies, and other objects and spaces, books in this production truly become places of action. This dimension of the artistic production reiterates Don Quixote’s original vision: he lives in and through the books he reads, and he finds in them a source of inspiration to act in the world, even as Cervantes reveals to his reader the perils of careless, idle reading. In the

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Barcelona print shop (Part Two, Chapter 62), Cer- vantes shows his reader how books are commercial products manufactured by modern machinery for sale in a capitalistic marketplace. Books in this production of Don Quichotte are likewise machines that create artful illusions, and which serve to reveal hidden truths that lead, ultimately, to desengaño. During several moments in this production, primarily after the intermission as the work moves towards its dénouement, the giant books are re- versed in orientation, showing the audience the pages instead of the spines. The pages are constructed from long slats of wood separated by narrow spaces. On closer inspection, as time elapses with the books in this orientation, the audience begins to perceive the strapping that connects and supports the pages of these books, revealing their inner construction. The effect is one of gradually stripping away the illusion of works of fiction to reveal them as products of mechanical reproduction, and it parallels the process of Don Quixote’s disillusionment, both in the opera and in the novel. This is perhaps one of the most self-conscious aspects of the Seattle artistic concept, and it acutely articulates the kind of metaliterary games that characterize Cervantes’s novel, with its intercalated tales, embedded authors, and tricks played upon readers, all of which force the reader to acknowledge the reality of Cervantes’s ingenious artifice. The visual revelation of these books as stage machinery parallels the process by

Reed 49 which Cervantes leads us into his literary worlds, causing us to suspend disbelief and enter into their “realities” only to suddenly reveal their fictive inner workings and machinations (as happens in the epi- sodes of Maese Pedro, Don Quixote’s battle with the wineskin “giants” that interrupts the intercalated “Novela del curioso impertinente,” and the protagonist’s encounter with print technology in Barcelo- na). Jonathan Sawday reminds us that machines in early modern Europe were considered products of the imagination as well as technical achieve- ments:

Machines and mechanisms in the European Renaissance were far more than simply an efficient means of helping human beings to perform ‘work’ or ‘labour’. Rather, the elaborate devices of the artist-engineers of the Renaissance reached deep into early- modern political, aesthetic, and philosophi- cal structures of thought (xviii).

The rise of technology, including print technology, is related to processes of the imagination that medi- ate human understanding of our place in the natural world. Machines not only increase productivity, but also create artful illusions (thus replacing magic in the early modern imagination) through the skillful manipulation of the laws of nature, creating some-

50 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 thing from nothing. In this sense, early modern technology illustrates Martin Heidegger’s concept of techne, which he links to poiesis as a process of human creativity (Sawday 1). The early modern world of technology, then, is never far removed from the act of artistic creation. People found machines useful, to be sure, but they also admired their artistry and the ingenuity and creativity involved in the invention of novel devices. Book technology, in particular, holds multiple imaginative associations; the products mass-produced by the printing press (such as those Don Quixote peruses in Barcelona) contain within themselves fictive worlds created by the human imagination. This is the sense in which Elizabeth Eisenstein understands early modern book technology as doubly marvelous, in that the creative worlds invented by fiction are themselves manufactured for circulation and public consumption by the printing press, another wonder of the creative imagination (557). In the Seattle production of Masse- net’s Don Quichotte, the ingenious use of books as stage machinery, which serve literally as the foundation for artistic expression, highlights the act of creation itself as an indelible link between the post- Romantic opera and Cervantes’s novel. In staging the page, both materially and metaphorically, Seat- tle Opera’s unique design concept anchors Masse- net’s opera in the metaliterary world of Cervantes, and in doing so succeeds in director Brovsky’s stated goal of celebrating the human imagination.

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NOTES

1 Seattle Opera’s production of Massenet’s Don Quichotte (the Seattle premiere of this opera) opened on February 26, 2011 and ran for eight performances, with two casts performing the principal roles in an alternating schedule. Carlo Montanaro conducted. Linda Brovsky was the stage director, Donald Eastman the set designer, Missy West the costume designer, and Connie Yun the lighting designer. The analysis in this article is based on the performances of March 5 (Malgorzata Walewska as Dulcinée, John Relyea as Don Quichotte, and Eduardo Chama as Sancho Panza) and March 6 (Daniela Sin- dram as Dulcinée, Nicolas Cavallier as Don Quichotte, and Richard Bernstein as Sancho Panza). 2 Mario R. Martínez, in his review of a recent, traditionally staged production (San Diego 2009), correctly observes that “there are really not many similarities to the novel. Nonethe- less, the idea of chivalry and dreams, ideas that permeate the novel, are made quite apparent in this operatic work as well” (287). 3 In a publicity interview for a video “teaser,” Brovsky pro- poses that this new production, on its most basic level, “cele- brates the imagination of writers, the imagination of readers.” Brovsky’s stated intentions carry this production beyond the simple imposition of a directorial concept on a theatrical work in the tradition of European Regietheater. Rather, the production’s emphasis on the power of the human imagination appears to derive from the creative staff’s understanding of this theme as a fundamental aspect of Massenet and Cain’s work. 4 The source of this quotation appears to be Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation of Cervantes (21), which is also cited in the Seattle Opera program notes for this production (Jenkins 10). 5 Burningham (20) also sees in the bandit Ténébrun echoes of Cervantes’s picaresque Ginés de Pasamonte.

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6 Massenet composed the opera in five short acts. Traditional- ly the first three are performed before the intermission as three “scenes” in a longer, composite first act, followed after the intermission by the last two. 7 A slide show depicting each of these scenes may be viewed at Seattle Opera’s web page: http://seattleopera.org/tickets/2010-2011/quixote/photos.aspx 8 Michael Moore, the Seattle scenic studio’s manager, describes the construction of the books, including the shipbuilding techniques and the “embossing” process, in a promotional video titled “Behind the Scenes: Building Sets.”

Works Cited

Brovsky, Linda. Interview. Teaser. Seattle Opera. Web. 27 Sept. 2013. http://www.seattleopera.org/tickets/2010- 2011/quixote/videos.aspx Burningham, Bruce R. “Writing in the Margins: Cervan- tes’ Challenge to Massenet.” Seattle Opera Magazine 28.3 (Winter 2010-11): 18-21. Print. Cain, Henri. Don Quichotte: comédie héroïque en cinq actes. Composed by Jules Massenet. Web. 2 Oct. 2013. http://www.impresario.ch/libretto/libmasdon_f.h tm Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Crítica/Instituto Cer- vantes, 1998. Print. ---. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Harper, 2003. Print.

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---. Don Quixote de la Mancha. Trans. Louis Viardot. Illustrations by Gustave Doré. Paris: Hachette, 1863. Close, Anthony. The Romantic Approach to Don Quix- ote. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print. Don Quichotte. By Jules Massenet. Libretto by Henri Cain. Dir. Linda Brovksy. Cond. Carlo Mon- tanaro. Seattle Opera, Seattle. 5 and 6 March 2011. Performance. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print. Jenkins, Speight. “A Sweet and Soulful Old Man.” Seat- tle Opera Presents: Don Quichotte. Encore Arts Program 35.4 (2011): 10-11. Print. Martínez, Mario R. “Don Quichotte, by Jules Massenet.” Comedia Performance 7.1 (2010): 286-95. Print. Moore, Michael. Interview. “Behind the Scenes: Build- ing Sets.” Seattle Opera. Web. 27 Sept. 2013. http://www.seattleopera.org/tickets/2010- 2011/quixote/videos.aspx Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of the Imagination: Renais- sance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Unamuno, Miguel de. Vida de don Quijote y Sancho. Madrid: Cátedra, 1988.

INCIDENTAL MUSIC AND ITS ROLE IN THREE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE COMEDIA PERFORMANCES

DONALD R. LARSON The Ohio State University

The expression “incidental music” is widely used in discussions of theatre, but it is not always appropriately understood. It does not, for example, signify something that is merely decorative, nor does it denote something that is secondary in the totality of the theatrical event; indeed, its presence in the production is frequently critical to the success of a show. The term refers, rather, to music that is heard intermittently during the course of the performance, rather than continuously, as would be the case with operas, or in sung passages of extensive duration, as would be the case with musical comedies, operettas, and zarzuelas. When grasped in this fashion as music inserted periodically into a performance in order to construct an acoustic framework for the happenings on stage and lend them enhanced interest and pleasure, it is evident that incidental music has occupied an important position in

D. Larson 55 Western theatre from its beginnings in ancient Greece, as indeed it has in theatre in most other parts of the world. Incidental music associated with early Greek tragedy was primarily in the form of choric odes, passages that were positioned between “epi- sodes” of spoken dialogue and devised to offer commentary on them.1 Such passages, sung and danced by a male chorus, are sometimes found in Greek Old Comedy as well. In Greek New Comedy, however, music was typically not used for ideological purposes, but rather for structural reasons, sepa- rating and marking off the different segments of the dialogue. Thus, surviving texts of Menander specify that choric performances are to be introduced into the action at certain points, but they provide no words for those performances, nor do they give any indication of their musical nature. “So comes into being,” Roger Savage has written, “the idea that a comedy should comprise several distinct dialogue- sections separated by something in a different performance medium, allowed for but not pre-scripted by the playwright” (139). That idea was incorporated into later Roman comedy, and finds reflection in a multitude of performances in early modern Ita- ly, Spain, and England as well. Typically, in those countries, plays that were long enough to be divided into acts featured brief musico-dramatic entertainments that served as a lead-in to the work being performed, as a kind of epilogue at the end, and as fill- er material between the acts. Such entertainments

56 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 came to be called by a variety of names, including intermedi, intermezzi, divertissements, and so on.2 In Spain the term entremés was perhaps the most commonly employed, although in scholarship today the word is used somewhat differently, referring to plays of brief duration, performed either in connection with longer works or on their own, and of a comical, often satirical, nature. Of course, not all incidental music in early modern theatre performances lay outside the con- fines of the various divisions of the play themselves. There was, in addition to the inter-act music, also a great deal of intra-act music. More often than not explicitly called for within the fictional world of the drama, that music took many different forms: serenades, marches, dances, trumpet flourishes, and so on. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries incidental music for theatrical performances became ever more prominent, most notably in the large theatres of capital cities that were typically state-supported. Such theatres were normally en- dowed with orchestra pits and a generous complement of musicians, the result of their serving as opera houses as well as venues for so-called “legit- imate” plays. Since the musicians were employed full-time, it made economic sense to utilize their services as much and as often as possible. This was the period during which it was not uncommon for renowned composers such as Men- delssohn and Grieg to be engaged to provide incidental music, sometimes for revivals of earlier

D. Larson 57 plays, at other times for new works. Usually their scores contained preludes, interludes heard between the acts, and postludes, in addition to intra-act music of the types just mentioned. On occasion, the intra-act music also contained passages not specifically called for in the playscript, such as orchestral underlining for scenes of great emotion and excitement. Such lavish employment of incidental music was, naturally, to change during the course of the early twentieth century, as rising costs made the hiring of large numbers of musicians increasingly rare, although music of some sort, live or recorded, continues to be a component of most productions today. When one speaks of incidental music in connection with early modern Spanish theatre, one is speaking primarily of the music associated with the performance of comedias, especially those written for the public theatres, for the music related to works created for court performance—spectacle plays, zarzuelas, operas, and semi-operas—can hardly be considered incidental, given its far greater extension. Serious scrutiny of the incidental music linked with the staging of comedias commenced for all practical purposes with the studies of Felipe Pedrell in the late nineteenth century and continued with the work of such more recent scholars as Emil- io Cotarelo y Mori, José Subirá, Miguel Querol, Jack Sage, and Louise Stein. Thanks to their efforts we now know a great deal about when and to what apparent ends music was employed in performances in seventeenth-century corrales.

58 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 For purposes of classification one can divide the music heard during a typical early modern comedia staging into two general categories. There is, on the one hand, the music included in the various short entertainments that book-ended the play and that filled the intervals between its acts. On the other hand, there is the music contained within the acts of the play. It is the latter that concerns us here, for it bears upon contemporary productions of comedias. This intra-act music, sometimes instrumental, sometimes vocal, sometimes both, is found, often in abundance, in the vast majority of seventeenth-century plays created for the public theatres. Its prominence in those works contrasts with the relative simplicity of most corral stagings and undoubtedly served in some degree as compensation for the lack of visual opulence. As indicated either explicitly or implicitly in the stage directions and dialogue of the plays, the intra-act music served a variety of functions. On occasion its purpose was primarily practical: loud music was utilized to cover offstage and onstage noises that would diminish the dramatic effect of the moment—the opening of trapdoors or the operating of machinery, for example. As in Greek New Comedy, music was also used to mark the structure of the play, employed at the beginning and ending of scenes and acts. In related fashion, it was also often inserted into the performance to create a transition or a necessary emphasis, as when impressive flourishes rang out to an-

D. Larson 59 nounce the arrival of a king or when a battle was about to begin. On still other occasions, as Gustavo Ump- ierre has observed in his study of songs in Lope de Vega, music was incorporated into the performance to create a specific mood or to establish or support a particular setting or atmosphere. A great many of the songs featured in the Comedia Nueva have to do, as we would expect, with love and its attendant feelings: desire, jealousy, sadness, and so on. When performed during the evening hours such songs were classified as serenades; when performed at dawn, they were known as alboradas, or aubades. Other songs were designed to accompany or generate alternative moods, and of these the most common are those that deal with celebration of one sort or another: thus, the many wedding songs found in the plays, as well as those that have to do with the welcoming of important visitors, the arrival of spring (“May songs”), and religious or quasi- religious festivities, such as those that took place during the Night of St. John. In some instances, the texts for these songs, especially those associated with the countryside and its seasonal occupations, were borrowed from the popular tradition; in the majority of cases, however, they were written by the dramatists themselves, although occasionally in imi- tation of fondly remembered folk songs. Songs in the Comedia Nueva that evoke a particular atmosphere, like songs which initiate or sustain a particular mood, are diverse in nature.

60 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 Those that are intended to suggest an aristocratic ambience are typically filled with courtly imagery, while those meant to conjure up a rural setting tend to employ images drawn from nature. A particular case are the songs associated with auguries and premonitions, heavenly interventions, and inexpli- cable happenings.3 In these, textual references are characteristically to the divinity, or to supernatural or unseen forces.4 While it is a relatively straight-forward task to identify where and for what apparent purposes music was employed in the works of the seventeenth-century Comedia Nueva, it is far more diffi- cult to specify what the music actually sounded like. What we do know is the kinds of instruments that were utilized, because those instruments are frequently specified in the stage directions of the text. Stringed instruments were common, guitars particularly, but also lutes, and to a lesser extent harps and vihuelas. Percussion instruments—drums, tambourines, bells—were also customary, as were certain wind instruments, especially trumpets, flutes, and shawms (the forerunner of the modern oboe). On occasion, bagpipes and shepherd’s pipes were also employed. To some extent, and as one would expect, many of these instruments came to be associated with certain types of scenes: trumpets and drums with scenes of warfare; harps and shawms with those of religious character; and such rustic instruments as tambourines, shepherd’s pipes, and bagpipes with country scenes. The players of the

D. Larson 61 instruments were sometimes the actors themselves, who were also responsible for most of the singing; on other occasions, especially in performances by larger companies, they were professional musicians. Matters of general instrumentation aside, however, much that we would wish to know about the nature of the music heard in early modern public theatres is a matter for speculation, for none of the notation of the purely instrumental interludes included in the plays has survived to the present day, and very few of the scores of the musical settings of the songs are still extant. As Louise Stein has shown (11-65), those compositions that do exist, especially for works of the first half of the seventeenth century, tend to be for songs that have been drawn from the popular tradition, and they are for the most part not those that would have been played during an actual theatre performance. The work of court composers, and typically polyphonic in character, they were created, not for the corrales, but rather for pri- vate performance in those aristocratic circles whose members were beginning to take an interest in folk culture. Why so few of the scores for the public theatres have survived is a matter of some puzzle- ment. One part of the explanation probably has to do with the fact that in the seventeenth century composing for the corrales, as opposed to composing for the court or the church, carried little pres- tige, with the result that no concerted effort seems to have been made to preserve theatre music. Then,

62 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 too, it is likely that many of the scores that had been collected were simply lost or destroyed over time. As Stein relates (7), much of the destruction can undoubtedly be attributed to two horrific catastro- phes that consumed a considerable portion of the music of the early modern period. The first of these was the fire that destroyed the Alcázar of Madrid, along with its royal library and archives, in 1734. The second was the collapse during the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 of the great library of King John IV of Portugal, another significant repository of the Spanish cultural patrimony. On the basis of those scores that do survive, Stein has ventured a number of conjectures, always with the caution that those scores may not be totally indicative. First, she believes, music heard in the public theatres of the first half of the seventeenth century was largely national in style, with little ab- sorption of foreign influences. Next, she speculates that many of the tunes, like many of the song-texts, were drawn from the popular tradition, although they could have been considerably altered for performance onstage. Finally, she hypothesizes that the song settings would have been basically simple, strophic in arrangement, and both homophonic and homorhythmic; they would also have been, she writes, “more chordal than contrapuntal, with short, clearly articulated musical phrases that follow the structure of the poetic text,” and with limited range and melodic movement (45). 5

D. Larson 63 Interestingly, the various purposes that incidental music served in the performance of comedias in the public theatres of the seventeenth century— structural, practical, atmospheric, mood-setting— are substantially similar to the functions carried out by incidental music in theatre today. Those functions have been analyzed by Deena Kaye and James LeBrecht in their book Sound and Music for the Theatre, which orders incidental music in contemporary productions into four basic categories. The first of these is what the authors call “framing,” a term that encompasses the music heard before the show begins, between the acts of the performance, and at the end of the event. Framing music, in other words, like the music of the various divertimenti that accompanied performances of comedias in the early modern period, exists outside the action of the play, although in most instances it will have some relation to that action. When utilized before the curtain goes up, it often sets the tone for the happenings to come, and when employed later, during the intervals of the performance or after the final curtain, it sometimes furnishes a kind of retrospective commentary on those happenings. More than anything else, perhaps, framing music serves to establish, or reinforce, the time and place of the events of the play. Thus, framing music will normally be somewhat consistent in style; music heard during other parts of the performance need not be. The second category of incidental music singled out by Kaye and LeBrecht is that of under-

64 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 scoring. Underscoring in the theatre, like underscoring in films, fulfills many purposes, but its primary tasks are to create a particular mood and/or to underline the emotions of the moment. This, of course, was one of the principal roles of music in performances of comedias in the seventeenth century, but here there is an important distinction to be made. In early modern theatre mood-music was typically supplied by the actors and actresses themselves in their work as characters within a particular dramatic world, although sometimes it was provided by professional musicians who played and sang either onstage or off. Underscoring meant to create a particular mood or ambience in a contemporary theatrical performance is not only not created by the dramatic characters themselves, it is not even, in most cases, meant to be “heard” by them. In those instances when it is “heard” it is because it emanates from an onstage source, a radio, for example, or from a posited offstage source, perhaps a band in the street, perhaps someone’s boom-box blaring in the distance. Most frequently, however, musical underscoring comes from unseen speakers in the audi- torium and exists to influence the feelings of the members of the public, not the characters onstage. Underscoring in the theatre today is usually sporad- ic, but there have been some productions that were underscored throughout, such as Ariane Mnouch- kine’s famous Kabuki-inspired staging of Shake- speare’s Richard II at the Paris Cartoucherie Thea- tre, and others, such as many of those conceived by

D. Larson 65 the prominent American director, Richard Foreman, in which the music is nearly continuous.6 Since it is meant to echo, or strengthen, or comment on moods and feelings which frequently change from moment to moment, underscoring music also tends to be quite varying. It does not, in other words, aim for the consistency of style that normally characterizes framing music. Kaye and LeBrecht’s third category is transitional music. Like underscoring, transitional music exists outside the action of the play in the sense that it is not meant to be heard by the characters. Like underscoring also, it is generally not specified in the playscript. Sometimes it is used to highlight the entrance or impending exit of a particular character with whom it has come to be associated. At other times it is employed to cap off a scene or to smooth the movement from one scene to the next, or from one act to the next. Often transitional music partakes of the nature of the framing music, but that is not invariably the case. The final type of incidental music discussed by Kaye and LeBrecht is that of “cued,” or “re- quired,” music. Such music, unlike the other kinds enumerated, is, as its name indicates, expressly called for by the playscript, and unlike framing, underscoring, and transitional music, it is meant to be heard by the characters onstage. The songs and dances so prominent in comedias with a rustic setting are clear examples of cued music, as are the serenades that feature in many plays of aristocratic

66 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 character. The nature of this music will be largely determined by what is specified in the playscript. Thus, whereas a Golden Age text may well call for seguidillas and a nineteenth-century work of the género chico for a chotis, a contemporary play will more likely stipulate a rock anthem. 7 In earlier periods all theatrical music was, naturally, live. In modern productions music may be live, or it may be electronically reproduced, or it may be a combination of the two, although now a full complement of live musicians in the theatre would be extremely rare indeed. As in the early modern theatre, incidental music in contemporary theatre is sometimes composed especially for a specific production and at other times it is drawn from pre-existing sources. These days the latter would typically be recordings of some sort. The composer or sound designer of modern performances typically works in close conjunction with the director of the staging and under certain circumstances with the playwright as well, if he or she is living. In the case of older works adapted from a foreign language, it is even possible that the translator becomes involved in the collaboration. The incidental music of a production need not be unified in style from beginning to end, but as the directors interviewed in the collections edited by Bartow and Delgado and Heritage seem to agree, there should be a sense of coherence throughout. Above all, the music must support the vision of the

D. Larson 67 director and enhance the effect of the work as a whole, as well as that of its individual parts. Beyond those inescapable requirements, additional demands are placed on the music employed in modern stagings of classical plays, especially if they are of a traditional, that is to say, non-updated, sort. At a minimum, the music of those productions is normally expected to suggest the location and the period in which the events of the work occur, and beyond that, something of its social and cultural setting. Those demands are, of course, increased when the time of the action is far removed from that of modern spectators and when the context in which it is embedded is equally distant, something that happens when Spanish Golden Age plays, no matter what their particular setting, are performed before contemporary English-speaking audiences. It might be supposed that the easiest way for a modern composer to create an appropriate acoustic framework for a performance of a comedia would be to draw upon the music created for its original production. That is virtually impossible, however, for as noted above all but a small fraction of the theatrical music of the early modern period has disappeared. Moreover, even if the original scores existed, there is no guarantee that they would suggest to contemporary audiences what they conveyed to earlier audiences, since musical conventions and practices of the seventeenth century were very different from those with which most people are familiar today.

68 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 The fact is that contemporary productions in English of all works transposed from a foreign language and culture necessarily involve, as all directors know, acts of negotiation between the here and now and the there and then, acts undertaken in an effort to make the “Other”—other people, other times and places—understandable in our present circumstances. Patrice Pavis refers to these as “intercultural exchanges,” and they encompass many diverse things: translation choices, the treatment of value systems that are dissimilar to our own, the manner in which time and space are organized, the movements, gestures, and way of speaking of the actors, and last, but not least, the kinds of music employed (Theatre 1-23).8 Through these exchanges bridges are built between the original work and its modern refashioning, bridges that in the words of David Johnston engineer “movement between the narratives, concepts and structures of life that are embodied in [the] foreign-language plays, and the perceptual and conceptual space of the [contemporary] spectator” (50). As Johnston notes this movement is always two-way: the past and the alien are conveyed to us in our present moment, but in turn we are transported to different times and distant lo- cations. Given, then, the demand to supply incidental music for an English-language production of a comedia that will function as an effective bridge between the contemporary period and the early modern period in Spain or its possessions, composers or

D. Larson 69 sound designers of the production have opted for a variety of solutions. Sometimes they have drawn inspiration from non-theatrical Spanish song and dance music. At other times they have borrowed from music that is not truly Spanish at all but that sounds Spanish to many modern ears. Always, however, and necessarily, they have worked with a great deal of freedom, as can be seen by examining the cases of three more or less recent North Ameri- can English-language productions, each of which employed a new, or newly revised, translation, and each of which enjoyed notable success, both with the public and with the critics. The first of the productions to be discussed is Alarcón’s The Liar [La verdad sospechosa], which was performed by the Antaeus Company of Los Angeles at the Chamizal Golden Age Drama Festival in El Paso in March, 2000, employing a new translation of Dakin Matthews and directed by Anne McNaughton. The second is Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, staged during the Stratford Shake- speare Festival in the summer of 2008, with a new translation by Laurence Boswell and under Bos- well’s direction. The third is Lope’s The Dog in the Manger [El perro del hortelano], which was presented in the winter of 2009 by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and which used an existing, but updated, translation by David Johnston and which was directed by Jonathan Mun- by.9 Each of these productions employed music in quite different ways and to rather different ends.10

70 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 All the music for The Liar was composed and performed by Carl Smith, a classically trained guitarist based in Southern California. He has worked with a number of different theatrical organ- izations on the West Coast, including the Berkeley Shakespeare Festival and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, but in recent years he has been particularly associated with the Antaeus and Andak companies of Los Angeles. Dressed in period costume, Smith was onstage with his guitar during the entire performance of The Liar, seated just outside the acting area. Since, rather unusually, Alarcón’s play has no cued music whatsoever, the score that Smith composed, for guitar alone except on one occasion, was limited to other objectives, which may be brief- ly enumerated. The first was to provide an appropriate acoustic frame. Thus, prior to the first act, the music served as a kind of prelude that set the mood of the upcoming performance, and at the end of the second, and final, act it functioned to draw closure on the evening and to accompany the bows of the actors. That same framing purpose was apparent during the entr’acte where, with the composer now both playing and singing, it encapsulated the pre- ceding action in a song. During the play itself, music—normally just a few brief bars—was used to indicate transitions between scenes, that is to say, changes of setting, of which there are many in Alar- cón’s text. It also punctuated especially dramatic entrances, particularly those of Don Juan de Sosa,

D. Larson 71 who was typically ushered onstage with dramatic, strummed “dum-da-da-dum” chords, which became his personal leitmotif and which never failed to provoke the audience to peals of laughter. As Patrice Pavis has pointed out, leitmotifs used in this fashion can serve both to create expectation and to signal dramaturgical progression (Dictionary 182). Finally, music in The Liar was employed to underscore Don García’s three extended monologues, each of which anchors a different act in Alarcón’s play. Those speeches are inherently musical, as the excellent actor, J. D. Cullum, who delivered them was well aware. With rising intonation here and following intonation there, with a dramatic pause on this or that word to create emphasis and a rushing onward in other places to vary the rhythm and speed up the tempo, with whispered phrases followed by lines that boomed forth, he made of the speeches something very like operatic arias. Un- folding the astonishing flights of Don García’s imagination in truly bravura fashion, he worked in close conjunction with Carl Smith whose guitar accompaniment followed unerringly the beats of Cul- lum’s spoken words. Thus a kind of duet between actor and musician was created, a duet that was especially notable in the last of the three speeches which rose to a crescendo of excitement as Don García related his supposed slaying of his rival, Don Juan. The style of Smith’s music throughout the production was recognizably Spanish, with strong

72 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 rhythms and extensive use of syncopation. There were occasional touches of flamenco, as seems inevitable in English-language adaptations of comedias, but more often the inspiration seemed to be lute and vihuela dance pieces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is undeniable is that Smith’s score worked, as it was intended to do, as a successful bridge between the world of the spectators and the world of Alarcón’s play. Of the three stagings examined here, Fuente Ovejuna contained by far the most music. No doubt this is partly a reflection of Lope de Vega’s well- known fondness for music, but it was also a reflection of director Laurence Boswell’s own propensity for incorporating generous amounts of it in his productions, a propensity of which he has spoken on several occasions.11 That penchant seems particularly apposite in mountings of Lope’s plays, for as Boswell himself has observed, they often seem to move to a dance-like rhythm. In his words, “they swing across the stage with pace and a powerful force” (Smith 170). As was the case with The Liar, all the music presented in the production of Fuente Ovejuna was original, written by the Canadian composer, guitarist, conductor, and arranger, Ed Henderson. Widely recorded, Henderson has won many awards for his music, which ranges freely among a variety of styles, including classical, pop, folk, rock and jazz. His assignment as composer of the Stratford production was rather different from that of Smith, for

D. Larson 73 unlike The Liar, Fuente Ovejuna contains a substan- tial quantity of cued music. Indeed, there is an important scene in each of the three acts of Lope’s play in which music figures prominently. The first of these is the scene in Act I in which the villagers welcome the Comendador home from the conquest of Ciudad Real; the second, is the wedding scene at the end of Act II; and the third is the scene of joy- ous abandon in Act III, subsequent to the killing and beheading of the Comendador. The Stratford staging made the most of each of these moments by flooding the playing area with virtually the entire large cast of actors, who sang, shouted, and danced to the accompaniment of guitars and drums played by several of them and a small complement of onstage musicians. To heighten and prolong the excitement generated in these scenes, some of the songs were repeated, and in other cases, additional verses were appended to the lyrics that Lope had provided. Most conspicuously perhaps, certain speeches that in Lope’s text were intended to be spoken were set to music and sung. A notable example was Mengo’s peroration during the wedding scene in Act II regarding the incompe- tence of bad poets (“¿No habéis visto un buñolero …?) that was here turned into the amusing ditty, “Have you seen a doughnut maker / Working at his pastry dough?” (75) The music that Henderson provided for the Stratford actors in these scenes—a total of seven different songs—was composed in close collabora-

74 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 tion with Boswell. During their work together, each of the men, composer and director, made numerous suggestions to the other: Henderson about the word- ing of Boswell’s lyrics, Boswell about the rhythms and melodic movement of Henderson’s song- settings.12 Both men were concerned that the songs composed for the inhabitants of Fuente Ovejuna be evocative of the atmosphere that they associated with the town, an atmosphere—standing in contrast to that of the court scenes—compounded of feelings of simplicity, love, loyalty, and harmony. The music for these town scenes is thus un- complicated, open-hearted, and appropriately folk- loric in tone. To be sure, it did not suggest the time and the place of the action of Lope’s play in a way that some would regard as truly “authentic.” Some of it was flamenco in style, and much of the rest had a pronounced Latin American flavor. (Henderson’s webpage implies that he is particularly fond of Bra- zilian music.) On its own terms, nevertheless, the music was pleasing to the ear and theatrically very effective. Also effective, although perhaps less striking, was the music that Henderson composed for purposes of underscoring in scenes involving the Grand Masters of the Orders of Calatrava and San- tiago and those in which the Catholic Monarchs appear. Unlike the cued music, which was, of course, performed live, this music, primarily choral, was pre-recorded by members of the cast in a church in Stratford, and much of it was based on liturgical

D. Larson 75 texts. Although some members in the audience who were familiar with Lope’s text apparently felt that the underscoring unduly emphasized the religious dimension of the play, Boswell himself vigorously defended its use in a wide-ranging interview with Dawn Smith, pointing out the tie that has long existed in Spain between the ruling class and the Church (175-76). What is indisputable, in any event, is that Henderson’s score for the production evokes both the humble world of Fuente Ovejuna and the aristocratic world of the court in a way that made each of them more arresting and comprehen- sible to contemporary spectators. If the music for The Liar was primarily of the framing and transitional sort, and the music for Fuente Ovejuna most memorable when it was cued, the music for The Dog in the Manger, written by the New York-based composer, sound-designer, and performer, Richard Martinez, seemed particularly notable when it functioned as underscoring. To the creation of that music, Martinez brought a wealth of experience, having written scores for numerous shows on Broadway, off Broadway, and in regional theatre, as well as for television and film. Much of the production’s background music featured a young soprano with a clear, lovely voice, Julie Craig, who floated songs of haunting beauty during many of the scenes of the play. In his study of opera Gary Schmidgall has written that what composers particularly look for when they are setting literary works are moments of

76 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 “expressive crisis” (11), moments when words alone do not seem to be sufficient to convey the depth and complexity of the feelings of the characters, and when only the union of text and music will achieve a moving and memorable effect. Something of the same thinking seems to have guided the choice of passages for underscoring in The Dog in the Manger, for they were passages when the singing of Ms. Craig notably heightened and intensified the emotions expressed by Lope’s text. The important difference between the operas being discussed by Schmidgall and the Washington production of The Dog in the Manger is, of course, that Ms. Craig did not herself intone the speeches of the text, but merely underlined them with a kind of flowing vocalise. The speeches involved, as might be expected, were those of Diana and Teodoro. Primarily soliloquies and monologues, their purpose was sometimes to express the feelings of the two of them, sometimes to hide those feelings, and as they groped their way to self-understanding their ever- changing consciousness was admirably reflected by the wordless songs provided by Ms. Craig. Adding to the effect of mutability was the fact that she did not project her songs from offstage, but rather from various apertures in the latticework wooden screens that formed the multi-level set, appearing first here and then there in a kind of unpredictable movement that paralleled the restless emotions of the two characters.13 Thus, whereas music in Fuente Ovejuna

D. Larson 77 was used primarily to create a sense of location and time, much of the music of The Dog in the Manger was used to express interiority, that is to say, the inner worlds of Diana and Teodoro. This, of course, is exactly the way that music, allied with verbal text, is frequently meant to function in such genres as opera and musical comedy, where, as Ulrich Weisstein has written, the merge of music and words “should theoretically result in a more satisfy- ing image of the mental universe than is furnished by either in isolation” (18). The nature of the music sung by Ms. Craig was neither period- nor place-specific, as is often the case with underscoring. To my ears, it seemed vaguely Eastern in inspiration, perhaps because of the harmonies in the ethereal, string-based accompaniment, which was presumably not performed live but recorded. The melodies were simple but haunting, rising and falling in oftentimes unex- pected ways, and the varied rhythms were perfectly calibrated to reflect the unstable emotions of the characters. In addition to the very effective underscoring, the Washington Dog in the Manger contained one brief cued song, heard from offstage in the middle of what is Act II in Lope’s text, and the usu- al framing music. Clearly intended to sound “Span- ish” (although the action of the play takes place in Naples), and recorded, like the accompaniment to the underscoring, that music was played through the theatre’s sound system. Act One of the production

78 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 was preceded by a lengthy prelude that began with palmadas and music in seguidillas rhythm and ended in a lively fandango. Act Two began with music of flamenco inspiration, attended by spirited dancing, and concluded in the same way, rising at the end to a fever-pitch of excitement. In those final moments Ms. Craig joined the rest of the cast at center stage and, in a bit of charming embellishment of Lope’s text, sang in Spanish a series of coplas, loosely adapted by translator David Johnston from poems by King John II of Castile, that celebrate the sweet tyranny of love. Their beautiful and context- appropriate conclusion is as follows:

Ya te conozco yo, amor tirano mío, yo no puedo más que decir que sí, tu ley implacable es destino mío, yo te amo a ti. 14

Although the three non-updated English- language productions of comedias discussed in this essay used incidental music in different ways, its basic purposes were the same in each. Those purposes were to shed illumination on the happenings on stage and offer a particular point of view toward them, provide the performance with clear punctuation, as well as rhythm and a sense of structure, and, last but not least, construct a bridge over which past and present could travel and meet. As Barbara Mu- jica has shown in her article discussing her own, contemporized staging of Calderón’s Love Is No

D. Larson 79 Laughing Matter [No hay burlas con el amor], those purposes for the most part remain the same in updated productions in translation of classical texts. And, of course, as Mujica emphasizes, there is another purpose as well, one that is sometimes overlooked by critics and theorists, if not by spectators, and that is simply to afford the performance delight and enchantment. After all, did not the poet Joseph Addison write of music in his “Song for St. Cecil- ia’s Day” that it is “the greatest good that mortals know, / And all of heaven we have here below”?

NOTES

1 For the brief discussion that follows regarding music in ancient Greek and Roman plays, I am particularly indebted to Roger Savage’s article on incidental music in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2 On the many varieties of these musico-dramatic entertainments in Spain, see, in particular, Cotarelo y Mori. 3 On songs of this nature in the theatre of Moreto, see the 2004 doctoral dissertation of Yuri Porras. 4 Many of the usages enumerated here pre-date the period of the Comedia Nueva, of course, for as histories of Spanish music make clear, music was a part of Spanish theatre from the very beginning. On early plays and their music, see the relevant chapters of Livermore, Subirá (especially chapters 1 and 2) and Shergold (especially chapters 4 and 5). Informative also is the brief overview in Chase’s still useful history of Spanish music (90-99). 5 As Stein explains (49-65), these conjectures apply particularly to songs in the plays of the first half of the seventeenth cen-

80 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 tury. More song settings are extant for plays of the second half of the century, but almost all of these are contained in collections compiled early in the eighteenth century, and it is likely that in many cases these settings were not heard in the original performances of the plays but rather in later revivals. 6 On Mnouchkine’s Richard II, see Alter 132-46 and Bartow 322-23. On Foreman, see the director’s own remarks in Bartow 128-39. 7 It should be mentioned here that there is a fifth type of music as well, not assigned to a separate category by Kaye and Le- Brecht, but referenced by them. That is what was earlier termed “practical music,” in other words, music intended to cover set changes, the moving of furniture, the operation of stage machinery, and so on. For a somewhat different classification of the various uses of music in modern theatre, see Pav- is Analyzing, 143-44 8 For an illuminating discussion of the intercultural exchanges involved in one recent staging of a comedia in English translation, many of them having to do with the use of incidental music, see Barbara Mujica’s article on her production of Cal- derón’s Love Is No Laughing Matter [No hay burlas con el amor]. 9 Johnston’s translation had first been used by the Royal Shakespeare Company during the season of Spanish Golden Age plays that it produced in 2004, on which occasion it was directed by Laurence Boswell. It was subsequently revised for the Shakespeare Theatre Company production in 2009 to bring its idioms more in line with North American usage. 10 Videos are available for each of these productions. For information on the video of The Liar see the website of the AHCT: http://www.comedias.org/AHCT/AHCT/Videos.html. For information on the video of Fuente Ovejuna, see the Ar- chives page of the Stratford Festival: http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/about/history.aspx?id=643. For information on the video of Dog in the Manger, see the website of the Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archive:

D. Larson 81 http://www.wapava.org/indexx.html. Note that the videos of Fuente Ovejuna and Dog in the Manger may not be borrowed and are only available for viewing on site at the holding institution. 11 See, for example, his interview with Dawn Smith 171-72. 12 Those interested in the nature of the collaboration between composer and translator/lyricist/director may wish to look at the interesting and entertaining video that the Stratford Shake- speare Festival has posted on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVbKyhRe4AE 13 For an interesting, if brief, discussion of how in certain cultures the movements of the music-makers influence both the production and the reception of the music, see Pavis, Analyz- ing 142-43. 14The coplas are not present in the published version of John- ston’s text. Like a number of lexical changes, they were added specifically for the Washington production.

Works Cited

Alarcón, Juan Ruiz de. The Truth Can’t be Trusted or, The Liar. Trans. Dakin Matthews. North Hollywood, CA: Andak Theatrical Services, 1997. Print. Alter, Jean. A Socio-Semiotic Theory of Theatre. Phila- delphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990. Print. Bartow, Arthur, ed. The Director’s Voice: Twenty-One Interviews. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. Print. Boyle, Catherine and David Johnston, with Janet Morris, eds. The Spanish Golden Age in English: Pespectives on Performance. London: Oberon, 2007. Print.

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Chase, Gilbert. The Music of Spain. 2nd ed. New York: Dover, 1959. Print. Cotarelo y Mori, Emilio, ed. Colección de entremeses, loas, bailes, jácaras y mojigangas desde fines del siglo XVI a mediados del XVIII. 2 vols. Ma- drid: Bailly-Ballière, 1911. Print. Delgado, Maria M. and Paul Heritage, eds. In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre. Man- chester UP, 1996. Print. Johnston, David. “Historicizing the Spanish Golden Age: Lope’s El perro del hortelano and El caballero de Olmedo in English.” The Spanish Golden Age in English: Perspectives on Per- formance. Eds. Catherine Boyle and Davis Johnston, with Janet Morris. London: Oberon, 2007. Print. Kaye, Deena and James LeBrecht. Sound and Music for the Theatre: The Art and Technique of Design. 2nd Ed. Boston: Focal Press, 2000. Print. Livermore, Ann. A Short History of Spanish Music. London: Duckworth, 1972. Print. Mujica, Barbara. “Facing the Music: Introducing Song into the Comedia.” Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia: Translation, Interpretation, Performance--Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer. Ed. Barbara Mujica. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013. 221-237. Print. ---. ed. Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia: Transla- tion, Interpretation, Performance—Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013. Print.

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Pavis, Patrice. Analyzing Performance: Theater, Dance, and Film. Trans. David Willliams. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. Print. ---. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Trans. Christine Shantz. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print. ---. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Trans. Loren Kruger. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Porras, Yuri. “Musical Scenes in the Minor, Secular, and Religious Works of Agustín Moreto y Cabaña (1618-1669).” Diss. The Ohio State U, 2004. Print. Ruiz de Alarcón. The Truth Can’t Be Trusted, or The Liar. Trans. Dakin Matthews. North Hollywood, CA: Andak Theatrical Services, 1997. Print. Savage, Roger. “Incidental Music.” The New Grove Dic tionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. Vol 12. New York: Grove, 2001. Print. Schmidgall, Gary. Literature as Opera. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. Shergold, N.D. A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times to the End of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Print. Smith, Dawn. “Staging Spanish Golden Age Plays for English-Speaking Audiences: An Interview with Laurence Boswell.” Comedia Performance 6.1 (2009): 161-89. Print. Stein, Louise. Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Print. Subirá, José. Historia de la música teatral en España. Barcelona: Labor, 1945. Print.

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Umpierre, Gustavo. Songs in the Plays of Lope de Vega: A Study of their Dramatic Function. London: Tamesis, 1975. Print. Vega, Lope de. The Dog in the Manger. Trans. David Johnson. London: Oberon Books, 2004. Print. ---. Fuente Ovejuna. Trans. Laurence Boswell. London: Nick Hern Books, 2009. Print. Weisstein, Ulrich. “The Libretto as Literature.” Books Abroad 35.1 (1961): 16-22. Print.

UN MONTAJE CIBERPUNK DE LA VIDA ES SUEÑO DE CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA EN DUKE UNIVERSITY

ALEJANDRA JUNO RODRÍGUEZ VILLAR Duke University

Pese a la poca atención que las carteleras estadounidenses han dispensado al teatro español en comparación a otros teatros occidentales, en los úl- timos años hemos asistido a un estimable número de representaciones de teatro clásico español con especial atención a Calderón de la Barca y a su obra más conocida, La vida es sueño1. Entre estas representaciones, los montajes universitarios son una buena prueba del potencial interés que la comedia puede suscitar en los teatros estadounidenses2 y entre estos montajes universitarios se encuentra el producido en Duke University en el año 2008. En los últimos meses de ese año, el Nasher Museum of Art de Duke University albergó una exposición de pintura espa- ñola del siglo XVII, bajo la dirección de Sarah Sch- roth, entonces Profesora Adjunta Asociada en Duke y Curadora Senior Nancy Hanks de dicho museo3. Esta exposición se llamó El Greco to Velázquez: art

86 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 during the reign of Phillip III4 e incluía pinturas de además de los mencionados en el título también de Juan Sánchez Cotán, Gregorio Fernández, Juan Bautista Maíno y Luis Tristán; el impacto de dicha exposición fue tal5 que culminó con la condecora- ción de Sarah Schroth con la Encomienda en la orden de Isabel la Católica, concedida por el estado español6. La exposición de El Greco to Velázquez no sólo se limitaba al arte pictórico sino que además patrocinaba una serie de actividades relacionadas con la cultura española. Entre ellas se contaban actividades didácticas, catas de vino, conciertos de música, conferencias varias sobre las diferentes ar- tes7 y circunstancias de la España del período, y entre todas estas actividades, una representación teatral: la de La vida es sueño de Calderón de la Barca. Este proyecto nació a través de las conver- saciones que mantuve en aquel entonces con Mar- garet Greer, Professor of Spanish en el Departamen- to de Romance Studies de Duke University, quien inmediatamente dio todo su apoyo a una idea de este tipo. Barajamos en primer lugar la posibilidad de representar un poema inédito de José Ruibal8, que bajo el epígrafe de “versión para ballet”, re- creaba la historia de la obra de Calderón, con gran énfasis en el deseo de Segismundo por Rosaura como único punto de agarre en lo inestable de su vida, de la vida y en el que se trasvasaba el motivo del sueño a la imposibilidad de la materialización de su amor por Rosaura9.

Rodríguez Villar 87

Después de estudiar el texto con detenimien- to decidimos desechar una posible representación del mismo por varios motivos, contándose entre los cuales su corta extensión, la ausencia de temas que considerábamos clave y la propia esencia del mismo, de marcado carácter anti-dramático. En estas circunstancias, Margaret Greer me encargó la reali- zación de mi propia versión del inmortal texto de Calderón, versión que escribí y dirigí, con la fundada compañía para la ocasión, The Spanish Duke Company, y que distaba mucho en intenciones y forma de la propuesta original del poema de Ruibal. De esta manera incurríamos en el siempre contro- vertido proceso de modernización de un clásico del teatro. Por una parte, la creatividad del director, que no es más que otro, aunque privilegiado, intérprete del texto, inserto en unas coordenadas espacio- temporales determinadas, trabajando para una audiencia en análogas condiciones. Por otra parte, nos encontrábamos con la necesidad de transportar se- mióticas desconocidas para un público contemporá- neo. ¿Necesita un público educado, y cuando digo educado me refiero a un público acostumbrado a la comedia, una traducción de términos? Posiblemente no. ¿Pero qué pasa en el caso de un público no educado en este tipo de contenido? ¿Estamos devaluan- do el texto, al autor, a la propia audiencia? Depende en gran medida de nuestros medios y de nuestros objetivos10. En este caso, no sólo se trataba de la propia versión del director, sino sobre todo de hacer

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La vida es sueño, algo significante para nuestro pú- blico objetivo. No es lo mismo presentar la propia versión de una obra de arte bien conocida entre la audiencia, con sus propias expectativas estéticas sobre la puesta en escena, que presentar una versión de una obra prácticamente desconocida, como lo iba a ser La vida es sueño para gran parte de nuestra audiencia. Si bien cualquier puesta en escena es en gran medida sólo otra versión/interpretación corpórea del tex- to del dramaturgo, quien pone en pie su visión ideal de la obra, en esta ocasión se añadía el hecho de que el texto también iba a ser intensamente retocado. Diversas restricciones de tipo material, estando entre las más prosaicas un limitadísimo tiempo de en- sayo11, nos obligaban a rehacer el texto de Calde- rón, extremando con sumo cuidado el compromiso entre la lectura tradicional de la obra, lectura que representaría una supuesta, pero inexistente en USA, larga tradición de exposición a este texto, las elecciones propias de la persona encargada de hacer la versión, en este caso yo, y aquellos puntos de amarre del texto que creyéramos que más podrían hacer conectar a nuestro público con lo que estaba pasando en escena, no sólo de una manera orgánica, sino también filosófica. Como montaje pensado para Duke University, nuestra audiencia iba a ser fun- damentalmente un público mayoritariamente ameri- cano, mayoritariamente instruido, por tratarse de público universitario, y así mismo mayoritariamente

Rodríguez Villar 89 joven, por tratarse de público estudiantil12. Entre las varias opciones posibles estaba la de hacer una ver- sión que, aunque abreviada, replicara en la medida de lo posible la estructura original. Sin embargo, rápidamente descarté esta solución en favor de dejar hablar a Calderón por sí mismo y opté por seleccio- nar los parlamentos más pertinentes para esta ver- sión (siempre guiada por los temas que queríamos subrayar), que no por accidente fueron exactamente, el monólogo inicial de Segismundo en la torre en la primera jornada, incluyendo los famosos recolecto- res “Tengo menos libertad” (Jornada I, Escena II, vv. 102-172, p. 79), el parlamento de Basilio tam- bién de la primera jornada en el que explica la historia de la profecía, desde el verso 612 al 825 (Jorna- da I, Escena VI, págs. 96-102), la comparecencia de Basilio explicando el caso (Jornada II, Escena I, vv. 1120-1149, págs. 110-111), parlamentos de Segis- mundo, incluyendo los famosísimos monólogos (Jornada II, Escena III, vv. 1224-1247, págs. 116- 117, Jornada II, Escena VI, vv. 1532-1547, págs. 126-127, Jornada II, Escena XVIII, vv. 2098-2126, págs. 146-147, Jornada II, Escena XIX, vv. 2148- 2187, págs. 148-149, Jornada III, Escena III, vv. 2307-2343, p. 145, Jornada III, Escena III, vv. 2356-2385, págs. 156-157, Jornada III, Escena XIV, vv. 3305-3319, págs. 187-188), enfrentamiento y el diálogo final entre Basilio y Segismundo (Jornada II, Escena III, vv. 1295-1303, p. 118, Jornada II, Escena VI, vv. 1503-1531, págs. 135-126, Jornada

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III, Escena XIV, vv. 3158-3247, págs. 183-186)13. Esta versión no seguía el orden de la obra sino que alteraba el orden de las intervenciones cuando era necesario, siempre en función de trasladar la infor- mación de manera clara en una propuesta que eli- minaba muchos de los componentes originales. Por ejemplo, en el enfrentamiento final entre padre e hijo se retoman versos anteriores de Clotaldo en la boca de Basilio, versos originalmente en la Jornada II, para aclarar cuestiones del comportamiento de Segismundo. Puestas así las cosas, lo que íbamos a ofrecer a nuestro público eran largas tiradas en verso barroco, en una especie de desafío a la audiencia en correspondencia con el desafío que el mismo tex- to de La vida es sueño supone a nivel filosófico y de puesta en escena. Como he dicho, la razón fundamental de esta elección fue la intención explícita de reproducir los versos de Calderón íntegros, aunque para ello hubiera que modificar la propia estructura de la obra. No sólo se trataba de reproducir el contenido del texto, sino también, en la medida de lo posible, el genio literario de Calderón. La fábula quedaba dividida en las siguientes escenas: lamento de Segismundo por su encarcela- miento, explicación de la profecía a la corte por parte de Basilio, explicación del “experimento” por parte de Basilio, traslado virtual de Segismundo a la corte, enfrentamiento con el padre, comportamiento de Segismundo en el castillo, traslado virtual a la torre, dudas de Segismundo sobre si lo vivido fue

Rodríguez Villar 91 real, aceptación de Segismundo de que “los sueños, sueños son”, petición de ayuda por parte del pueblo, sublevación de Segismundo, y resolución del enfrentamiento entre padre e hijo. Como queda claro la mayor modificación de contenido consistió en centrar el conflicto de la obra en el enfrentamiento padre-hijo, concentrándonos en los debates filosófi- cos en torno a los temas de la predestinación, la de- cepción de los sentidos, la experiencia virtual y el ejercicio último del libre albedrío. Estos cuatro motivos eran los ejes de una puesta en escena que pres- cindía no sólo de la figura del gracioso Clarín, sino también de la subtrama de Rosaura, eliminando así la composición bifronte y simétrica de La vida es sueño. La eliminación de la subtrama de Rosaura estuvo determinada por la necesidad de la concen- tración de la trama en el conflicto padre-hijo, por no contemplar en este espectáculo la posibilidad de subtramas y porque la relación Basilio-Segismundo era suficiente para lo que queríamos transmitir. Esto sin embargo no quiere decir que de esta versión también se eliminara la intervención estructural de la protagonista femenina como dispositivo externo de memoria de Segismundo, función que encarnaría el coro. Y me explico al respecto: si bien los únicos dos personajes originales en esta versión eran los de Basilio y Segismundo, la única exposición de sus largos parlamentos hubiera desembocado en un es- pectáculo hipertextual que en ningún momento se contempló como opción por dos razones. La prime-

92 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 ra, una elección estética, y la segunda, que un texto hipertextual de este calibre hubiera en cierta manera traicionado el espíritu del teatro del Siglo de Oro español, fuertemente basado en la acción y el movimiento.

Matthew Patrick as Basilio. Fotografías de Joaquín Bueno

La solución vino entonces a través de la composición de textos que funcionaran como conectores entre los parlamentos calderonianos de Ba- silio y Segismundo. En ocasiones estos textos eran tomados de otros personajes de la obra y en otras ocasiones fueron especialmente compuestos, así mismo en verso, para este montaje. Estos conectores eran interpretados por un coro reminiscente de la manera griega, que efectivamente ayudaba al desarrollo de la acción, introducía una determinada di- námica visual en el escenario, contribuía a intensifi- car el uso del diálogo, y asumía el papel de audien-

Rodríguez Villar 93 cia14 tanto en el contenido de sus intervenciones como en su ubicación física, a veces desde el mismo patio de butacas. Era éste un espectáculo sin cuarta pared, en el que había apelaciones al público y el texto subrayaba explícitamente la existencia de “espectadores”, en un intento de enfatizar la filosofía “ficcional” del montaje, en un efecto de distancia- miento y al mismo tiempo en un recuerdo de la me- tateatralidad barroca. Si bien los dos personajes principales son y estaban interpretados por hombres, el coro estaba compuesto por cuatro mujeres de diferentes etnicidades15 para contribuir a la “des- espacialización” histórica del texto. Después de haber elegido los parlamentos originales y escrito los textos conectores, Margaret Greer y su antigua alumna Bronwyn Lewis tradujeron y ensamblaron el texto en inglés, para nuestra audiencia americana. La traducción elegida fue la de Gregary J. Racz, en parte por su calidad, y parte por ser una traducción hecha en verso, lo que también añadía un plus de significado y lealtad a la obra original. Hablo de desespacialización del texto, lo que puede sonar paradójico, porque los parlamentos originales empleados comprenden marcas espacia- les que en ningún momento me propuse suprimir. Era importante que el público supiera que ésta es una obra española ambientada en Polonia16. Este tipo de información tiene un valor intratextual pero también extratextual, que es de gran importancia a la hora de dar a conocer la comedia española. Ahora

94 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 bien, en esta producción de La vida es sueño sí que había un proceso de desespacialización, atemporali- zación y proximización al espectador contemporá- neo que no se sostenía sobre el aspecto textual, sino sobre el aspecto espectacular. El planteamiento hí- brido de la obra no residía en su propia estructura argumental en esta ocasión, sino en dos líneas para- lelas de información, la textual y la performativa, que con ser muy diferentes, se complementaban y retroalimentaban. No era la intención de este montaje transportar detalladamente los temas del siglo XVII al siglo XXI sino, muy al contrario, mostrar a través de la ilustración visual que los temas del siglo XXI, siguen siendo los mismos que los del siglo XVII. No se trataba sólo de un proceso de facilita- ción, sino también de analogía. De ahí que la estética empleada para este montaje fuera la del movimiento filosófico ciberpunk, inserto en una desnuda caja negra como esce- nografía. ¿Por qué el ciberpunk? En primer lugar, porque gracias al cine, en especial a la película The Matrix17(Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, 1999), ésta es una estética muy reconocible para el público contemporáneo, lo que le otorga una magní- fica plusvalía como conector con la más imperante actualidad. En segundo lugar, por un valor intertex- tual. Son innegables las concomitancias que hay entre el argumento de La vida es sueño y The Ma- trix, y no sólo en la trama, sino en su pregunta fundamental sobre cuál es la naturaleza ontológica del

Rodríguez Villar 95 mundo. Creando una estética reminiscente, el mensaje no era sólo filosófico, sino asimismo genealó- gico18. Construíamos la historia de unas ideas que llegan hasta nuestros días. Confrontando un texto claramente barroco, (recordemos que se respetó el verso original), con una estética claramente post- modernista19, tendíamos puentes que o bien cues- tionaban ciertas supuestas rupturas ideológicas his- tóricas, o bien subrayan la innegable modernidad de un texto como La vida es sueño. Si bien la obra coloca la trama en Polonia, en su contenido en una época indeterminada, pero en su forma en pleno Barroco, y la estética elegida colocaba la trama en el presente o futuro, claramente en un lugar muy tecnificado, o en términos ciberpunk, en una construcción del mundo extrapolada, la puesta en escena intentó ser lo más abstracta y anti-realista posible. De ahí el uso del coro compuesto por cuatro mujeres que en todo momento rompían el eje de realidad inmiscuyéndose en la trama, metamorfeándose en los diferentes roles que interpretaban, convirtiendo la puesta en escena en una calculada coreografía, en el sentido más literal del término, en el que el movimiento continuo, propio del Barroco, era el gran protagonista20. Las cuatro integrantes del coro llevaban a cabo movimien- tos sincronizados de manera constante que no sólo tenían la labor de marcar un determinado ritmo visual, armónico y geométrico sino asimismo sustituir espacios o ideas. Pongo un ejemplo, en la tirada ini-

96 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 cial de Segismundo, interrumpida por el coro para evitar la hipertextualidad de la que antes hablába- mos, cada intervención del mismo era acompañada por una aproximación física a Segismundo acotando y empequeñeciendo su espacio de movimiento físi- co. De esta manera representábamos también el mundo del cautiverio ontológico.

Elena Kauffmann, Alexandra Young, Matthew Patrick, Mi- chael Burakow, Nnenna Theresa Opara, Susan Langford.

Los textos del coro, recitados en diferentes armonías, a veces a una sola voz, otras veces a varias voces21, servían para cuatro cosas: en primer lugar como hemos dicho, para conectar las diferentes acciones funcionales de la trama y evitar que el espectador se perdiera en una fábula concentrada; en segundo lugar, para explicar ciertas claves del texto, para lo que se recuperaban ideas expuestas por Calderón en otras de sus obras, como por ejem-

Rodríguez Villar 97 plo, el hecho de que la revolución científica explica- ra a los hombres de la temprana modernidad que el cielo no era ya realmente azul22 (III Jornada de Sa- ber del bien y del mal); en tercer lugar, para subrayar los momentos críticos de los parlamentos, como la repetición del motivo “Y teniendo tú más (alma, instinto, albedrío, vida) tienes menos libertad”; y en cuarto lugar, para presentar el espectáculo como una narración dentro de una narración (idea que se repe- tía a través de otros signos en escena), pues el coro lo introducía a modo de cuento infantil con la fór- mula “Érase una vez...”, en myse en abyme. Retomando la propuesta estética en su va- riante filosófica, ¿por qué ciberpunk? El ciberpunk es un género de ciencia-ficción en el que se presenta una visión pesimista de la vida humana dominada por una hipertecnificación que coarta el libre albe- drío de las personas, y en el que la realidad ha deja- do de tener su sentido en un mundo profundamente virtual. Un género que se pregunta constantemente por el yo, el ser, y reflexiona sobre la hibridización esencial del hombre, en relación a los efectos que los avances científicos y tecnológicos tienen en él. Y qué más híbrido que Segismundo, mitad hombre, mitad fiera. Asimismo porque el género del ciberpunk a menudo presenta el poder omnímodo de las corporaciones, por encima del valor del ser humano, basándose gran parte de sus tramas en la subversión contra ese control absoluto del poder establecido sobre el libre albedrío individual. Ese valor de rebe-

98 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 lión está presente en el texto original en muchísimos niveles: la rebelión contra el padre, la rebelión contra la razón de estado, y por último, la rebelión contra el determinismo, no sólo en el sentido de la pro- fecía, sino también determinismo en el sentido de actuar contra la propia biografía, o lo que es la ver- sión más pura del libre albedrío. Rebelarse contra el animal autómata de Descartes, el mecanismo ciego. En La vida es sueño encontramos esa faceta cientí- fica en la figura de un padre astrólogo, el poder om- nímodo de las macroestructuras sobre el ser humano en la razón de estado esgrimida por Basilio y el so- metimiento del libre albedrío, a través del determinismo biológico, orgánico, que atendería a la presencia de la profecía y del determinismo construido, lo que respondería al enclaustramiento animal de Segismundo durante gran parte de su vida. Puede plantearse aquí el determinismo social que Segis- mundo encarna en la obra original en el pasaje del soldado condenado, pero esta parte fue suprimida de esta versión por plantear unas interrogantes que se- rían difícilmente explicables en el conjunto del es- pectáculo y que alejarían al espectador del auténtico objetivo del mismo. Por eso, muchos de los elementos utilizados en escena retrotraían a esa visión ciberpunk, no sólo en su utilización intradiegética, sino extradiegética, generando una puesta en escena heterogénea con varios elementos anacrónicos en escena recordando la heterotopía descrita por Foucault23 y tan querida

Rodríguez Villar 99 por el ciberpunk. En cuanto a los elementos extra- diegéticos, el montaje contó con una gran pantalla situada al fondo en lo alto del escenario, trabajando la dimensión vertical del Barroco24 y trabajando así mismo la inclusión de nuevos medios en escena, en concordancia con la propia estética y ética del es- pectáculo25. A lo largo de la representación en esa pantalla se fueron proyectando imágenes que conec- taban el texto con el presente. Con el presente de la exposición de El Greco to Velázquez, pues por ejemplo, cuando Basilio se dirige a la corte, se pro- yectaban retratos reunidos en esa exposición26, como si los retratados fueran la audiencia del Rey, pero también con respecto al presente “ciberpunk” de nuestro público. En el momento en el que el Rey narra la profecía, se proyectó una cadena gigante de ADN conectando esa idea a la de determinismo bio- lógico desde lo alto; los traslados de Segismundo de una realidad a otra eran subrayados con imágenes computerizadas (o ciberespacio, en términos de Gibson, escritor calificado como ciberpunk), tal y cómo se ilustra convencionalmente la inmersión en un mundo cibernético, con los infinitos pasillos de líneas verticales y horizontales, a menudo en tonos verdes sobre un fondo negro; también la proyección de una carta de ajuste al final de la obra, como signo de finalización de una narrativa virtual, dominando el relato, de igual modo que pasaba cuando las tele- visiones finalizaban su emisión o se contempla el final del copión de material visual no editado.

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Elementos físicos también contribuían al relato cibernético, siendo el más sobresaliente la sustitución de las drogas por un casco de realidad virtual, que le es impuesto a Segismundo para pasar de la torre al castillo y viceversa y contribuyendo a la idea de la no existencia de una única realidad, que si bien en el texto original se formula de modo filosófico en esta versión alcanzaba una expresión total gracias a la utilización de estos recursos, o una placa madre y un soldador de placas electrónicas en manos de Basilio, a modo de cetro y bola del mundo, denotando su control sobre la realidad, ya totalmente virtual27. No en vano, cada vez que Segis- mundo entraba o salía de una determinada realidad, Basilio se colocaba en el fondo, en lo alto, replican- do los gestos de un marionetista, incidiendo en la misma idea. Entre otros elementos físicos utilizados en esta producción estaba el uso del vestuario, este- reotípico en el caso del Rey, y en el caso de Segis- mundo, en una amalgama entre estética clásica y ciberpunk, denotando los diferentes estados del protagonista de manera visual28. Estos cambios de vestuario se hacían en escena con la ayuda del coro, coro que nunca cambiaba su estética de cuero negro y metal, adornado con accesorios que recordaban elementos tecnológicos; entre otros elementos tam- bién se incluyó el uso de cuerdas como símbolo de la falta de libertad (refiriendo así mismo la referencia mitológica del Prometeo encadenado apuntado por Ciriaco Morón29), joyas y manjares como sím-

Rodríguez Villar 101 bolo del vanitas vanitatum, espejos como duplica- ción infinita de la realidad y un collar canino, que polisémicamente servía como símbolo de esclavitud en la torre, y como corona en el castillo. Para acre- centar la idea del libre albedrío, en el momento final del montaje se amagaba el asesinato de Basilio a manos de Segismundo, llevando ya esta corona, pero después de un brevísimo apagón volvíamos a ver a Segismundo perdonando a su padre, y liberado ya del collar canino tanto en su forma de grillete como de corona y por lo tanto liberando al personaje de su status social, de su biografía, y de su biología, para dotarle de absoluto libre albedrío. O en palabras de Antonio Regalado: “Recupera, pues, la idea platóni- ca de anamnesis, el poder reconocer lo esencial, libre de los fortuito y contingente, de los aparencial y sensorial” (Regalado, 1995).

Michael Burakow as Segismundo.

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El resto de los elementos en escena incluía un uso anti-realista de la iluminación, siendo empleada para subrayar a los personajes en determinados pasajes o incluso para simbolizar la inspiración, la epifanía moral, y una banda sonora que incluía música electrónica, trance e industrial entre otros géneros contemporáneos. Por último, tras el recitado de Segismundo en inglés de los famosos versos, se incluyó una voz en off que repetía el colofón de este monólogo también en español, como referencia extradiegética en homenaje a una tradición cultural que ha hecho de estos versos unos de los más famosos de la lengua castellana: “¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que todo en la vida es sueño y los sueños, sueños son.”. En resumen, se buscó una integración de signos tradi- cionales con signos no convencionales en la repre- sentación de este texto. La recepción del montaje propició que éste hubiera de ser repetido, debido a la gran demanda de localidades para la única función planeada, por lo que se programó una segunda representación, también con una gran acogida por parte del público. No hubo cambios directoriales de una a otra puesta en escena, entre otras razones por no apreciarse su necesidad en relación a la respuesta del público. En este sentido, creo que puedo decir que este montaje cumplió nuestras expectativas no sólo en éxito de público, sino asimismo en nuestra intención de tras-

Rodríguez Villar 103 ladar determinados temas y visiones a nuestra audiencia. Por último, yo utilizo su grabación audiovi- sual30 como complemento a la hora de explicar La vida es sueño en el aula, lo que hace mucho más fácil para los estudiantes subgraduados el acerca- miento al texto por su corta extensión (alrededor de una hora), por la concentración de los temas, y por su presentación cercana a los signos contemporá- neos. La experiencia de utilizar este video en clase ha sido más que positiva, recabando entre algunas opiniones la sensación de ensoñación que el propio montaje inspira, o lo sugerente que resulta la con- traposición del texto barroco con la estética post- moderna. Desde aquí agradecer a Luciano García Lorenzo, del CSIC, su presentación de este espec- táculo, pues hasta Duke se trasladó para ser parte de esta experiencia y sobre todo a Margaret Greer por apoyar y contribuir a este proyecto de manera deci- siva. A todos los integrantes del mismo31, una vez, mis más sinceras gracias.

NOTAS

1 En la base de datos online Out of the Wings, autodefinida como “a three-year AHRC collaboration between King's Col- lege London, Queen's University Belfast and the University of Oxford which aims to make the riches of the theatres of Spain and Spanish America accessible to English-speaking research- ers and theatre professionals”, se cuentan por ejemplo, la producción dirigida por JoAnne Akalaitis, representada en el Court Theater de Chicago, (1999); la producción de la Okla-

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homa City Theater Company, dirigida por David Pasto, representada en Oklahoma City, Oklahoma y reseñada en Comedia Performance 2.1 (Spring 2005) por Christopher Weimer; la versión de José Rivera titulada “Sueño” dirigida por Joseph Hanreddy con la Quadracci Powerhouse Theater en el Mil- waukee Repertory Theater de Milwaukee, Wisconsin, en 2006 y reseñada por Christopher Weimer en Comedia Performance 4.1 (2007); o la producción dirigida por Kate Whoriskey y representada en 2007 en el South Coast Repertory de Costa Mesa, California, reseñada en Comedia Performance 5.1 (Spring 2008) por Bonnie L. Gasior. http://www.outofthewings.org/db/play/la-vida-es- sueno/productions. Web. En Internet también podemos encontrar las siguientes producciones: la producción de Repertorio Español (en español), afincados en NYC, dirigida por René Buch en 2008, http://www.repertorio.org/productions/index.php?area=ind&id =107. Web.; la de la compañía Vitalist Theater, dirigida por Liz Carlin-Metz y representada en el teatro Stage 773 de Chicago en 2011, http://www.vitalisttheatre.org/past_productions.html. Web; o la producción de Main Street Theater, representada en 2012 en el Main Street Theater de Houston, Texas, dirigida por Pablo Bracho, http://www.mainstreettheater.com/info/news/ Life_Is_a_Dream_fact_sheet.pdf. Web. 2 También en Out of the Wings aparecen compiladas las siguientes representaciones universitarias: la dirigida por Ma- riana Althaus con la compañía de la University of Massachu- setts en 2005, representada en el Curtain Theater de Amherst, Massachusetts; la producción de The Theater School at De- Paul University, representada en el Merle Reskin Theater de Chicago, Illinois y dirigida por Barry Brunetti, reseñada en Comedia Performace 5.1 (Spring 2008) por Jorge Abril Sán- chez; la producción de Long Island University de Brooklyn, dirigida por Quiche Stone y representada en The Kumble

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Theater for the Performing Arts, en Brooklyn , New York, en 2006. http://www.outofthewings.org/db/play/la-vida-es- sueno/productions. Web. En internet encontramos otras producciones universitarias como la llevada a cabo en la Georgia College and State University, dirigida por Karen Berman en 2009, http://www.gcsunade.com/2009/11/13/theatre- department-gears-up-for-sue-ntildeo/ Web.; o la representada en Harvard University en 2011, en el Loeb Experimental Theater y dirigida por Caleb J. Thompson con la compañía Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/10/25/life-dream- calderon-thompson/. Web. Estas producciones han sido dirigi- das o bien por profesorado o bien por alumnos de las citadas universidades. 3 En la actualidad directora del Nasher Museum de Duke Uni- versity. 4 http://nasher.duke.edu/elgreco/index.php. Web 5 Esta exposición fue visitada por más de 70.000 personas. Información provista por Sarah Schroth. 6 Condecoración otorgada para “premiar aquellos comporta- mientos extraordinarios de carácter civil, realizados por personas españolas y extranjeras, que redunden en beneficio de la Nación o que contribuyan, de modo relevante, a favorecer las relaciones de amistad y cooperación de la Nación Española con el resto de la Comunidad Internacional”. http://www.maec.es/es/menuppal/ministerio/historiayprotocol o/protocolo/condecoracioneslasordenesdependientesdelministe rio/Paginas/Condecoraciones%20las%20Ordenes%20dependi entes%20del%20Ministerio%20de%20AAEE.aspx. Web. 7 http://nasher.duke.edu/elgreco/events.php. Web. 8 Y reproducido en el programa de mano de la representación. 9 Este texto está disponible en García Lorenzo, L., 2008. 10 Para una mayor discusión del proceso de modernización de la comedia consultar el artículo “Calderon’s La Vida es Sueño

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meets Callaghan’s Fever/Dream” Performance Studies: Adap- tación and Performance” de Catherine Larson. 11 Una vez preparado el proyecto, la dramaturgia y el cua- derno de dirección, el tiempo real de ensayos con los actores, estudiantes de Duke, se limitó a siete días. 12 Desde el primer momento se buscó como público objetivo prioritario el estudiantado de la universidad. 13 Siguiendo la edición crítica de Ciriaco Morón de La vida es sueño de Pedro Calderón de la Barca. 14 “Desde el teatro griego, el coro es un grupo homogéneo de bailarines, cantantes y recitador que toman colectivamente la palabra para comentar la acción a la cual están diversamente integrados”. Patrice Pavis (101). 15 En palabras de Robert Leach “the body is capable of making meanings as the intellect is” (94). 16 Este dato habla de una interrelación cultural y política entre los países de Europa, como unidad ideológica, y no sólo eso, sino también ejemplifica el uso de la metáfora basada en tér- minos geográficos. Para saber más sobre la relación entre Cal- derón y este país, consúltese la comunicación de Ernesto Gi- ménez Caballero, “Calderón y Polonia” (1573-1578). 17 William Gibson, un escritor de ciencia-ficción considerado “ciberpunk”, ha calificado en su blog a The Matrix como “ar- guably the ultimate "cyberpunk" artifact”. 28 Enero 2003. http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_arc hive.asp#90244012. Web. 18 Me refiero aquí a la genealogía de la idea filosófica de la vida como un sueño, presente ya en la antigüedad clásica. En palabras de Jacinto Rivera Rosales, “[Calderón A]cusa la in- fluencia del escepticismo griego (pirronismo), que había re- surgido en el Renacimiento […]. En ellas se discute el problema del criterio o fundamento del conocimiento y su certe- za: ¿sobre qué base se puede afirmar la realidad de algo y su modo de ser? En primer lugar se ha de decir que, para esa fun- ción, los sentidos se muestran sumamente quebradizos y poco

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fiables. Ni siquiera logran asegurarnos de que soñemos o es- temos despiertos” (9). En cuanto a los orígenes sufíes y orien- tales de La vida es sueño, consúltense los artículos de Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, “Una leyenda oriental y La vida es sueño de Calderón de la Barca” (299-309) y “El delito de nacer calderoniano y la tradición sufí” (289-299). 19 Como Kate O’Riordan lo explica: “The Matrix simultaneously re-popularises cyberculture whilst rendering it as a product of this technological excess. It symbolizes the return to the modern re-packaged in a postmodern aesthetic and represents a resurrection of dualism over materi- alism of the web” (140). 20 En palabras de Emilio Orozco Díaz, “[…] y con las figuras de los actores viene a dar un valor plástico, escultórico, de figura en movimiento. Estos valores visuales […] son los bá- sico y esencial del efecto teatral. De ahí el valor dramático teatral del ballet y la pantomima, vuelto a destacar por la escena moderna que tanto tiene de barroca”. (122). 21 Una vez más hemos de recordar la importancia del elemento musical en el teatro barroco y en el de Calderón en particular. Consultar a este respecto la obra de María Belén Molina Jimé- nez, El teatro musical de Calderón de la Barca: análisis textual. 22 “…. ¿qué más razón, más verdad, más prueba, que el cielo azul que miramos? ¿Habrá alguno, que no crea vulgarmente que es zafiro, que hermosos rayos ostenta? Pues ni es cielo ni es azul." Saber del bien y del mal, de Calderón de la Barca (137). 23 Foucault define este concepto como espacios que funcionan sin una jerarquía determinada, y que pueden ser tanto espacia- les como mentales (22-27).

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24 Como explica María Alicia Amadei-Pulice, la verticalidad del Teatro Barroco tiene mucho que ver con la concepción escatológica cristiana, en la que desde el mundo inferior, terrenal, se asciende al superior, o celestial (4). Sin embargo, en esta ocasión, el uso de la verticalidad también servía para encarnar el control que se ejerce desde lo alto, desde las estrellas que rigen nuestros destinos, desde el ojo que todo lo ve. 25 Y lo que Johannes Birringer llama la technological scene: “the constructed, technological environment that shapes our vision and embodies our relationship with the life-word” (170). 26 Como el retrato de Góngora de Vélazquez, o el retrato de Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino de El Greco. 27 Es la literalización de las metáforas propia del ciberpunk. 28 En el teatro barroco español el vestuario tiene en numerosas ocasiones el objetivo de señalar la condición del personaje, el lugar y el tiempo en el que se desarrolla la trama. Consúltese Abraham Madroñal Durán (316). 29 Ib. p. 16. 30 Videos de la representación: https://vimeo.com/21524015, https://vimeo.com/21535869. 31 El elenco del montaje estuvo compuesto de la siguiente manera: Versión, dirección y dramaturgia: Alejandra Juno Rodri- guez Villar; Traducción: Margaret Greer y Brownyn Lewis; Regidora: Sandra van Ginhoven; Musica y supervisión de efectos: Rachel J. Valladolid; Asistente de reparto: Melanie Sereny Brasher; Segismundo: Michael Burakow; Basilio: Matthew Patrick; Coro: Susan René Langford, Elena Kauff- mann, Alexandra Young y Nnenna Theresa Opara.

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Obras Citadas

Amadei-Pulice, María Alicia. Calderón y el barroco: exaltación y engaño de los sentidos. Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages 31. Amsterdam Benjamins, 1990. Birringer, Johannes. Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Print. Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. La vida es sueño. Trad. De Gregary J. Racz. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print. --- Saber del bien y del mal. Angel Valbuena-Briones (ed.). Obras completas, Tomo I, Dramas. Madrid: Aguilar, 1959. Print. Foucault, M. "Of other spaces", Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-27. Print. Galmés de Fuentes, Álvaro. “Una leyenda oriental y La vida es sueño de Calderón de la Barca”, Studia in honorem Prof. M. de Riquer. Tomo I. Barce- lona: 1986: 299-309. Print. --- “El delito de nacer calderoniano y la tradición sufí”, Boletín de la Real Academia Española, Tomo LXX. Núm. 250. 1990: 289-300. Print. García Lorenzo, L. “Jose Ruibal: tres versiones para ballet de obras calderonianas”, Hacia la tragedia áurea: lecturas para un nuevo milenio. Frede- rick Alfred de Armas, Luciano García Lorenzo, Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomás (eds). Iberoameri- cana Editorial, 2008: 219-240. Print.

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Gibson, William, "THE MATRIX: FAIR COP", http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com, 28 Jan 2003. Web. 18 Nov. 2013. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto. “Calderón y Polonia”. Luciano García Lorenzo (coord.) Calderón: actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Calderón y el teatro español del Siglo de Oro. Tomo III. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1983: 1573-78. Print. Larson, Catherine. “Calderon’s La Vida Es Sueño meets Callaghan’s Fever/Dream: Adaptation and Per formance”. Comedia Performance. 10.1 (Spring 2013): 19-55. Print. Leach, Robert. Theater Studies, The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Madroñal Durán, Abraham. Diccionario de la comedia del Siglo de Oro. Frank P. Casa, Luciano García Lorenzo, Germán Vega García-Luengos (eds.). Madrid: Castalia, 2002. Print. Molina Jiménez, María Belén. El teatro musical de Calderón de la Barca: análisis textual. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2008. Print. Morón, Ciriaco. Edición crítica de La vida es sueño. Madrid: Cátedra, 1986. Print. O’Riordan, Kate. “Changing Cyberspaces: Dystopia and Technological Excess”. Stacy Gillis (ed.) The Matrix Trilogy. Cyberpunk Reloaded. London: Wall Flower Press, 2005. Print. Orozco Díaz, Emilio. El teatro y la teatralidad del barroco. Barcelona: Planeta, 1969. Print. Pavis, P. Diccionario del teatro. Dramaturgia, estética, semiología. Barcelona: Paidós, 1983. Print.

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Regalado, A. Calderón. Los orígenes de la modernidad en la España del Siglo de Oro. Vol. I. Barcelo- na: Ediciones Destino, 1995. Print. Rivera de Rosales, J. Sueño y Realidad. La ontología poética de Calderón de la Barca. New York: OLMS, 1998. Print.

STAGE PICTURE, TEXT AND THE TWEN- TY-FIRST CENTURY AUDIENCE: PER- FORMANCE AS THE FINAL ELEMENT OF TRANSLATION IN ANA CARO’S VALOR, AGRAVIO Y MUJER

IAN M. BORDEN Johnny Carson School of Theater and Film University of Nebraska-Lincoln

In October of 2012, the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film at the University of Ne- braska-Lincoln produced a new English trans- adaptation of Ana Caro’s play Valor, agravio y mujer. Titled Agravio, the term trans-adaptation is more applicable to the production because of how the play was developed for performance, incorporating the stage picture into its translation process. Hans J. Vermeer suggests that each translation must have its own “skopos,” or purpose, working towards a target audience (228). Agravio was not a “text- book” translation, an attempt to be as accurate as possible in reflecting the original text of the play. Instead, adaptations made to the original text combined with the stage picture to impart meaning to-

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Borden 113 gether. The process was successful, and performances of Agravio bridged gaps in culture, language, and time to generate understanding and ap- preciation of Caro’s story.1 To create a successful trans-adaptation for a twenty-first century audience, there must be allowance for the necessary adaptation inherent in theatre production, as well as recognition of the performance and resultant stage picture as the final aspect of the translation process. A play text must be viewed in a fundamen- tally different manner than literature, not as a finished product, but as a blueprint for performance. Bruce R. Burningham notes that “there can be no closer reading of a dramatic text than that undertaken by actors in rehearsal” (113). The stage pictures resulting from the collaboration of actors, designers and the director create context for the audience in addition to, and often in place of, the spoken text. For example, when the actress playing Leonor grasps a sword, she embodies the mujer varonil in a fashion that goes beyond description or spoken text. The set design, the use of lighting, the noises of the play (whether from the sound of the spoken text, the clash of swords, or added effects such as thunder and music), all affect the stage picture and how it conveys meaning. Even the theatre architecture and how it alters the relationship of the audience to the stage changes the context of the performance. Each production is a unique combination of these ele-

114 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 ments, meaning that each production is, by nature, an adaptation of the play text. How then, does the stage picture factor into the translation/ adaptation process? Lawrence Ve- nuti notes that no “foreign text and its translation can be unmediated, free of an interpretant, some third term that serves as […] a cultural and ideological code” that enacts “its own processes of signifi- cation (221-2). Vermeer asserts that “because the original text is aimed towards its original culture/target audience, “it is thus not to be expected that merely ‘trans-coding’ a source text, merely ‘transposing’ it into another language, will result in a serviceable translatum [translated text]” (228-9). Note how these ideas merge with the theories of some of the most famous directors of classical work, such as John Houseman, who allows for a play to be “reshaped […] by the cultural […] circumstances” of production (414). John Gielgud suggests that classical texts demand a “contemporary approach” and that production “reinterprets the text” (405). Margaret Webster acknowledges that directors must “sometimes take liberties of adaptation” (419). “To communicate” a Renaissance play, Peter Brook argues the existence of that play “is inseparable from its performance” (422-3). Finally, Peter Hall asserts that it is necessary to “imbue our plays with the kind of reality understood by our modern audience” (432). The stage picture, the combination of design elements and action on stage,

Borden 115 is the final aspect of a “crucial interpretive act” that fixes “a meaning or structure in the foreign text” (Venuti 222). Valor, Agravio y mujer is an especially dif- ficult piece for current audiences to approach, with large gulfs of time, geography and culture to overcome. Burningham notes that “the comedia’s impe- rial themes, baroque aesthetics, and often archaic poetic language can be doubly alienating” (107). It is the job, then, of the translator/ director to overcome these alienating factors of language and culture. Lorna Hardwick sums up this difficulty well:

I take ‘translation’ to cover the process of constructing meanings which cross and sometimes redefine the boundaries between and within languages and cultures. – There is also the added dimension of ‘translation (from the page) to the stage’ which affects all performance […]. In the case of classical material, this also necessitates crossing boundaries of time and place […]. (167)

Jacques Derrida echoes Hardwick’s assertion, noting that “No translation will ever reduce this quantita- tive, […] this aesthetic difference” between the original text and its translation (428). However, for production, Vermeer’s concept of skopos provides

116 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 an avenue that parallels the director’s process in approaching a play, in that a production needs to be truthful to the audience, rather than to the original source text. Thus a “translation [in production] real- izes something ‘different’, not something ‘more’ or ‘less’ ” than the original play (Vermeer 232). In short, through the use of the stage picture, a director will often create cultural signifiers that are recog- nizable to the target audience. Agravio began as a collaboration with Amy Williamsen that resulted in an English text titled Courage, Betrayal and a Woman Scorned, published in Introduction to Theatre and Film in 2010. To overcome perceived barriers to production and the play’s reception by twenty-first century audiences, this text made two major adaptations. The cast size was changed to reduce the number of actors and balance the number of roles equally among men and women. In addition, the scene order at the top of the play was changed, with an additional scene added, to clarify Leonor’s position as the heroine of the play. The problem of cast size and balance could be addressed relatively simply. First, the small roles were removed from the play and their lines given to major characters. Secondly, the play was re- organized so that the actors playing Don Fernando, Principe Ludovico and Tomillo would also play the three bandoleros, Tibaldo, Rufino and Astolfo. Don Juan continued to be played by an actor with no

Borden 117 other role. To prevent five male actors over- balancing the three major female roles of Leonor, Estela and Lisarda, the remaining male role of Ri- bete, Leonor’s servant, was combined with the small criada role of Flora. The play could now be performed by a total of eight actors, four men and four women. The relatively arbitrary decision of having Flora don male clothing and take on the persona of Ribete was to have an enormous impact on the sub- ject matter of the play. Leonor was no longer travel- ing alone as a mujer varonil, but accompanied by her servant and (as now described) female friend, who is also disguised as a man. This means that Le- onor is no longer acting alone, “an active character moving on the offense through the plot to get what she wants and deserves,” not wavering “in her word or her deed but instead single-mindedly [seeking] her goal” (Rhodes 311). Now her journey is shared by another female character, who also must become “invisible, as it were, as a female,” and “adopt, for a time, gestures and behavior accepted as masculine” (Soufas, “Unanswering,” 95). Rather than weaken- ing Leonor, the dual journey strengthened the image of women transgressing “the patriarchal standard of silence and reclusion for women [that] suggested an encroachment on and an appropriation of the public domain of men” (Soufas, Dramas 99). Leonor no longer relies on the male Ribete for advice, but her female friend, Flora.

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The second decision, shifting the scene order, also had an effect on how the female characters were viewed. In Caro’s original, the play starts in the wilderness, with Doña Estela and Doña Lisarda lost in the forest. They are set upon by three bandoleros before being rescued by Don Juan. Subse- quently, Don Fernando and Principe Ludovico arrive, befriend Don Juan and all of them travel to the Principe’s palace. It is only after the audience has seen every other major character that they are introduced to Leonor. As Leonor and Ribete enter the emptied stage, their dialogue reveals that they have traveled to Flandes in search of revenge upon Don Juan. Audiences attuned to twenty-first century theatrical and filmic story-telling expect that the hero or heroine will appear in the first few moments of the play or film. In response to this concern, Ca- ro’s second scene (the arrival of Leonor and Ribete) was split in two. A new opening scene was created for Leonor and Flora. Although new lines were created to account for this shift, most of the scene’s language originated in Caro’s expository text. Be- ginning with a scene featuring Leonor and Flora created three major effects on the story. First, Le- onor is established as the primary character as the heroine of the play. Secondly, Leonor’s quandary is highlighted immediately,

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so that when don Juan is finally introduced, the audience is already aware of the injustices he has com- mitted and can agree with Tomillo when he reproaches his master for abandoning her. (Cabellero 6)

The character change strengthens what Soufas describes regarding the relationship of Leonor and Ri- bete, where “they represent a partnership of two figures outside the hegemonic category of male courtier and become co-conspirators in a plot that effects a blurring of social and gender identities” (Dramas, 109-10). Williamsen was concerned that the adaptations would diminish the impact of Leonor’s actions and especially the image of her as a reasoning character. However, as Edward H. Friedman suggests, when she “dons britches and converts herself into an early modern alpha male, a lover and a fighter,” Leonor still “far surpasses the other characters in creativity, ingenuity, narrative prowess, [and] his- trionics,” and “becomes moreover, the best man” (168; 166). However, adding Flora as an ally moved the trans-adaptation away from the singular vision of the mujer varonil, and Flora joined Leonor in breaking apart the traditional male-dominated construct of the court in Flandes. Mercedes Maroto Camino describes how “Valor exemplifies that female support is a necessary prerequisite for the vin-

120 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 dication of female rights” (4). These two women, both disguised as men and moving together into the male-dominated world, also highlight “the rele- vance of the concepts of value, worth, and courage to the contemporary construction of gender” (Camino 4). However, the repositioning of scenes and the addition of Flora complicate what Caro may have envisioned as a complimentary relationship between Leonor and Estela. If, as Williamsen argues, Caro was extremely democratic in her depiction of her female characters, then prioritizing Leonor in the story structure has a major effect on the impact and meaning of the play. It could easily be argued that Estela and Lisar- da were established by Caro as another form of mujer varonil, the bella cazadora. As the play opens, Caro has the two appear “vestidas de cazadoras, con venablos” (2). McKendrick notes how a love of the outdoor life, in fact, is almost a sure sign of female unorthodoxy and is often used by the dramatists as a short-hand […], a technique of instant characterization” (242). Current audiences, especially English- speaking ones, are highly unlikely to recognize this cultural signifier. Furthermore, in establishing Don Juan as a master swordsman in his rescue of Estela and Lisarda from the three bandoleros (which will later heighten the image of Leonor’s strength when she masters Don Juan in sword play), a twenty-first century audience may assume that Estela and Lisar- da are weak. Understanding of Estela’s position and

Borden 121 power partly rely on recognition of the bella cazadora. Caro almost certainly intended Estela to balance Leonor. Elizabeth Rhodes notes that she performs “the same admirable traits as Le- onor/Leonardo […] all while dressed in the material signifiers of a woman” (322). Rhodes continues, commenting that “Estela incarnates the woman's construct of woman, as does Leonor, and Caro's representation of other women in the play as virtu- ous and strong normalizes Leonor's features” (322). Soufas states that

What Estela and Leonor (as Leonar- do) enact is the possibility of elimi- nating men altogether from a politi- cally self-sufficient female universe. Such a universe, however, is still populated by representatives of both genders and is a refashioning rather than a transcendence of the patriarchal discursive order. (Dramas 111- 2)

In perhaps the most prominent display of her status, Estela’s position is central to the matrimonial matchmaking at the end of the play. She even sup- plies the dowry for Flora, making her financial power the final mark of female agency in the play.

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Unfortunately, when early modern plays pair couples together for reasons of social status and wealth rather than romance, the response from current audiences is overwhelmingly negative. Soufas contends that “Caro acknowledges the superficial status quo” and that the “firm emotional commitment” of the united couples “is suspect” (Ana Caro, 98). Undoubtedly, she is correct. However, a negative reaction at this point undercuts the message from the rest of the play and leaves the audience dissatisfied. Thus, a goal of the trans-adaptation was to create an emotional connection for each couple earlier in the play. Most significantly this involved changes to the balcony scene that occurs in Caro’s Act II. In the trans-adaptation, instead of two couples on stage, with Juan and Leonor on one side of the stage and Ludovico and Estela on the other, now Lisarda and Fernando joined the scene. Fernando coached Ludovico from underneath the balcony, much like the well-known scene in Cyrano de Bergerac. On the balcony above, Lisarda coached Estela. By the end of the scene, Ludovico and Lisarda had spoken directly to each other, and Fernando had taken Lu- dovico’s place in speaking to Estela. This established the potential for each couple as a romantic pair, so that by the end of the play, when the couples were more formally matched, the audience was already aware of an emotional connection for each union. In addition, as the scene comes to its conclu-

Borden 123 sion, Fernando climbs the balcony and shares a kiss with Estela. As with Cyrano, audiences unfamiliar with the genre may recognize the Romeo and Juliet reference, and the gesture solidifies the idea of true affection shared by Estela and Fernando. To add the additional characters into the scene, the original text had to be greatly altered. Sections of text were interwoven, naturalizing the dialogue form. Long sections of continuous text is a style unfamiliar to current English-speaking audiences. To counteract this effect, the two halves of the scene intercut much more than Caro’s original, so that the two balcony scenes occur almost simultaneously. The juxtaposition of dialogue from one half of the scene not only echoes the other, but heightens the ideas of the scene:

JUAN: [to Leonor] False reasoning!

ESTELA: [to Ludovico] You're mistaken, Leonardo. (Borden, 47).

The intercutting of short bursts of dialogue helps also helps focus the attention of a twenty-first century audience, used to the quick editing of film and television. The speech from one side of the stage adds to the action from the other. Leonor challenges Don Juan, leaving him at a loss for words. Instantly, from the across the stage, Fernando (disguised as

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Leonardo) asks about Don Juan, and Estela also condemns him:

LEONOR: What’s your answer, Don Juan? Tell me.

JUAN: [Aside.] Estela knows about Leonor. This is madness.

FERNANDO: And Don Juan?

ESTELA: He doesn't please me, I was only grateful because he saved me—I love you alone, Leonardo. (Borden 46)

The cross-cutting of the text led to a double effect for the character trajectory of Don Juan. His behavior is condemned by Leonor the very moment that Estela chooses Leonardo over him, marking the su- periority of Leonardo and the “positive moral attributes” that he displays (Rhodes 321). Juan is beaten by Leonor as a woman, and also beaten by Leonor in her persona as a man. Furthermore, Juan is isolated on the stage and left alone when Leonor exits: “Is there any greater despair? My heart pounds in the prison that holds it” (Borden 48). Juan is doubly defeated, by the text and by the action on stage, an effect only possible through the shifting

Borden 125 and intercutting of text. What started as a simple desire to adjust the text so that current audiences weren’t faced with long speeches became a means of additional contextualization. An examination of the stage picture reveals levels of meaning not present solely with the spoken text. Juan, defeated by both Leonora and Leonardo through the text of the play, was shown in a picture of defeat (kneeling and facing down, isolated and in relative darkness) while Fernando was growing in victory (standing erect, face lifted up with a warm amber light crossing his face). The elements of the stage (the actors’ bodies, the position on the set and the lighting) had combined to reinforce the spoken text. The text suggests a romantic affiliation between Estela and Fernando, as well as Lisarda and Ludovico, and the stage picture confirms it. Coached by Fernando, Ludovico’s lines are only an echo of Fernando’s adoration of Estela. This lessens the connection between Ludovico and Estela, and subsequently strengthens that between Estela and Fernando. Equally important is the presence of Lisarda. Lisarda attracts Ludovico’s attention as she speaks eloquently about love in place of Estela. Moreover, all three couples on stage are connected by elements in their costumes. The blues of Le- onor’s costume reflect the flashes of blue found on Juan, the deep green found on Fernando compli- ments the aqua of Estela’s dress, and the romantic

126 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 reds of Lisarda’ costume are echoed by the red found in Ludovico’s. While none of the parallels are especially obvious, the eye comfortably matches each of the pairs by the colors in the costumes. Stage position reinforced these links during the action of the scene. As Juan and Leonora remained isolated on the right side of the stage, their character relationship was already suggested by their proximity on stage. The connection was made stronger in the moment that Juan confesses his love for Leonor:

LEONOR: Confess that you loved Leonora. JUAN: I confess it. LEONOR: [Aside.] Oh, my heart!

As Juan makes his confession, Leonor is directly above him, both characters sharing the desire and despair they are feeling. The audience subcon- sciously unifies the pair the moment they hear that Juan, indeed, loves Leonora. Much the same visual technique was used stage left, where four characters potentially mud- died the stage picture. Estela and Lisarda frequently trade places, moving backward and forward on the balcony above, while Fernando (disguised as Leo- nardo) and Ludovico duck underneath and out below. When suddenly the characters were still, it be-

Borden 127 came clear which characters should match with whom.

LISARDA: And then, like an eclipse, you stole my heart completely Ludovico — Leonardo.

[Lisarda, realizing her mistake, moves away from the edge of the balcony.]

LUDOVICO: Oh, I dream that she called my name—how her beautiful words inflame me!

FERNANDO: I know Prince Ludovico pines for you. He's rich, he's noble—love may conquer all, but I can’t consider myself that fortunate.

[…] FERNANDO: And Don Juan?

ESTELA: He doesn't please me, I was only grateful because he saved me—I love you alone, Leonar- do. (Borden 45-6).

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As the dialogue occurs, Ludovico is aligned below Lisarda while Fernando stands beneath Estela, with one behind the other on the balcony and on the ground, their positions reinforcing the vertical alignment. As with Juan and Leonora, the positional relationships strengthen and clarify the relationships created through the spoken text. The dynamism of the stage action, in counterpoint to the dialogue, created as much meaning as the text itself. The surprise in creating this trans-adaptation came through the character of Flora, whose presence created a second avenue of displaying female strength and determination on stage. Flora, also disguised as a male, echoed and reinforced the trans- gressive actions of Leonora. Camino notes how Ca- ro “criticized the marginal position in which women were placed” (3). With the addition of Flora as a major character, the questions were given a louder and more comical form. In the scene in which Tomillo is given a sleeping potion and his pockets are searched, Flora comments upon and disparages the trappings of Tomillo’s masculinity, from his moustache to his phallic tobacco pipe. Eventually she finds and takes his purse. As Rhodes suggests,

Flora enacts particular justice, keeping her virginity and returning tit for tat by deflowering Tomillo of that which is dearest to him, his money, a victory that buttresses Leonor's larg-

Borden 129

er triumph and follows its retributive trajectory. (317)

Rhodes comments are directed at Caro’s script, but Agravio presents an even greater level of female transgression into the male world. Flora begins the scene dressed as a woman. As she searches through Tomillo’s pockets looking for his purse, she not only derides Tomillo for his belongings, but also undresses him. As the audience watches, Flora removes her feminine outer gar- ments and dons Tomillo’s masculine ones, once again taking on the persona of Ribete. Piece by piece Flora took away the signifiers of Tomillo’s masculinity and put them on her own body, assuming the position and picture of maleness. Her actions highlight how “the binary sexual division is an illusion produced and maintained by acting” and becomes “a parody of the whole societally dictated binary division of human beings” (Stoll and Smith xix). Flora embodies the action Ania Loomba describes wherein “women emerge as both constructed by and radically disruptive of” the social hierar- chy (67-8). In performance, the challenge to gender distinctions is highlighted further. Flora, donning the last of Tomillo’s clothing and now fully articulated as male on stage, engages with the already laughing audience: “Why do women keep getting the shaft? Because we don’t have one!” (Borden 60). Flora’s undressing and stealing of Tomillo’s

130 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 signifiers of maleness actively question the social markers of male and female.

Jenny Holmes as Flora and Shade Ingraham as Tomillo. Photo by Doug Smith

While these adaptations were in themselves successful and interesting, a second level of adaptation would result in the script titled Agravio. The first adaption was rejected for production because the language was too cumbersome and the story did not flow well. Most importantly, Leonor was described as both “too manly” and “unlikeable.” For the next level of adaptation, Williamsen removed herself from the process, but gave permission to make much larger changes to the text. Focused now with Vermeer’s skopos, the goal became success on stage, rather than staying close to Caro’s original text. Still maintaining the story, shape and character arcs of the original, the focus was on making the

Borden 131 play appeal to the target audience of a twenty-first century English-speaking audience. In short, this meant approaching the play more as a director than as a translator, so that stage action and picture were given prominence over textual conformity. Finally, there was an acknowledgment that current audiences expected greater emotional connection to Leonor if she was to be seen as a sympathetic character. The existence of Leonor as a reasoning character was not lost. Rather, the presence of the actress and the emotion she showed on stage became the keys to understanding Leonor’s reasoning. The visual impact of the actress as Leonor/ Le- onardo became paramount to the success of the play. Many essays on Valor, Agravio y mujer suggest that, as Soufas argues, for “female protagonists to find access to the male circles of communication ordinarily closed to them, they must “erase themselves from the text as women” (Dramas 159- 60). But in performance, such erasure is effectively impossible. The audience sees the actress taking on the persona of Leonardo, and is always aware of the female body on stage. Soufas actually counters her own argument in an earlier essay, noting that “The audience in the theater […] knows Leonor’s true sex” and acknowledges her “as a counterfeit male” (Ana Caro, 95). The recognition within the audience is increased when Leonor is positioned at the beginning of the play as a woman, and the audience wit-

132 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 nesses her transformation from female to (counterfeit) male.” When she is joined in counterfeiting by Flora, whose presence echoes and reflects Leonor’s actions as a male, this effect is heightened even more. In Caro’s original, “As Leonardo, [Leonor] comically performs masculinity's social attributes to inspire others to read her as male […], provoking Ribete to joke about what isn't behind it” (Rhodes 17). With Flora also taking on a male role, in fact that of Ribete, most of the humor becomes focused on Flora’s actions. In counterpoint, Leonor appears much more vulnerable to “the physical violence that males argue must be the basis of the honor dilemma” (Soufas, Dramas 112). The presence of two actresses appearing outwardly male changes how the play is understood. At the end of Caro’s Act I, Leonor slaps her servant Ribete. Originally, this was a man being slapped by a woman. As Ribete complains to Beel- zebub and wonders if he has been mistaken for Don Juan, the language of the original play suggests a comical moment:

RIBETE: […] ¡Ah, señora! ¿Con quién hablo?

LEONOR: Déjame, villano infame! Dale

RIBETE: Belcebú, que más te llame, demándetelo el dïablo.

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¿Miraste el retrato en mí de don Juan? ¡Tal antubión...! ¡Qué bien das un pescozón!

LEONOR: ¡Déjame, vete de aquí!

Vase [RIBETE]. (Caro 24)

Even in today’s culture, a woman slapping a man is rarely viewed negatively, and the action occurs frequently in many current dramas on stage, television or film. Additionally, Caro’s audience would have possessed a different understanding of class that current audiences don’t share, prompting a very different reaction as Doña Leonor slapped her servant. Having two female characters changed how the moment would be viewed by the audience, and is key to how Leonor was originally perceived as unlikeable. The potential humor in the moment has been lost:

FLORA: Leonor! Let's go back to Spain; there’s no good that can come of this.

[Aside.] If in the first act there are rages, fits, jealousies, lightning and thunder, what will follow? Lady...

LEONOR: Villain! [Slaps Flora.]

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FLORA: Beelzebub, what happened to being your only friend? The devil! Did you mistake me for Don Juan?

LEONOR: Leave me alone.

FLORA: So be it.

[Flora exits]. (Williamsen and Borden 23)

Because Ribete had become the character of Flora playing Ribete, now the audience was witnessing Leonor slapping her female servant Flora, who had also been seen as a confidant and a friend. Slapping Flora created an extremely negative stage picture, with the violence occurring against a female body, and without the possible cultural permission inherent in Caro’s audience. The slap was removed, and the moment worked. The two women still parted angrily, but Leonor remained sympathetic to the audience An important aspect of creating the stage picture that often gets overlooked is the sound of the text. Caro’s play is written in beautiful verse that flows, builds and crescendos delightfully. Close English translations of Spanish text often sound stunted and flat, and this was the case with much of Courage, Betrayal and a Woman Scorned. Edith Grossman asserts that “a translator’s fidelity is not to lexical pairings but to context,” that “good trans-

Borden 135 lations are good because they are faithful to [the] contextual significance,” so that a translator will

use analogy to create significance, searching for the phrasing and style in the second language which mean in the same way and sound in the same way to the reader [audience] of that second language. (71)

This is the ideology that led to an effective spoken text. First, Leonor became Leonora. Caro’s conscious choice of using a masculine ending for Le- onor was now counterproductive. The addition of the traditionally feminine “a” at the end of Leonor provided an immediate softening effect to an Eng- lish-speaking audience, without losing Leonor(a)’s stature as a mujer varonil. Additionally, the syllabi- fication and stress of Leonora corresponds almost exactly with Leonardo. Aurally, this helps unify the two personas the actress presents on stage. Two more major textual changes were made. The first was to eliminate any attempt at maintaining Caro’s verse. The meter, sentence construction, and dialogue forms are disparate enough between Spanish and English that maintaining the verse of the original would have been at best diffi- cult, and likely unsuccessful.2 Rather, allowing the trans-adaptation to take the form of prose ensured both that the dialogue would be aurally accessible,

136 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 and that any changes that needed to occur during the rehearsal process could be accomplished much more easily. The second major change was to radically shorten many of the dialogue passages in the text. In some instances, as in the balcony scene mentioned above, the solution was to intercut the dialogue more frequently. In Caro’s play, characters often speak for dozens of verse lines before being answered or interrupted by another character. In Agravio, they speak for only a few sentences and are answered quickly by another character. The major content or focus of the speech is never lost, although there is less elaboration and embellishment. Most often the number of lines a character speaks did not actually change, but was simply intercut with other dialogue. One of the conventions created to shorten the longer speeches in the Agravio adaptation is to have another character interrupt the speech and then make an aside to the audience. These instances most often occurred with Leonora and Flora. In the new first scene, Flora originally said the line, “How she prattles on,” to poke fun at Leonora’s long speeches and to play with the audience regarding the style of Siglo de Oro theatre. However, Elizabeth Petersen was concerned, rightly, that the word “prattle” conveys a negative connotation for English-speaking audiences, particularly important in regards to a character describing Leonora. Recognizing that “prattle” undercut the strength of Leonora, the line

Borden 137 was altered to read, “Young women in love these days — the way they talk!” (Borden 3). This simple change helped establish Flora’s feelings towards Leonora without diminishing Leonora’s character. A script rarely (if ever) discusses the importance of theatrical design. Costuming provides an example of how one design element can affect the audience’s understanding of the play, as costumes are one of the most important means of defin- ing character. For Agravio, the actors did not appear in strictly historically accurate costumes. As Julie Douglass, the costume designer for the production describes, the women’s clothes were not significantly changed, rather finding “a balance between the romantic, open look of [England’s] Princess Anne […] and the severely constricted look of 16th century Spanish women,” resulting in a “softer, less confining neck for Estela and combined color, soft fab- rics, and romantic trim such as lace and embroidery to achieve the goal” (15). These were the major changes from what Spanish women would have worn historically. The men’s costumes underwent much greater alteration. Current audiences look at men in trunk hose, peplums and peascod bellies that are historically accurate to the period, and view the men as feminized, even though this was the proper clothing for a nobleman of the period.3 Instead, Douglass, created “venetians, below knee length breeches for Don Juan, Don Fernando, and Tomillo, while reserving the trunk hose for Prince Ludovico”

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(14). The men’s clothes were a “nod to the style and modesty of the time, but less confining for stage movement and acknowledging modern sensibility” (Douglass 14). What a current audience recognizes as a signifier of masculinity or femininity can be radically different than those recognized by the original audience for the play, again highlighting the importance of creating meaning through stage picture.

Estela, Lisarda, Don Juan and Fernando, showing the costume adjustments. Photo by Doug Smith

This process became especially important for one particular moment in the play, the approach to Leonora’s monologue after she has chastised Flo- ra/ Ribete. In Caro’s version, after the slap, Ribete exits and Leonor berates the heavens that she has not seen justice. Leonor’s speech is a passionate plea for vengeance over 68 lines of verse. As Le-

Borden 139 onor cries to heaven, the build and crescendo of the text creates an air of rabia. Caro’s sonic picture was exciting, invigorating, even dangerous. And while Leonor still invokes reason in her speech, the aural picture makes it clear that Leonor is driven by passion as much as reason, the words building in several crescendos until at last she cries out,

Mi honor, en la altiva cumbre de los cielos he de ver, o hacer que se disculpen en mis locuras mis yerros, o que ellas mismas apuren con excesos cuanto pueden con errores cuanto lucen valor, agravio y mujer, si en un sujeto se incluyen. (25)

A close textual translation of the same verse in Eng- lish seemed cumbersome and slow, hardly repre- sentative of the passion the moment desired. While possible, of course, to create such an effect in English, it is only in rare instances, such as in Shakespeare’s plays, that English-speaking audiences accept such long speeches on stage. Caro’s verse is 311 words as it finished Act I. In Agravio, this speech was adapted to prose, and only 78 words:

LEONORA: Oh, Flora wait, I shouldn’t

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have — Heavens! What am I doing? Do these unwomanly clothes make me unkind to my friends? Or has my blood, steeped in bitterness, become poison, blackened by injustice?

Heavens, where are your thunderbolts? How can you allow such evil? How can you allow Don Juan to walk this earth?

Oh, I could die! Vengeance, por Dios, vengeance! My honor shall be restored, there on the proud summit of heaven for all to see!

[Leonora exits.] (Borden 23)

In comparison, Leonora’s speech in English hardly seems to match Leonor’s Spanish. However, the stage picture was essentially the same. If the Eng- lish translation of Caro’s 68 lines had been attempt- ed essentially “word for word,” there would have been no sense of rabia, but rather a sense that Le- onor is long-winded and overly wordy. Instead, theatrical elements not found on the Siglo de Oro stage

Borden 141 reinforced the impact of the speech. Music isn’t indicated in Caro’s text, but for Agravio, the text was underscored, creating a second level of emotional resonance for the audience. In addition, stage lighting was used to heighten the moment, slowly dim- ming around Leonora to focus the audience’s attention, isolating her and increasing Leonora’s importance within the frame of the stage. Finally, it is easy when looking at a script to forget that an actor’s face can tell a story that words cannot. At the end of the speech, the actress playing Leonora, Kay- la Klammer, lifted her face to heaven, filled with anger and determination. Viewing the performance of Agravio, the audience understood the rabia of the original. Thus, the stage picture, formed by the music, the lighting and the visible emotion of the actress, created a potentially equivalent resonance for the audience watching Agravio, as that which would have seen Valor, agravio y mujer. The final hurdle in making a successful trans-adaptation was to communicate the notion of honor. As Flora comically takes on the outward trappings of maleness in the form of clothing, Leo- nora must adopt another, much more dangerous, purview of the Siglo de Oro male, the violent preservation of the honor code. Renato Barahona carefully points out that while “honor—perhaps especially that of females” is presented as “a price- less possession and quality,” in fact “Spain’s al- leged obsession with parental and family honor has

142 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 been grossly overstated” (39, 41). However, honor remains sharply defined in the dramas of the period, so that Leonora must still negotiate the male world of violence. As Leonardo, her “male disguise allows her to redress her honor by making it possible for her to approach don Juan as an equal” (Rhodes 323). Rhodes’ argument is key to Leonora’s presentation of female/ male behavior, for much of Leono- ra’s strength is made visible through the use of her blade. It is this facet of the workings of Siglo de Oro honor that current audiences can see and understand, and through which they come to understand the characters. Leonora’s connection to swordsman- ship is established from the first scene of Agravio, when she brandishes a sword, stating, “Now I swear to all the skies, I will have his heart on my blade or die in the attempt” (Borden 5). The oath is indicative of how Leonora portrays “a masculine model of integrity and loyalty that the male characters do not live up to” (Soufas, Dramas 104-5). Caro appears to have had an innate understanding of how sword play functioned in terms of stage picture and action. She is willing to compro- mise Estela’s depiction as a bella cazadora, placing her and Lisarda in need of rescue from three bandoleros. This seems a strange choice if Estela is going to perform “the same admirable traits as Leonor/ Leonardo” (Rhodes 322). What is not necessarily evident in Caro’s text is the image of Don Juan as a master swordsman, capable of defeating three ban-

Borden 143 doleros single-handedly, with Estela even highlighting Juan’s skill, “¡Oh, qué irresistibles golpes!” (Caro 7). Caro presents Juan as a master swordsman that Leonora must meet and overcome. Caro also establishes both her and Leonora’s knowledge of fencing when Leonora invokes the name of Narvaez and “the art of the punto, the curves and angles of the famous fencing master” (58).4 By invoking her fencing knowledge, Caro ensures that the audience knows that Leonora must have some form of training. When Leonora fights Don Juan, she is able to wound him and defeat him. She subsequently defends Don Juan against the attack of Ludovico, who comments on her ability, “I can barely catch my breath — what terrible skill!” (Borden 38). This is an extraordinary social statement, created by a combination of text and stage picture. Remember, too, that Caro was writing for an audience that would have been very familiar with displays of skilled fencing and its terminology. An analogy for an American audience would be a mov- ie about baseball, and how important it is that the action of the game is portrayed correctly. Caro’s audience would also recognize the skill necessary for Leonora to succeed against Don Juan. Ludovi- co’s addition to the fight is important, because his commentary prevents the audience from assuming that Leonora succeeded through luck. The stage direction given by Caro is “Comi- enzan a reñir” (41). This says nothing of how they

144 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 fight, making the creation of the fight choreography extremely important. The ways in which Leonora moves on stage, the way she uses her sword against Don Juan and then against Ludivico, present the audience with an image of her strength. This becomes even more important for a current audience, most of whom will be extremely unfamiliar with fencing or sword play of any kind. Thus, the fight director becomes another cog in the process of trans-adaptation, creating stage pictures that current audiences can recognize as markers of Leonora’s skill. The audience sees Leonora with a sword, ar- guably the strongest outward signifier of maleness, and they see her ability to fight with it and even best one of the greatest swordsmen of Spain. The stage picture and action of the sword fight create a testa- ment to Leonora’s strength and courage that no textual reading by itself can fully translate. The final image the audience sees of Leono- ra in the persona of Don Leonardo (before she reveals herself as a woman to the court in Flandes), is with her sword drawn and in a standoff with Don Juan, Don Fernando, and Principe Ludovico as they argue about the dictates and behavior necessitated by the honor code:

FERNANDO: What a labyrinth!

LUDOVICO: Don Juan speaks rightly. If Don Fernando marries

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Leonora to Don Leonardo, how can she accept him if Don Juan lives? And Don Juan must kill Leonardo. And then you must kill Don Juan. But he is under my protection, so then I must kill you. So go the precepts of honor.

FERNANDO: You’re right. We must all kill each other. I can see no other solution.

LUDOVICO: Nor can I, por Dios, bar- baric and bloody as it is. (Borden 66)

Leonora, already transgressing into the male world, is brave enough to engage in violence and face physical danger, to meet and equal the male para- digm of behavior. But as a female, she is able to find a solution that the male characters cannot. As Rhodes so succinctly sums up, “closure entails seeing Leonor dishonor don Juan as just recompense for his dishonorable behavior, then reconciling him permanently to the past he disordered. (Rhodes 316- 7). Leonora, through her persona of Don Leonardo, repairs the social disruption created by Don Juan. She does this by utilizing and then superseding the

146 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 construction of the honor code. Even as she returns dressed as a woman, Leonora is the most successful male in the play. But it is through the creation of stage pictures, as much as text, that the audience understands this.

Juan, Ludovico, Fernando and Leonardo caught in the precepts of honor. Photo by Doug Smith.

How does a play cross boundaries of culture, language and time to convey meaning? For Agravio, the stage picture became as important as text. Agra- vio is not an exact translation of Caro’s text, but that is an impossibility. Venuti describes how translation “inevitably domesticates foreign texts, inscribing them with linguistic and cultural values that are intelligible to specific domestic constituencies” (67). In other words, the act of translation must by necessity remove the text from its original context and root it in the cultural context of the target audience

Borden 147 described by Vermeer. The stage picture is as important as the text for creating signifiers for the target audience, and must be considered as part of the translation (more accurately described as a trans- adaptation) of a play designed for production. It is the performance of Agravio, the combination of stage picture and spoken text, that makes Caro’s play resonate for a twenty-first century audience.

NOTES

1 The translation and production process was also part of a continuing engagement with members of the Spanish Golden Age Working Group of the American Society for Theatre Re- search. Although their commentary has not gone through the ordinary rigors of academic review, because it affected this particular adaptation of Caro’s text, some of this discussion has been included. 2 Full verse translations are not necessarily ineffective, and there have been many over the years, such as those created by Dakin Matthews (as well as other very talented translators) that are extremely playable and maintain a remarkable faithfulness to the original text. The decision was made here to turn fully to prose for several reasons. These included the target audience, the time restraints affecting the trans-adaptation process and the theatrical conditions for the production. 3 The pescod or peascod belly was padding under a man’s coat that created a look of being fat or even pregnant, while a pep- lum is a skirt-like extension of a garment below the waist. 4 A punto is a thrust, and Narvaez was the most famous fencing master of Spain, and knowledge of his treatise on fencing was a mark of male education.

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Works Cited

Barahona, Renato. “Between Ideals and Pragmatism: Honor in Early Modern Spain.” Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama. Eds. Laura R. Bass and Margaret R. Greer. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2006. 39-44. Borden, Ian. Agravio. Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 4-14 Oct. 2013. Borden, Ian and Sarah Imes. Introduction to Theatre. Ed. Ian Borden. Dubuque: Great River Technolo- gies, 2010. . Brook, Peter. “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Cur- rent problems and Opinions.” Directors on Di- recting: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre. Eds. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy. New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1963. Burningham, Bruce R. “Placing the Comedia in a Per- formative Context.” Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama. Eds. Laura R. Bass and Margaret R. Greer. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2006. 107-14. Cabellero, Judith. “Female Solidarity and Friendship: The Adaptation of Leonor’s Soliloquy in Amy Williamsen’s and Ian Borden’s Translation.” “Undercover: New Approaches to Plays from

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the Spanish Golden Age through Hidden Histo- ries of Women & Native Americans.” 1-6. American Society for Theatre Research Confer- ence: Nashville, 2012. 24 Oct. 2012. . Camino, Mercedes Maroto. “María de Zayas and Ana Caro: The Space of Woman's Solidarity in the Spanish Golden Age.” Hispanic Review Vol. 67. 1 (Winter, 1999): 1-16. JSTOR. 24 May 2013. . Caro, Ana Mallén de Soto. Valor, agravio y mujer. As- sociation for Hispanic Classical Thea- tre.11/17/2009. . Derrida, Jacques. “What is a Relevant Translation?” Trans. by Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2004. Douglass, Julie. “Costume Design for Agravio.” MFA Costume Design Thesis. University of Nebras- ka-Lincoln. Lincoln: UNL Press, 2013. Friedman, Edward H. “Clothes Unmake the Woman: The Idiosyncrasies of Cross-dressing in Ana Caro's ‘Valor,agravio y mujer’.” Confluencia, 24. 1 (Fall 2008): 162-71. JSTOR. 23 May 2013. . Gielgud, John. “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Cur- rent problems and Opinions.” Directors on Di- recting: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre.

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Eds. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy. New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1963. Grossman, Edith. Why Translation Matters. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010. Hall, Peter. “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current problems and Opinions.” Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre. Eds. To- by Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy. New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1963. Hardwick, Lorna. “Playing Around Cultural Faultlines: The Impact of Modern Translations for the Stage on Perceptions of Ancient Greek Drama.” Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture. Ed. Ashley Chantler and Carla Dente. New York: Rodopi, 2009. 167-183. Houseman, John. “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current problems and Opinions.” Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Thea- tre. Eds. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy. New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1963. Lewis, Philip E. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2004. 256-89. Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. New York, St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1989.

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McKendrick, Melveena. Woman and Society in the Drama of the Spanish Golden Age: A Study of the Mujer Varonil. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1974. Mujica, Barbara. “Ana Caro’s Valor, Agravio y mujer as Performance Text.” Engendering the Early Modern Stage: Women Playwrights in the Span- ish Empire. Ed. Valerie Hegstrom and Amy R. Williamsen. New Orleans: UP of the South, 1999. 19-50. Petersen, Elizabeth. “An Actor’s Point of View: A Brief Interpretation of the Protagonist Leonora and Flora the Adaptation, Courage, Betrayal and a Woman Scorned.” “Undercover: New Ap- proaches to Plays from the Spanish Golden Age through Hidden Histories of Women & Native Americans.” 1-4. American Society for Theatre Research Conference: Nashville, 2012. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Redressing Ana Caro's Valor, agravio y mujer.” Hispanic Review 73. 3 (Summer, 2005): 309-28. 24/05/2013 JSTOR. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/30040405>. Soufas, Teresa S. “Ana Caro’s Re-evaluation of the Mu- jer varonil and her Theatrics in Valor, Agravio y mujer.” The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age. Eds. Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991. 85-106. ---. Dramas of Distinction: A Study of Plays by Golden Age Women. Lexington: The University of Ken- tucky Press, 1997.

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. ---. “Unanswering the Question.” Approaches to Teach- ing Early Modern Spanish Drama. Eds. Laura R. Bass and Margaret R. Greer. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2006. Stoll, Anita K. and Dawn L. Smith. “Introduction.” The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age. Eds. Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991. xiii-xxvii. Venuti, Lawrence. The Scandals of Translation: To- wards an Ethics of Difference. Routledge: Lon- don, 1998. ---. “Translation, Community, Utopia.” The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. Routledge: London, 1998. Vermeer, Hans J. “Skopos and Commission in Transla- tion Theory.” Trans. Andrew Chesterman. The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Ve- nuti. London: Routledge, 2004. 227-38. Webster, Margaret. “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current problems and Opinions.” Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Thea- tre. Eds. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy. New York: The Bobs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1963.

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Williamsen, Amy and Ian Borden. Courage, Betrayal and a Woman Scorned. Introduction to Theatre and Film. Ed. Ian Borden. Dubuque: Great River Technologies, 2010. .

Interviews

EL DIRECTOR DE LA COMPAÑÍA NACIONAL DE TEATRO CLÁSICO DEBE DEFENDER A LOPE Y A CLADERÓN, NO A SÍ MISMO: ENTREVISTA CON JOSÉ LUIS ALONSO SANTOS

PURIFICACIÓ MASCARELL Universitat de València

José Luis Alonso de Santos (Valladolid, 1942), uno de los principales dramaturgos vivos de la segunda mitad del siglo XX español, ha desempeñado funciones de director escénico desde que inició su trayectoria artística en la década de los 60. Ha dirigido más de una treintena de montajes de sus propios textos y de autores como Brecht,

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Mascarell 155 Aristófanes, Synge, Valle-Inclán, Arniches, Calderón, Baroja, Plauto y Shakespeare. Es catedrático de Escritura Dramática en la RESAD de Madrid y Premio Nacional de Teatro de 1986. En su vertiente teórica, Alonso de Santos ha escrito ensayos entre los que destaca su tratado La escritura dramática (1998).

PM: ¿Qué supuso en su trayectoria profesional y personal que en el año 2000 le nombrasen director de la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC)?

JLAS: No me supuso ni más ni menos que otros trabajos que he desempeñado en el mundo del teatro durante los cincuenta años que llevo trabajando en este ámbito. He pasado por muchos cargos, por muchas etapas. Algunos han tenido un poco más de representación social, otros, menos. He pasado por muchas situaciones y todas tienen en común que cuando haces teatro, haces teatro. Es decir, te juntas con una gente y montas una obra de teatro, la escribes, la diriges, defiendes el trabajo de los demás. La gestión es muy similar, solo se diferencia en el presupuesto.

PM: Es decir, para usted se trató de una etapa más dentro de su trayectoria.

JLAS: Sí. Montar una obra con unos aficionados en un barrio o con la CNTC, al final, se diferencia en

156 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 la cantidad de dinero que manejas. Si tienes mucho, los actores están más formados y la escenografía es mejor; si tienes menos, pues todo es más pequeñito. Lo demás son “palabras, palabras, palabras”, que dice Hamlet. Parece que, con unos actores aficionados en la casa de la cultura de tu pueblo, el debate sea más humilde, mientras que en la CNTC se habla de arte y de cultura en mayúsculas. Pero, en el fondo, el proceso es idéntico: “dame una entrada”, la coges, te sientas, se pasa bien o se pasa mal, y colorín colorado. O sea que, para mí, la CNTC no supuso nada. Si acaso una etapa de sacrificio personal en mi obra, ya que esos años, al tener un cargo oficial, no pude estrenar. Fue una responsabilidad y me tomé esos cinco años como un servicio público, nunca como un servicio para mí mismo, porque yo era ya un director conocido. Por lo tanto, acepté ese trabajo como una promoción importante de los clásicos, y me dediqué a defender a Calderón, a Lope y a Cervantes durante unos años, en vez de defenderme a mí. Y luego se acabó, y ya está.

PM: ¿Cuál cree que ha sido su principal contribución a la Compañía, o por qué razón pasará José Luis Alonso de Santos a la historia de la CNTC?

JLAS: En la CNTC no tienen que pasar a la historia los que están allí, sino los que ya estaban, los autores clásicos. Se es director de la CNTC para

Mascarell 157 defender a Lope de Vega, no a uno mismo. Y el que no lo entiende así, está equivocado. Porque la gente va al teatro de la Compañía para ver a los clásicos en montajes importantes y de grandes presupuestos. Para eso se inventó la CNTC. Hago un paralelismo con el Museo del Prado: ¿Qué director del Prado ha sido más importante? ¿Qué más da? La gente va para ver los cuadros de Velázquez, no a comprobar cómo gestiona el museo su director, porque lo importante allí son las pinturas. En este sentido, mi postura siempre ha sido muy humilde. Y para que se me vea a mí, y no a los clásicos, llevo a cabo otro tipo de proyectos.

PM: Cuando Andrés Amorós se puso al frente de la CNTC, propuso un proyecto artístico que usted asumió enteramente en el año 2000. ¿Por qué no se cuestionó el trabajo de su antecesor?

JLAS: Andrés estuvo poco tiempo, pero cambió por completo la idea de la Compañía, su programación y orientación. Cuando yo llegué, tenía dos posibilidades: cambiar su propuesta, diseñada para varios años, o mantenerla. Como me pareció un proyecto muy razonable, asumí todo el trabajo de Andrés y decidí darle continuidad. Quizá, si no hubiese estado él antes, me hubiera planteado mi etapa de otra manera. Pero Andrés es un hombre muy trabajador en el que confío plenamente. Además, no soy partidario de llegar al cargo para configurar tu propia compañía privada y realizar tu

158 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 desarrollo personal. Al igual que Andrés, considero que la CNTC es un centro de producción. La Compañía no es mi compañía. Por otro lado, si después se ocupará de la institución otro profesional, ¿qué sentido tiene hacerla propia?

PM: Durante su etapa en la Compañía concibió los espectáculos dentro de ciclos por autor. Primero Calderón, después Lope y, finalmente, Tirso. ¿qué ventajas posee esta organización por ciclos de autor?

JLAS: Me pareció muy apropiada por razones pedagógicas. Permitía organizar conferencias, exposiciones y actividades para los estudiantes en torno a un autor. No hay que olvidar que el 50% de la responsabilidad de la CNTC tiene que ver con proporcionar apoyo al ámbito educativo. Y un trabajo aislado de una sola comedia no da el mismo juego que un ciclo. Si este año predomina Lope, dedicamos todo el esfuerzo a Lope y su mundo, y sacamos cuadernos pedagógicos, libros, etc. El año siguiente, nos centramos en Calderón. Era un criterio que había establecido Andrés y que yo asumí.

PM: ¿Cuáles fueron sus principales dificultades en el cargo?

JLAS: Tuve dos pegas básicas durante mi etapa en la CNTC. La primera, la batalla constante con los

Mascarell 159 sindicatos y la lucha política. Andrés era un director general del Partido Popular [el partido conservador en España] y yo estaba contratado, indirectamente, por ese partido, lo cual significó que los sindicatos, el Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) e Izquierda Unida se dedicaron a machacarme sin parar. Además, desde el primer día hasta el último hubo un rechazo frontal de toda la prensa. Me tragué esa disputa política sin tener nada que ver conmigo, que estoy muy cercano al PSOE, y quedé como un traidor para unos y para otros. En realidad, la actitud de todos fue irracional, empezando por la de los trabajadores: hubo huelgas los cinco años que estuve en el cargo. Las huelgas son magníficas política, social y moralmente, pero artísticamente resultan una lata. Los sindicatos exigen mayores sueldos y menores jornadas laborales mientras tú estás dándolo todo por Lope. La segunda problemática que me amargó la existencia fue el traslado del Teatro de la Comedia [en el centro histórico de Madrid], que no es bueno para el clásico, al Teatro Pavón [en el barrio de Lavapiés], que es espantoso. En principio, acepté irnos al Pavón durante unos pocos meses, pero la CNTC ha estado años allí, con todo el absurdo que supone y los gastos de restauración que ha acarreado. Ese espacio no se corresponde con la dignidad que se le pretende dar a Lope de Vega. Por lo demás, los cinco años fueron una maravilla, porque trabajar con los clásicos y con buenos presupuestos es una gozada.

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PM: Realice una valoración del trabajo de dirección que han sostenido sus colegas en el cargo.

JLAS: Imposible. Dejémoslo en parecido. Cada uno lo ha hecho lo mejor que ha podido. Algunos montajes han salido mejor que otros. Vi montajes de Marsillach que me gustaron mucho y otros que no me gustaron nada y, en general, así con todos. Yo creo que todos han tenido muy buena voluntad, todos han trabajado lo mejor que han podido y algunos han estado mejor que otros. Pero no puedo hacer una valoración de ellos uno por uno.

PM: Al menos, necesariamente, ha de tener unas palabras sobre el fundador, Adolfo Marsillach.

JLAS: Marsillach contó con un centro para redimensionar el teatro clásico, pero no lo inventó. Eso es un tópico. En su gestión hubo tres o cuatro aciertos y dos o tres errores que luego se han pagado. Entre los primeros, el haber dado forma a una compañía que ha tenido una continuidad importante. Y entre los últimos, el local. Eligió un teatro prácticamente en ruinas, el Teatro de la Comedia, equivocándose con la sede cuando era el momento de coger la mejor. Pero Marsillach fue un director que estuvo ahí como podría haber estado otro, sin más. Tampoco se encontró con una falta de actores preparados para el clásico, eso es otro tópico. Con la Compañía hubo grandes presupuesto

Mascarell 161 y un espacio estable, pero los actores que hacían las obras clásicas antes de 1986 eran estupendos. Y también había buenos directores haciendo teatro clásico, como José Luis Alonso, Miguel Narros o José Tamayo.

PM: ¿Cuáles han sido sus directores fuente de inspiración? ¿Qué influencias reconoce en su puesta en escena de los clásicos?

JLAS: No tengo unos referentes concretos. Hay, en esencia, dos tipos de teatro: el bueno y el malo. Si quitas las tonterías, las ridiculeces, los caprichos personales y haces un trabajo serio y responsable, la gente disfrutará con esa obra de arte, y con eso basta. Los directores que creen descubrir el mundo, me parecen unos farsantes que buscan salir en la prensa y cobrar más. Con hacer bien tu trabajo, ya es suficiente. Así que nunca he seguido unas figuras ni he tenido unos maestros. Mis influencias vienen de los espectáculos que he visto y me han gustado. En general, soy un hombre bastante conservador en el arte. Acepto la renovación y la vanguardia, pero también sé que muchas veces son el refugio de la tontería. Prefiero la tradición, lo consagrado. Así que, en el terreno de los clásicos, soy más partidario de la conservación de los valores que de la innovación. Hay quien piensa que con Calderón hay que prender fuego al teatro, pero yo no soy de esos.

162 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 PM: ¿Qué directores teatrales de la actualidad admira?

JLAS: Estoy convencido de que me gustan los mismos directores españoles que al 99,9% de las personas. Me gusta Miguel Narros, que ha dirigido hace poco La cena de los generales, una de mis obras. Me gusta José Carlos Plaza, que es un trabajador, un hombre de teatro consagrado, y que dirige siempre con gran pasión. Me gusta y respeto mucho los trabajos de Lluís Pasqual, Mario Gas o José Luis Gómez. Esto no quiere decir que, si veo un montaje fuera de la primera fila de los grandes directores, no me pueda gustar. Un chavalito recién salido de la escuela de Arte Dramático puede hacer un montaje precioso. Y también es posible que Flotats haga un montaje malo. Pero, en general, suelen estar mejor los trabajos de las personas formadas, porque la clave del arte no es la originalidad, sino la formación. ¿Quién prefieres que te opere? ¿Un chaval que está empezando o el profesional que lleva cuarenta años realizando ese tipo de operación quirúrgica?

PM: ¿Se circunscribes bajo algún programa teórico o escuela para hacer teatro?

JLAS: Después de tantos años, ya soy yo el sistema teórico y la escuela. De la historia del teatro he seleccionado lo que me ha dictado mi sentido común y mi experiencia labrada en tantas horas de

Mascarell 163 ensayos para crear un espectáculo. El teatro es teatro y, aunque ha variado mucho en algunos aspectos a lo largo de las diferentes épocas, desde los griegos hasta hoy existen una serie de principios inmutables: hay que aprenderse unos papeles, subir al escenario, interpretar con la mayor calidad posible, hacer que el público disfrute y aprenda.

PM: Aunque los pasos para llevar a cabo el montaje de una obra están perfectamente detallados en su manual de Teoría y práctica teatral, durante su etapa en la CNTC, ¿cuál era el proceso de trabajo para cada montaje?

JLAS: Siempre he funcionado bajo una premisa: ser tan sencillo y lógico como poco caprichoso. Obedecer a las normas de la normalidad y no creerme un mago, un genio que posee un valioso secreto oculto para lo demás. No creo en esa idea romántica de la inspiración. Tú vas al trabajo, tienes un horario laboral, comes allí, te organizas la semana y, poco a poco, a partir de la gente que tienes, el material y las circunstancias, va saliendo un producto. Un artista es un privilegiado, y si además le paga la sociedad en un teatro institucional, es cinco veces privilegiado, así que no vale el “hoy no estoy inspirado”. Igual que si vas a un médico de la Seguridad Social, esperas que te cure y no que te salga por peteneras, el artista debe luchar por la excelencia. Así que mis procesos de trabajos siempre se han guiado por esta premisa de

164 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 la racionalidad y el sentido común, conceptos fundamentales en la vida y, sobre todo, en el arte.

PM: Ha dirigido más de treinta y seis montajes teatrales de autores de todas las épocas: Brecht, Aristófanes, Baroja, Valle-Inclán, Arniches, Plauto. De entre los clásicos del Siglo de Oro, además de un Shakespeare en 1983 (Sueño de una noche de verano), has montado El auto del hombre, sobre textos de Calderón (1972), La dama duende (2000), Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (2002) y El gran teatro del mundo (2006). ¿Cuáles han sido las principales diferencias o dificultades al dirigir los textos barrocos con respecto al resto de títulos de tu trayectoria?

JLAS: No encuentro ninguna diferencia. Cada obra tiene su dificultad y su camino y, al final, todo es teatro. ¿Que es más difícil? Todo es difícil. Yo he montado obras de Muñoz Seca y de Calderón. Pues no es más fácil la de Muñoz Seca. Eso sí, hacerlo mal es fácil, me refiero a hacerlo bien. Porque lo complicado es darle a una obra de Arniches, por ejemplo, una calidad escénica. El teatro es difícil de narices siempre.

PM: ¿Qué consejos le daría a un joven que empieza ahora a dirigir teatro clásico?

JLAS: El primero es no abandonar la formación, porque el aprendizaje es un largo y serio proceso en

Mascarell 165 el que los buenos profesores son fundamentales. El segundo es observar si se tienen condiciones naturales, porque ningún aprendizaje convierte a alguien en un buen director si no hay aptitudes previas. Cuando coinciden un buen aprendizaje, una ficha genética adecuada y suerte, como dice Woody Allen, se puede llegar a ser un director importante.

PM: Aparte de sus adaptaciones para la escena de obras como El Buscón, Yo, Claudio o Anfitrión de Plauto, ha realizado versiones de comedias barrocas. En 1987, hizo la adaptación para el montaje de Josefina Molina de No puede ser el guardar a una mujer. Y el año 2000 se encargó de la dirección y la versión de la comedia de Calderón La dama duende. ¿Dónde se encuentra el límite en la manipulación del texto a la hora de adaptarlo a la escena contemporánea y al gusto actual de los espectadores?

JLAS: Si te soy sincero, cuando era más joven creía que podía hacerse lo que se quisiera con los textos. Pero, a medida que he ido cumpliendo años, me he ido volviendo más responsable. Cada año que pasa, considero que se pueden tocar menos los textos. ¡Es como si cogiéramos Las meninas y cambiásemos lo que no nos gusta! Si no lo hacemos con una pintura de Goya o con una partitura de Mozart, ¿por qué hacerlo con una obra de Lope o de Calderón?

166 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 PM: Pero las comedias barrocas recogen un léxico y unas referencias culturales que el espectador actual desconoce, ¿no hay que acercárselas?

JLAS: Ahí interviene el sentido común. Los elementos epocales, como la alusión a una batalla reciente, o los elementos coyunturales que funcionan de relleno en las obras, conviene depurarlos un poco. Y ello porque uno adivina que, si Lope de Vega estuviese aquí, probablemente lo haría también. El peligro viene del inconsciente que se considera un genio y cree que el material textual está a su servicio. En arte todo el mundo es libre, por supuesto, pero no comparto la opción de emborronar el original. Así, además, se le miente al espectador. El público desconoce el significado de las palabras “versión” o “adaptación” y cree ciegamente que está viendo una obra de Calderón.

PM: Sin embargo, su adaptación de Moreto fue bastante personal y creativa.

JLAS: Estimulado por la directora Josefina Molina, efectivamente, me puse a cambiar la obra hasta dar con un Moreto sensual, el que ella buscaba. Tiempo después, para mi sorpresa, leí un estudio sobre Moreto en el que un especialista explicaba la potente sensualidad en el dramaturgo a partir de mi adaptación para la CNTC. Los versos que citaba para justificar su tesis eran, precisamente, los que yo había inventado para la puesta en escena. Como

Mascarell 167 la cultura es un batiburrillo, ahora está quedando la idea de que Moreto es un autor sensual. Si hoy hiciera la adaptación, no cambiaría prácticamente nada porque reconozco que, aunque en el escenario funcionaba bien el erotismo de los protagonistas, Moreto jamás hubiera dicho lo que yo ponía en los versos. Y voy más lejos: los finales que Lorca, en La Barraca, inventó para las obras clásicas son todos aberrantes. Fuente Ovejuna, sin el final original de Lope con los reyes, ¡no se entiende!

PM: En consecuencia, y tras su cambio de paradigma, ¿cuál sería la premisa básica para realizar una adaptación adecuada?

JLAS: Pensar si el autor, al ver hoy esa adaptación, se enfadaría o no. La adaptación es un proceso intrínseco al arte del teatro, pero siempre que uno se plantee si al dramaturgo le gustarían, o no, los cambios introducidos. Si Calderón ha escrito una obra para defender la salvación del hombre a través del arrepentimiento, y a ti este mensaje no te gusta, pues no la montes. Porque, llevarla a escena para expresar que el cielo es una porquería, resulta una traición a Calderón y un engaño para el público. Respecto a las adaptaciones, yo pondría una segunda regla de oro: no pagar a los versionistas. Porque hay quien cambia dos versos de Lope, coloca su nombre en la portada del libro o en el cartel de la obra, y cobra unos derechos de autor muy elevados. O sea, que detrás de las adaptaciones

168 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 hay un negocio ilegal con la obra de los clásicos. Yo hice versiones para la CNTC, pero cuando no era el director. Estando en el cargo me daba vergüenza cobrar dos veces.

PM: Usted trasladó la acción de La dama duende al Siglo de las Luces (un XVIII ilustrado, galante y prerromántico) con una puesta en escena que actualizaba la época de la obra de Calderón, ¿este procedimiento es útil para acercar el texto clásico a los espectadores contemporáneos?

JLAS: Lo principal para trabajar con una obra es encontrar el concepto bajo el que englobar todo el montaje, esto es: qué vas a decir, por qué lo vas a decir y cómo lo vas a decir. Y en La dama duende el elemento clave era la modernidad. Calderón luchaba por un mundo moderno y estaba anticipándose a su época. Yo llevé esta idea al vestuario y al estilo. No era un capricho estético. Estaba ayudando a Calderón a trasladar su mensaje al espectador de hoy, y creo que a Calderón le hubiese gustado que llevara su texto hacia el XVIII. En mi caso, este procedimiento resulto útil, sí.

PM: Juan Antonio Hormigón divide en tres las opciones para trabajar con los clásicos en escena: arqueológica o museística, ilustrativismo o tradicionalismo y libertad frente al texto. Es evidente que la CNTC se ha movido en la última de las opciones. Sin embargo, no han sido pocos los

Mascarell 169 filólogos que han defendido la primera de ellas. ¿Qué opinión te merece utilizar los medios técnicos actuales para recrear fielmente una representación teatral tal como pudo ser en el pasado?

JLAS: Pues que no tiene ningún sentido y que resulta imposible. Tendríamos que vestir a la gente como en el Siglo de Oro, poner la luz del Siglo de Oro, el frío del Siglo de Oro, las sillas del Siglo de Oro, la comida de ese día. ¡Todas la circunstancias! Incluso si hay guerra, poner guerra, porque eso condiciona la representación. Sería precioso, pero sería una mentira. Porque en el fondo no estamos en el Siglo de Oro, y el teatro tiene cañones, luces, micrófonos, butacas mullidas. El teatro clásico debe ser entendido desde hoy. Hay que respetar el texto es por su gran belleza y porque son obras que tienen el poder de la palabra. Pero en el resto de aspectos teatrales, no hay respeto posible. Cuando se dice: “Hacedlo como en el Barroco”, resulta que nadie tiene ni puñetera idea de cómo se hacía entonces.

PM: Y, por otro lado, lo barroco se confunde demasiadas veces con lo romántico.

JLAS: Claro, porque todo el mundo tiene, ingenuamente, una idea decimonónica del pasado. El gran triunfo del teatro en España se da en la época romántica y contagia, casi hasta nuestros días, la idea de lo que es el teatro. La pierna doblada, la capa caída, la espada al cinto y el

170 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 recitado ampuloso no son elementos del Siglo de Oro, son del Duque de Rivas. Pero, ¿cómo va a ser eso de Lope de Vega? ¿Dónde está el documento que lo atestigüe? ¿Y cómo se decía el verso? ¡No lo sabemos! “Quiero verlo antiguo”, dicen. Pero yo no quiero verlo antiguo porque a mí me gusta lo clásico, que es diferente. Y quiero ver lo romántico como romántico, pero no todo el teatro hecho a la manera romántica del Duque de Rivas. Sin embargo, el imaginario colectivo identifica el teatro de Lope y Calderón con los modos del siglo XIX porque no existe memoria teatral más allá de ese siglo. Y si alguien exige: “¡Hay que respetar la tradición del Siglo de Oro!”, yo no sé de qué me está hablando. Incluso las pinturas que tenemos de personajes del teatro barroco han sido pintados en la época romántica.

PM: ¿Quiénes han sido sus actores “fetiche” de la CNTC?

JLAS: La CNTC ha tenido y tiene buenos actores: Pepa Pedroche, Joaquín Notario, Arturo Querejeta (el que más continuidad ha tenido en la Compañía, pues ha trabajado con todos los directores y ha hecho desde terceros papeles hasta de protagonista). Pero me atrevería a decir que el teatro clásico no necesita actores fetiche. Los grandes actores del teatro clásico, Rafael Álvarez, El Brujo, o Juan Luis Galiardo, por ejemplo, hacen teatro clásico para ganar fama, pero en una compañía de actores como

Mascarell 171 la CNTC no funcionarían porque la desequilibran. Aquí es importante que los actores estén unidos y cobren más o menos lo mismo. No interesan los divos, sino gente joven dispuesta a trabajar de forma dura y sacrificada y, por supuesto, en equipo. Los actores mienten cuando dicen que quieren hacer teatro clásico. Les llamas para proponérselo y las tarifas que exigen no se corresponden con el interés que aparentan tener. En el fondo prefieren series y películas con las que ganar más fama y dinero. El divo puede ser útil para convertir tu montaje en un acontecimiento social. Si la protagonista es Ana Belén, habrá unas colas tremendas para asistir al teatro. Pero la diva no va a interpretar rotundamente mejor su papel que una actriz menos conocida.

PM: Ahora que habla de calidad interpretativa, sobre la eterna polémica del verso en el teatro clásico, usted sostiene en su célebre manual que “el verso no debe ser dicho o recitado, sino interpretado, incorporado por el actor en su personaje y situación”.

JLAS: Efectivamente. El concepto de “recitado” corresponde al Romanticismo. El problema es que la gente todavía lo conserva, porque si damos a leer un texto clásico a cualquier persona, lo recitará a la manera romántica sin dudarlo, con ese soniquete infantil tan característico. No obstante, a estas alturas todos los actores saben que hay que eliminar

172 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 esa musiquilla e incorporar el verso a la situación imaginaria que se está interpretando.

PM: Entonces, ¿contamos ya con un plantel de actores preparados para enfrentarse al verso clásico?

JLAS: La forma romántica de decir el verso está completamente borrada ya entre los actores del clásico, pero siempre habrá un 10 o 15 % del público y de la crítica que insistirá en que “los actores no saben decir el verso”. Eso es una matraca eterna. ¿Qué es decir “bien” o “mal” el verso? En realidad, no hay una única forma de hacerlo bien. Y si un actor lo dice mal será porque su director no tiene oído, o porque el actor carece de sentido musical. La dificultad del verso radica en su acentuación, porque la obsesión romántica por la rima está superada. La musicalidad del verso viene dada por la dimensión del acento. Pero no es necesario explicar estas cuestiones al actor. Automáticamente, la gente que habla bien sabe qué palabras debe acentuar en su discurso y cuáles no, y luego están los hablantes átonos que nunca acentúan nada. Se trata de algo intuitivo que puede desarrollarse estudiando música.

PM: Sus dos obras más conocidas, La estanquera de Vallecas y Bajarse al moro, se caracterizan por presentar personajes que emplean un lenguaje coloquial cercano al del espectador. Nada más distanciado al lenguaje elaborado y estético de los

Mascarell 173 versos del barroco español, repletos de mecanismos expresivos alejados de nuestro uso común del lenguaje: metáforas, sinécdoques, rima, etc. ¿Cómo se supera en escena esta distancia expresiva entre el habla de los personajes barrocos y la del espectador?

JLAS: Te tengo que llevar la contraria. El habla de mis personajes es simple tan sólo en apariencia. ¿Por qué, si no, esas obras mías tan elementales e ingenuas, de chicos jóvenes hablando, llevarían treinta años representándose en el mundo entero? Porque detrás del lenguaje de esos chicos diciendo tacos hay unas raíces literarias. Cuando trabajaba en el texto de Bajarse al moro, justamente estaba también haciendo El auto del hombre de Calderón. De ahí que Jaimito diga octosílabos y endecasílabos a montones, pero con lenguaje de la calle. Habla en argot, sí, pero basado en las raíces del idioma, y por eso esta obra es de lectura obligatoria en institutos del mundo entero. Ahora bien, es cierto que el verso y el lenguaje barroco no permiten una comunicación instantánea y adensan el mensaje. Pero el espectador de teatro clásico se “autoprograma” antes de ver una obra, si no, no lo aguantaría. La gente que va al teatro clásico tiene una paciencia de santo, porque está media hora sin entender una sola palabra y no pasa nada. Se trata de un público muy bueno que ha decidido pagar y dedicar su tiempo a algo que le eduque y le proporcione una riqueza

174 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 cultural; luego también se divierte, pero una vez que ha tomado conscientemente esa actitud paciente ante el clásico. Creer en un adanismo según el cual es posible meter en la ópera a cualquiera que va por la calle y que disfrute y valore estéticamente el espectáculo, es una soplapollez. Si metes en la ópera al que está tomándose algo en un bar, se duerme a los dos minutos sin entender nada de lo que se está cantando. Para disfrutar del teatro clásico y tratar de entenderlo, se precisa de una actitud escogida voluntariamente por el espectador.

PM: ¿Ir a ver teatro clásico se ha asimilado a una delicatessen para gustos exquisitos, como sostiene Enrique García Santo-Tomás en su libro sobre la recepción de Lope, un hábito para la gente que desea darse un baño de brillo social o adquirir cierto prestigio de élite?

JLAS: Ojalá la gente, para presumir de pertenencia a un determinado grupo social, fuera a ver teatro clásico, a visitar los museos y a escuchar los conciertos. He visto presumir en el palco del Bernabéu o en una recepción política en el Palax, pero en el teatro clásico la gente va a los estrenos vestida normal y se trata de personas humildes, muchos de ellos estudiantes. En la ópera es posible que, el día del estreno de los grandes montajes en el Real, la gente busque aparentar estatus porque la entrada cuesta mucho dinero. O tal vez en alguna

Mascarell 175 corrida de toros cara. Pero un espectáculo que cuesta 15 euros no da estatus.

PM: ¿Qué montajes de la trayectoria de la CNTC considera fundamentales?

JLAS: Ninguno. En general, me quedo con la continuidad de la CNTC. He visto muchísimos montajes y no recuerdo ningún montaje que haya marcado la pauta o haya cambiado la historia del teatro español. Otra cosa es la tendencia humana al “cualquier tiempo pasado fue mejor”. Los montajes de Marsillach fueron criticados hasta la muerte en su momento. Y la realidad es que algunos estaban bien y otros menos, como ocurrió en las etapas del resto de directores.

PM: Y, dentro de su época como director, ¿cuál sería el “montaje estrella” con el que firmaría su etapa?

JLAS: No voy a decantarme por ninguno. En mi etapa, dirigiera yo u otro, era consciente de que algunos espectáculos iban a salir mejor y otros peor. Por ejemplo, La serrana de la Vera, que es una obra muy bonita pero con grandes dificultades para la escena. En general, todos los montajes de mi época tuvieron una dignidad y un buen acabado. Simplemente. A lo largo de mi vida he visto algunos montajes que me han impresionado, pero ninguno era de teatro clásico. El teatro, para que te

176 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 impacte de verdad, te tiene que sorprender, y yo me sé de memoria las obras clásicas. Ni en mi etapa en la CNTC ni en la del resto de directores he visto un montaje que me haya maravillado, pero tampoco me ha horrorizado ninguno. Todos se ubican en un término medio.

PM: ¿Qué tres obras del teatro clásico español están más preparadas para pasar al canon escénico del siglo XXI?

JLAS: Las mejores, que son La vida es sueño, El alcalde de Zalamea y El retablo de las maravillas.

PM: Lope y Calderón ganan por goleada al resto de dramaturgos clásicos en cuanto al número de puestas en escena realizadas por la CNTC, ¿es porque son los mejores poetas, porque los tenemos mejor estudiados, porque son nombres conocidos por el gran público o porque se ha creado una tendencia difícil de romper?

JLAS: Porque son los mejores con mucha diferencia del resto. No en todas sus obras, pero cada uno tiene diez o doce impresionantes. En total, contamos con veinticinco obras de primera categoría que funcionan siempre y con las que la gente se lo pasa bomba. No ocurre lo mismo con los demás dramaturgos clásicos.

Mascarell 177 PM: Amorós quiso ampliar el sentido del adjetivo “clásico” para que abarcase el repertorio teatral español desde la Edad Media al siglo XX, sin embargo, en su etapa (igual que en el resto de etapas y siguiendo la pauta inicial de Marsillach), excepto los cinco Tenorios de Zorrilla, el resto de montajes lo fueron de textos barroco. ¿Por qué esa preeminencia del siglo XVII en los escenarios de la CNTC?

JLAS: Todo el que llega a la CNTC, al principio, anuncia cosas de este estilo. Pero no hace ninguna falta ampliar nada. La gente que llega a Madrid quiere ver los grandes títulos de los grandes autores. Y es razonable. Lo mejor es lo mejor. El siglo XVIII no tiene el menor interés y el Renacimiento es anecdótico. Y la CNTC está hecha para el mejor teatro clásico.

PM: ¿Qué obra no ha montado todavía la CNTC y cree que debería montar?

JLAS: Las buenas se han montado todas. Yo monté Peribáñez porque no se había atrevido nadie con ella. En general, el teatro rural da un poco de miedo a los directores porque parece como antiguo, como de pueblo. Pero quizá habría que atreverse con El mejor alcalde, el rey.

PM: ¿Cuál no debería haber montado nunca?

178 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 JLAS: Si algunas obras no han salido bien a lo largo de la trayectoria de la CNTC, ha sido porque los textos, por muy del Siglo de Oro que fueran, no valían la pena. Todo el mundo dice: “Hay que recuperar textos de fuera del canon”. Bien, se recuperan porque esa es una de las tareas de la CNTC. Pero son unas obras infumables que se montan para luego regresar al cajón durante doscientos años más.

PM: La CNTC ha recorrido más de 25 años en permanente evolución. ¿Cuáles son los principales retos que afronta la CNTC durante los próximos 25 años?

JLAS: Uno, el local. Hay que llevar a la CNTC a un espacio en condiciones y con poderío, como los Teatros del Canal. El Teatro de la Comedia es el sitio menos indicado para la Compañía y volver allí le va a pasar factura. Dos, ser cada día más rigurosos con los clásicos y abandonar los caprichos personales. Y tres, la permanencia, es decir, conseguir que la CNTC siga en activo mucho tiempo.

PM: Usted ha afirmado: “Nuestro patrimonio teatral conforma una de las señas de identidad más significativas de la comunidad en que vivimos. Representar en la actualidad a los clásicos es defender las corrientes humanísticas y los mejores valores de la lengua y la historia”. ¿Es rentable para

Mascarell 179 una institución pública la defensa de estos ideales en un momento histórico en el que las Humanidades se ven relegadas al último rincón y los valores asociados a ellas no significan nada para la gran mayoría de la sociedad?

JLAS: Precisamente por el momento histórico en el que vivimos deben potenciarse más y mejor los clásicos. Cuando la sociedad se confunde en medio de la marea informativa y el relativismo, se debe recurrir a los clásicos, esos poderosos símbolos que pueden con todo. Lope o Calderón deben ser para nuestra sociedad lo que las pirámides para Egipto. La vida es sueño o Peribáñez son nuestras pirámides y cualquier visitante merece verlas. La cartelera teatral debe ofrecer permanentemente lo más significativo de nuestra cultura, porque así se crea afición. Además, el teatro clásico sólo será rentable si se apuesta por los grandes títulos. Entiendo que los eruditos quieran recuperar obras menores, pero en el ámbito universitario, no en montajes millonarios que acaban alejando a los espectadores. Por eso es lógico que se reponga La vida es sueño, porque en Londres cualquier visitante puede ver siempre un Hamlet.

LA ESPAÑOLA INGLESA SUBE A LAS TABLAS EN ALMAGRO: ENTREVISTA CON MIGUEL CUBERO, ACTOR Y DIRECTOR DE TEATRO

ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Sarah Lawrence College

“Esta manera cervantina de ver el mundo impregna tanto el tratamiento de la nueva versión teatral, así como el modo y código de interpretación, la plástica y la música del espectáculo.” —Miguel Cubero, programa de mano de La española inglesa

Julio 2013

En el IV Centenario de la publicación de las Novelas ejemplares (1613) de Miguel de Cervantes, Germanía de Teatro ha estrenado en el Festival de Almagro del 2013, y dentro de la categoría de “Almagro off”, una innovadora puesta en escena de

180

Fernández 181 “La española inglesa”. Entre las distintas Novelas ejemplares que se han llevado a los escenarios españoles desde la época del Teatro Universitario Español (TEU) en la década de los cuarenta, esta es la segunda vez que “La española inglesa” sube a las tablas. En 1990, el Taller de Teatro La Barja, dirigido por Carlos di Paola, estrenó un primer montaje en el Real Coliseo Carlos III de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, basado en la dramatización de trece escenas de la novela de Cervantes. Esta vez, Cubero, quien cuenta con una larga carrera profesional como actor del Teatro de la Abadía, de la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico y de Televisión Española, se enfrenta con el reto de transformar la totalidad del tejido novelesco de “La española inglesa” en materia puramente dramática. El director logra hacer que la compleja dimensión bizantina del relato tome pleno cuerpo en los escenarios a través de un montaje que materializa la textura maravillosa y el imaginario de la novela Cervantina. Miguel Cubero tuvo la amabilidad de concederme esta entrevista en julio del 2013. En esta conversación, el director reflexiona sobre el proceso creativo a lo largo de los doce meses que duró el taller de exploración y el trabajo de ensayos, el cual culminó el 17 de julio del 2013 con el estreno de La española inglesa en el teatro de la Veleta de Almagro.¹

182 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 EF: ¿De toda la colección de Novelas ejemplares qué es lo que más le atrajo de “La española inglesa”?

MC: Tengo que reconocer que se me hace ahora muy difícil acudir a la primera sensación al leer la novela, pues el trabajo teatral que hemos realizado posteriormente pesa demasiado a la hora de valorarla después de casi dos años de vivir intensamente todo el proceso. Pero si tengo que volver al momento en que me cautivó, y como decimos los españoles, me cogió un pellizco, diría que me mantuvo en un estado de viaje continuo, viaje interior de los personajes y viaje a través de geografías y épocas con un gran poder de evocación y sorprendente atractivo. La decisión de iniciar un proceso creativo para realizar su representación, vino enseguida, y el deseo de interpretar vivamente sobre las tablas los sucesos, los personajes y las atmósferas de la novela fue lo que más me atrajo para elegirla. Claramente produjo en mí un potente deseo por representarla y hacer de ella una pieza teatral. La novela guarda dentro el alma de Cervantes y su visión del hombre y la vida que le toca recorrer, y sabemos que en esta novela hay muchísimas alusiones a su propia biografía. Siempre me ha fascinado lo que transmite Cervantes de su propia personalidad en sus obras, esa visión tan humana y estoica del comportamiento humano, esa media sonrisa ante las contradicciones

Fernández 183 del mundo, la delicadeza al pintar sus personajes o el valor del esfuerzo y honradez sin pedir nada a cambio. “La española inglesa” tiene todos los componentes para establecer sobre ella todo un plan clarísimo de guión casi cinematográfico. Unos personajes bien definidos en cuanto al equilibrio de roles, lugares contrastados, atractivos y variados, grandes temas arquetípicos, sorpresas continúas que hacen avanzar la historia produciendo un continuo interés en el lector. Y desde luego, un principio y un final bellamente trazados. Es una maravillosa historia capaz de trasladarte como en una montaña rusa por infinitos carriles de emoción, fantasía y entretenimiento.

EF: ¿Qué cree que aporta el medio teatral a esta novela cervantina?

MC: Aunque el poder de la imaginación es incombustible, y esto es patente al ponerse a leer una novela, el arte del teatro, por medio de la acción, es capaz de poner en vida lo que habita solamente en el imaginario del espectador. El placer artístico es absoluto cuando se pueden oír las voces de los personajes, ver, sentir su energía, asistir al choque verídico de los conflictos entre ellos: y el espectador puede volver a disparar su imaginación con la presencia viva de los hechos inventados por el poeta. También existe un nuevo diálogo entre lo que emana de la novela o el libreto y lo que resulta

184 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 del proceso de crear una representación. Participar de un resultado teatral siempre provoca un continuo ir y venir entre lo que pasa en el tablado y lo que voy procesando en la imaginación. Es un nuevo conocimiento que se adquiere en el momento de la representación teatral.

Fig 1. La española inglesa, dirigida por Miguel Cubero. Germanía de teatro. Almagro, 2013. Fotógrafo: Eduardo García. Foto cortesía de Miguel Cubero.

EF: ¿Cuáles fueron los retos artísticos más significativos a la hora de llevar esta novela a la escena?

MC: Dada la escasez económica con la que contábamos a la hora de producir este espectáculo, teníamos claro que debíamos agudizar nuestro sentido artístico y creativo. Esto supuso, no un freno, sino una gran posibilidad para desarrollar muchas propuestas sobre vestuario, caracterización de los personajes y creación de los espacios. Luego, el reto quedó en ser capaces de fijar un montaje donde la autenticidad y compromiso de nuestros artistas quedará patente y libre, lleno de riqueza y aportaciones individuales puestas al servicio de la

Fernández 185 historia y el esquema de espectáculo trazado. Para mí personalmente, uno de los mayores retos fue transmitir e interpretar los numerosos cambios, tanto de los lugares físicos como mentales de los personajes. Mantener ese estado maravilloso de continua transformación.

EF: ¿Cuál fue el aspecto que más exploraron como grupo?

MC: La capacidad de poder transformarse. Transformarse uno mismo y ser capaz junto al resto del elenco de poder transformar el lugar que habita en el escenario. Esa es la magia del teatro. Soy un fanático de la técnica de interpretación que Michael Chekhov desarrolló. Hemos trabajado esta técnica en todos los sentidos, creando las atmósferas, los personajes, haciendo un análisis de los arquetipos que fluyen por debajo de las acciones y dándole mucha importancia al trabajo del cuerpo para poder interpretar todos estos conceptos que emanan de la obra. Otro aspecto fundamental y de importancia plástica es el lenguaje de Cervantes. El sonido que ha alimentado tanto nuestra forma de expresarnos como la cultura misma de la que venimos. Un sonido hermoso y lleno de palabras elegidas con la maestría de un verdadero forjador del idioma español. Hay que trabajar duro para poder decir estos textos que han de sonar fluidamente, como el habla llana, pero a la vez dejando que las imágenes,

186 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 su forma y su inteligencia no queden despreciadas por efecto de una interpretación sin atención y meramente emocional.

EF: Uno de los aspectos que me sorprendió gratamente al ver el montaje fue la manera en la que entretejió el elemento cómico a lo largo de la trama. Al tratarse de una trama tan densa, creo que fue un acierto insertar esos momentos de alivio cómico que aligeraban la carga emocional de algunas escenas. ¿Fue algo que tuvo claro desde un principio o fue tomando forma a lo largo del proceso de exploración con los actores durante los ensayos?

MC: El humor en Cervantes nunca es estentóreo. Su fineza y ternura viene de una amable visión del carácter humano. Eso no quita que los personajes sean a veces sorprendentes, lo que nos dio la posibilidad de trabajar la comicidad y el divertimento desde el juego. Hemos querido dejar palpitar la vena cervantina junto a nuestra propia manera de hacer teatro, llena de contraste y diversión creativa. Juanma Rodríguez, interpreta a Arnesto mediante la técnica del clown y el bufón grotesco, que es una técnica específica en su pálpito creativo y su código. Eso facilitaba un efecto compositivo muy interesante y divertido al confrontarlo con la figura de Ricaredo, interpretado por Sergio Mariottini que mantiene el rol de joven virtuoso renacentista. El trabajo de los actores ha sido fundamental. La recreación de las escenas y

Fernández 187 elaboración de los personajes es un enorme trabajo de generosidad y de capacidad de juego necesario para que el público disfrute con el acto teatral. Todos los actores han interpretado sus personajes con mucho rigor y a la vez con una gran dosis de diversión y libertad creativa. Una vez que se pasa del estudio y análisis del texto, la labor del actor es la de jugar y desarrollar un gran sentido de composición artística. El equilibrio entre lo cómico y puramente dramático es un carácter muy barroco, un elemento constante en el teatro clásico español y en nuestra propia cultura.

EF: Otro de los grandes aciertos de su puesta en escena fue, en mi opinión, la estética de la escenografía. Las formas, los materiales y las texturas logran recrear ese mundo cambiante y en constante movimiento. ¿Podría explicarme de dónde partió para crear un diseño escenográfico tan minimalista y artesanal pero a la vez tan evocador?

MC: El carácter artesanal era un concepto claro desde el principio, pero no su uso. La presencia de materiales naturales, y de formas muy básicas, nos proporcionaba muchas combinaciones donde establecer momentos y lugares de modo parecido a como lo hacen los niños cuando cogen una caja de cartón o un trozo de madera y hacen con ello todo un universo lleno de magia y vivencias. El mundo de los barcos que van o vienen está plasmado en las sencillas velas que a veces se

188 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 convierten en los paños de los muros de una casa o el palacio. La tarima que evoca una galera, también es una casa de España, de Londres o el trono de la Reina de Inglaterra. Todo está a la vista, no hay truco ni engaño hasta el momento mismo de entrar en escena. El puro juego hace posible que un espacio que parece una almoneda llena de cacharros se convierta en lo que se propongan un puñado de actores y músicos con una historia que contar. Quise hacer un espacio que fuera un pequeño juguete de madera, concentrando los espacios, trayendo el mar, el palacio, los interiores y ponerlos cerca de la tarima que es un remedo del tablado del corral de comedias. Nuestra escenografía es un lugar donde constantemente se está pasando el umbral, que es la frontera entre la actuación y la no actuación, entre diferentes mundos imaginarios, la propia línea donde el actor se transforma, y eso, todo, lo hacemos a vista del público, al igual que los cambios de vestuario para entrar en uno u otro personaje.

Fernández 189

Fig 2. La española inglesa, dirigida por Miguel Cubero. Germanía de teatro. Almagro, 2013. Fotógrafo: Eduardo García. Foto cortesía de Miguel Cubero.

EF: Al igual que la escenografía, el vestuario llama la atención por su creatividad y evocación. Claramente está basado en los patrones clásicos de lo que podría ser un vestuario naturalista del Renacimiento pero con un giro innovador. No sé si estoy en lo cierto, pero el vestuario, para mí, no era uno de “quita y pon” sino que realmente “pertenecía” a los personajes y reflejaba el alma y la sensibilidad de cada uno de ellos. ¿Fue esa su intención a la hora de diseñarlo?

MC: El origen de mi decisión para el vestuario parte de los retratos del fotógrafo holandés Hendrik Kerstens, hechos en su mayoría a su propia hija en los años 90. Son evocaciones del retrato flamenco del siglo XVII, a la vez que incluyen una enorme

190 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 carga emocional y psicológica de los personajes. Refleja muy bien el alma y sensibilidad de cada uno de los actores. El vestuario se creó sobre el cuerpo directo de los actores, y no en un día, sino en muchos, cambiando de opinión, mirando, fotografiando, variando, mejorando—esa es la razón de que suceda lo que preguntas. No se hizo a través de figurines previos, fue por auténtica comprensión del cuerpo de los actores, sin perder de vista el objetivo.

Fig 3. La española inglesa, dirigida por Miguel Cubero. Germanía de teatro. Almagro, 2013. Fotógrafo: Eduardo García. Foto cortesía de Miguel Cubero.

EF: Después de ver su montaje de Los sueños de mi prima Aurelia de Federico García Lorca en el Teatro de la Abadía, me parece que la música juega un papel clave en su misión artística como director.

Fernández 191 ¿Qué ha querido aportar al espectador con la música en directo del arpa española, del clave y de las canciones interpretadas por los actores?

MC: Conocí a Sara Águeda trabajando juntos en la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. Ella participó en numerosos montajes tocando repertorio del XVI y XVII español y europeo, es una de las mejores arpistas y especialistas en música antigua de España, a pesar de su juventud. Tiene una sensibilidad y eficacia enorme para el trabajo teatral y somos muy cómplices. Ella, junto a Teresa García, al clave (que ya participó en mi montaje de Los sueños de mi prima Aurelia al piano) han elaborado el programa musical de la obra. También ha participado con otro tipo de material Isa Suárez, compañera española afincada en Londres. Isa creó la música que utilizamos grabada y que tiene que ver con ciertas atmósferas o momentos más contemporáneos. También compuso un tema específico de La española inglesa para arpa, que interpreta en directo Sara Águeda en un momento del montaje. La música en directo es una parte importante para el teatro. En el teatro del siglo de Oro siempre estaba presente vocal e instrumentalmente. Estos instrumentos que utilizamos nos traen el sonido directo de siglos pasados. Es un verdadero lujo tenerlos durante el espectáculo. Trabajamos repertorio español e inglés del siglo XVI y XVII

192 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 para marcar unas zonas sensoriales de uno y otro lado de la historia. La utilización de la música en directo, aparte de darle espectacularidad al montaje, funciona como un personaje más, un generador de atmósferas y un ingrediente de la plástica teatral indispensable en mi trabajo como director. Hacemos un tipo de teatro que se enmarca en la tradición del teatro del arte y todas estas disciplinas se incluyen en nuestro trabajo para conseguir esa totalidad artística a la que aspiramos y en la que creemos.

EF: De todas las novelas ejemplares, “La española inglesa” resulta para mí una de las más complejas de dramatizar al ser un relato que se debate entre el género bizantino y el caballeresco y donde abunda la descripción sobre el diálogo. No obstante, el guión dramático de María Ayuso fluye con una naturalidad que llega incluso a revitalizar el relato cervantino en las tablas. ¿Le dio alguna pauta a seguir? ¿qué buscaron resaltar usted y María Ayuso con respecto al guión?

MC: Siempre que dirijo una obra, utilizo el patrón del guión cinematográfico standard que consta de quince partes, en el que encajo el texto a montar. Para esta ocasión hice lo mismo con la novela, y esta encajaba perfectamente. La verdad es que cualquier obra de arte Literaria, y esta lo es, suele cuadrar en este tipo de marco, pues se basa en el sentido de percepción occidental arquetípico.

Fernández 193 Después de dividir la novela de Cervantes en sus partes, María Ayuso creó el libreto definitivo, manteniendo muchos de los diálogos originales de Cervantes y creando otros nuevos, situaciones y momentos originales sin perder de vista el sentido del argumento, su estilo literario y la forma del lenguaje propia de Cervantes. María ha aportado un peso mayor en el mundo particular de Isabela, y ha desarrollado un aspecto interesantísimo sobre “los encuentros”, que en la novela son continuos, junto a las separaciones correspondientes de los protagonistas y demás personajes. Creo que ella ha realizado un impecable trabajo, dejando que los personajes sean mucho más creíbles, dotándoles de momentos originales y puntos de vista frescos, divertidos y muy humanos. En el libreto se juntan la visión de Cervantes y la nuestra, desde lo contemporáneo, provocando un diálogo entre ambos mundos en ciertos momentos del montaje que dan pie a una nueva recreación.

EF: ¿Qué le ha aportado como director y como profesional del teatro clásico esta experiencia cervantina?

MC: Que este tipo de trabajo que realizamos es imposible sin un sentido de “elenco”. Quiero decir elenco y no compañía. Para mí, este concepto es más importante y necesario, ya que alude a la actitud y compromiso en el trabajo del teatro. Un trabajo basado en el respeto al autor, al manejo del

194 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 cuerpo y la palabra, y un compromiso personal en lo creativo enorme. En este elenco no encontrará ninguna jerarquía, ningún divismo, sólo trabajo común y respeto por el trabajo del otro. En cuanto a la experiencia cervantina, es la tercera vez que me enfrento a este autor. Anteriormente, participé como actor en un hermoso montaje de Los entremeses en el Teatro de la Abadía de Madrid, donde me enamoré definitivamente del mundo cervantino. Después actué haciendo el Cardenio de La entretenida en la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, una obra ingratamente valorada por la crítica pero de una enorme complejidad y estética única y original en el tratamiento del amor. Ahora he disfrutado mucho navegando en La española inglesa, pudiendo inventar y disfrutar con mis compañeros todo este mundo tan cercano a la propia vida de Cervantes. Saborear sus textos y aprender de su filosofía de vida es uno de los mayores placeres que se pueden tener. Cervantes siempre te pone un espejo donde mirarte a fondo, un espejo en el que el paso del tiempo va dejando ciertos espectros detrás de ti que son los estadios por los que el hombre va pasando a lo largo de la vida. Estos espectros, no hay porqué volver a mirarlos de frente o volver a ellos para rescatarlos, pero sí se pueden o deben mirar con distancia, con ternura, con humor desde el plano de la realidad más inmediata que te toca vivir. Creo que él hacía algo de esto con su propia vida, o por lo menos a mi me gusta imaginármelo así.

Fernández 195 NOTES

¹ Quisiera agradecer a todo el equipo de Germanía de Teatro (Miguel Cubero, María Ayuso, Álvaro Martínez, Juanma Rodríguez, Camila Viyuela, Sergio Mariottini, Ione Irazabal, Sara águeda, Teresa García, Eduardo García e Isa Suárez) por su generoso acogimiento desde el primer momento y por toda la generosidad, tiempo, paciencia e infinita inspiración que me han brindado para poder estudiar su trabajo.

LOPE’S FUENTEOVEJUNA THROUGH THE EYES OF A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DIRECTOR: A CONVERSATION WITH LISA ABBOT

MICHAEL J. MCGRATH Georgia Southern University

August 2012

Photo by Rebecca Becker

The insight I gain from reading the interviews that appear in Comedia Performance informs and shapes my teaching of Spanish Golden Age drama. Several years ago, I was able to

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McGrath 197 interview Spanish director Ana Zamora (Segovia, Spain) for Comedia Performance (2.1 (2005)), and I was hopeful that I would have the opportunity to interview another director. When Lisa Abbott, who is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Georgia Southern University (Statesboro, GA), informed me that she would be directing a student production of Lope de Vega’s masterpiece Fuenteovejuna in the spring of 2012, I began to think about the questions I would ask Lisa if she agreed to the interview. Fortunately, she did, and in this interview she addresses several aspects of the production, including staging, costumes, and interpretative and performative challenges. Lisa Abbott earned an M.F.A. degree in directing from the University of Portland with a thesis titled “Two Noble Kinsmen: A Directorial Approach to the Tale of Courtly Love.” Before Lisa arrived to Georgia Southern University in 2008, she taught at the University of Portland and Clark College in Vancouver, WA. Lisa is the recipient of several Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Faculty Directing awards for plays that she has directed at Georgia Southern University, including Fuenteovejuna (2012), Big Love (2011), The Tempest (2011), The Listener (2010), The Curate Shakespeare As You Like It (2010), and On Dragonfly Wings (2009). Recently, she directed a community theater production of The Wizard of Oz for Statesboro’s Averitt Center of the Arts. Lisa is a director who welcomes new challenges, such as

198 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 working with new scripts or developing new writers. Toward this end, for example, she participates in the Shakespeare in Prison program. As a faculty member of Georgia Southern University, she teaches a wide variety of classes, including Theatre History, Movement for the Actor, Acting Styles-Audition, Playwriting, Fundamentals of Acting, and Rehearsal and Performance. I interviewed Lisa Abbott in her office on Georgia Southern University’s campus in August of 2012.

MM: Why did you choose to direct Fuenteovejuna?

LA: Our process for selecting shows is a discussion amongst the faculty. We look at what genres we covered and what eras we covered so that we are getting good rounding and variety, and the discussion came up that we hadn’t done anything from Spanish theater. Different titles were thrown out, and Fuente was one of them. I sat down and read it, fell in love with it, and later discovered that a friend of mine had done a translation of it some five years ago. It was also the same time as the Arab Spring, so it seemed like the right time and the right place.

MM: In addition to Fuenteovejuna, did you consider any other Spanish plays from the same time period?

McGrath 199 LA: When I teach theater history and we cover Spain, I have my students read The Constant Prince. So, I looked at that play. I also looked at non-Golden Age plays, like Blood Wedding, and some others, because we (the faculty) did say Spanish theater.

MM: Why did you choose the translation you chose?

LA: One reason is very personal. One of the translators (William Sam Gregory) is a good, personal friend, and a playwright whose work I have directed before. I also know Daniel, the other translator. So, I knew both of the men who worked on it. I also have a relationship with the theater company in Portland (Teatro Milagro) that had the NEA grant through which they did this adaptation. It is more a straight translation than an adaptation. So, personal reasons, but the flip side of that is I read probably three or four different translations, and I felt that Sam and Daniel captured the play in a way that communicated to a modern audience. They still kept the verse and the imagery, but it did not feel like it would go over the heads of a college audience.

MM: As you were reading the play for the first time, did you have any specific thoughts about the characterization, the dialogue, or the staging?

200 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 LA: When I do a first read of any script, I am real visual, and I work really visually. So, in my first read, something is going to come up in my head. As I was reading this play, Picasso’s painting Guernica popped into my head, and I couldn’t get away from it. That would be the strong visual element of it, what came out for me. One of my biases against the cloak-and-sword plays is the inherent sexism to them, and Lope has this incredibly strong female character in this play. Then, Isabel becomes this incredibly strong female voice. Character-wise, I was intrigued by the fact that the women in the play had this strength and power and moral conviction, and for that period, it is hard sometimes to find that. Shakespeare pulls it off in many of his plays, but they are writing in a time period that is inherently sexist. Those two characters became a huge draw, because of the strength of the women.

MM: How was directing Fuenteovejuna different from previous plays you had directed?

LA: Getting the students to get their heads around the verse was a challenge. Young actors want to play the rhythm, and they want to play the rhyme, which doesn’t always work. Sometimes it just falls naturally, sometimes, it’s like, “Don’t pay attention to the fact that’s the end of the line, look for the punctuation.” So, it’s very similar to directing Shakespeare, although you are not stuck with iambic pentameter when you do Lope. We spent an

McGrath 201 extraordinary amount of time just on, “What are you saying?” We did much more table work for what is normal for most of the shows I do.

MM: How did you prepare the actors and actresses to portray characters from seventeenth-century Spain?

LA: Well, we had you come in and talk to us. It helped them put the frame work around the play. Because Fuenteovejuna is based on an actual occurrence, many of the actors, like the one who played the Comendador, researched his character and found information about who that person was. The actor and actress who played Ferdinand and Isabel researched who they were. I think there were four members of the cast who were either second majors in Spanish or minors, so they brought a lot of information about cultural attitudes. Since we put the play in the 1930s, we spent a lot of time talking about what role fascism was playing in Spain and acknowledged the fact that history did not play out that the bad guys (i.e. the villagers’ murder of the Comendador) lose. So, we talked about what that meant.

MM: Would you talk about the physical disposition of the stage?

LA: One of the things I gave to my scenic designer was that I wanted the audience layout to be a

202 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 reflection of a traditional Spanish theater layout, where you have a three-quarter thrust, no entrances through the audience; although, we cheated a bit and added one. So, the audience was right there on top of the action, which reflected back to the time period. Then, I asked for a lot of levels, because I didn’t want the King and Queen to ever touch the ground. I wanted to show where people lived in this world through physical staging so that we could really look at that class break down. I ended up with different levels, which created a challenge: How do I get them up there? It also created really interesting pictures. It helped in the physical action when we show the class stratification. I don’t expect my audience to walk away, saying “Did you notice how…?” They experience it so they internalize it; they feel it, even if they do not articulate it. Then, I do have a few people in the audience who articulate: “I noticed you did this…

The villagers of Fuenteovejuna after the death of the Comendador (Photo by Patricia Quilichini)

McGrath 203 MM: What did you do to address the challenges presented by staging a play from seventeenth- century Spain for a twenty-first century audience in the United States?

LA: We didn’t have to change any language because Sam and Daniel’s language was spot on and contemporary. I think the main thing we did was moving the play forward into the 1930s. While many of our students may not be able to tell what a black shirt is, they know when they see that uniform, it represents a fascist soldier. They may not know why, they may not be able to articulate to you why these guys are bad, but they understand it. If we were doing it totally period, how do you make people understand that the Knights of Calatrava, who have crosses on their chests, are the bad guys? There is distinction in clothing from that period that, unless you are an historian in clothing, you don’t get it. So, it played out really well to move it into the 1930s. It also gave the opportunity to take advantage of Picasso’s painting. It allowed the audience to make that connection with something they understood to be a tyrannical regime and the action of standing up for your rights, the pain of that.

MM: Would you explain the decision to have the Comendador’s head appear on a pole in the scene following his murder?

204 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014

Brock Vickers, who portrayed the Comendador, with the Comendador’s head (Photo by Patricia Quilichini)

LA: Visually, you have to have the head, because you don’t see any of the actual violence. What they do to the Comendador and to his men, the words tell you what they do, but you can’t really see it. So, we decided to go for the head. Part of it is that the technical director, who is also my husband, is a special effects artist. Obviously, it became a learning process, too. When we cast the actor’s head, they did that as part of the Make-Up class. So, Sean (Sean Devine) showed them how to do a casting. The poor actor has to sit there and get his head wrapped. Then, you cut off the wrapping and make a mold from that. Sean got a really good mold, and then one of our students, who is an

McGrath 205 extraordinarily talented painter, painted it. I have pictures of the actor next to the head, and people were shocked at how much resemblance there was. Then, glued the hair and added the blood. It was one of the takeaways from the show. It was so funny because I think that every press photo went out, but the one they chose was the one with the head in it.

MM: Would you talk about the staging of the torture scenes? Did the staging contribute to the dramatic impact of these scenes?

LA: It’s funny because we restaged those about six times until we finally landed with what we did. So, what we did was, Laurencia and Frondoso are on the stage, and, in essence, they are narrating, they are reacting to what they are hearing. So, it is not written for the audience to see the people being tortured. We had talked at one point about having the torture playing out behind a scrim so that you would see just a silhouette of it. That did not really work with the layout of the set. Another time we talked about having the torture scenes on different parts of the stage, but it felt like too much. So, we had two panels that had two of the more painful images from the Guernica painting. Those were lit up from behind. During the torture scenes, the actors were literally under the seats of the audience. They crawled under and were hiding beneath the audience risers. When the actors were screaming, the audience, especially

206 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 the audience right above, was really uncomfortable. I think that particular scene is a challenge because, if we were to do a modern-day take on the play, they (the villagers) rise up against the Comendador and it’s all done. It’s not all done, because now they have to pay the price. Getting the audience to understand now the King and Queen will torture them; it’s a different way of being able to understand class structure. Even though the Comendador was a traitor to the King and Queen, they are going to torture the peasants because they are peasants. So, we really had to make it clear what they were saying when they said, “Fuenteovejuna did it!” So, having the two lovers on stage, reacting to the screams, and then making the screams such a visceral part of the audience’s experience, I think it made the point really clearly. Then, we understand why they made the stand they had to make and also the rules we think apply don’t apply.

MM: I thought the staging of the torture scenes was brilliant. I think whenever a person senses that something is happening behind him or her, and especially an action that involves painful screams like the torture scenes, the person must wonder about his or her own safety and whether there is danger nearby.

LA: We spent time in rehearsal, making the actors understand they had to sell that. If they were in any way backing away from the screams, they lose the

McGrath 207 audience. When an audience feels that uncomfortable, they laugh. It was interesting watching the audiences for Fuenteovejuna, no one laughed. They didn’t understand, they didn’t know it was coming, and then all of a sudden… The looks on faces, they were shocked, they didn’t understand, then you saw them figure it out.

MM: Were there any particular challenges that directing a play by Lope presented to you as a director?

LA: I think the biggest challenge is that Fuenteovejuna does not end like a modern play would end. The fact that we have to go through the journey through the torture, and then the villagers have to appear before the King and Queen and get justice from them, that speaks to a class structure and a world view that modern audiences are not familiar with. It’s funny, because a couple of people said they thought the King and Queen should wipe out the village, and they would’ve been okay with that. It would show the true injustice to the villagers. It has a happy ending, but not in the way we have expected a story like this to end. So, that became the challenge: How do I get the audience to stay with me after the villagers kill the Comendador? I think we succeeded. How? I am not totally sure. I think a big part had to do with the cast made that commitment to the characters and to

208 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 taking the story through to the end. It’s definitely a challenge.

MM: Would you like to direct another play from Spain’s Golden Age?

LA: Yes, but don’t ask me which one at this point in time. We had a ball with it. As a director, I fall in and out of love with different playwrights and different time periods. So, I really, really enjoyed doing Fuenteovejuna. I rediscovered some things. I think the plays of this period present some real challenges. They are not as universal as Shakespeare is in terms of carrying past time period. Going back to what I originally said about the women in the play, that for me becomes one of the biggest challenges to face. On the other hand, I love doing plays with sword fighting.

MM: Looking back on directing Fuenteovejuna five or ten years from now, what might stand out to you from this experience?

LA: I think it comes down to the actors. This cast created a really strong ensemble, which in this kind of play is kind of tricky because you have three distinct groups, and yet they had their group in which their character existed in. The cast as a whole was one of the strongest ensembles I’ve worked with and everyone made a full commitment to their character and what part of the story they were

McGrath 209 telling. I think all of them really locked on to the idea that the village as a whole is the protagonist.

MM: Did Lope teach you anything about drama?

LA: I knew on a theoretical level that he cements the three-act form, but working with it cemented for me how it works and why it works. I get why he did it this way, and I get why people stole it from him. I never had to deal with rhyming couplets before, because I haven’t had the chance to direct Molière yet. The rhyming couplets weren’t as strong in this piece as you get when you have a translation of Molière, but enough so that helping the actors through how to use that language structure effectively made me exercise some directing muscles I haven’t had to rely on for a while.

MM: Besides the language, were there any other notable challenges to the actors and actresses?

LA: With student actors, helping them ground themselves into the reality of the character, especially when you are using a language that is heightened, could be a big part of it. We never actually see the violence take place. There are a couple of places where the Comendador roughs Laurencia up, we don’t see the tortures, we don’t see the rape, we don’t see even when the rebels attack the Comendador and his men, so the

210 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 implication of the violence is playing the moment before the violence. Getting the actors and actresses to that point, if the scene continued, this is what would happen. So the audience can fill in the blank, the actors have to learn how to play that moment as if they were going forward. That is one of the physical challenges of it. It was a tough set in terms of physical demands: there were two places to get to the secondary level, three places to get to the top level, and twenty-some actors having to come in and get to those levels through two very small places became a challenge. Working in the thrust configuration, getting the actors to work on the perimeters, to face outward, not to worry about turning their back on the audience, those are all challenges with young actors.

MM: Thank you for sharing your knowledge and insight about directing.

LA: Thank you.

Theater Reviews

LA TRAICIÓN EN LA AMISTAD BY MARÍA DE ZAYAS. DIR. MARIO COSTA. PLAZA SANTEO DOMINGO, ALMAGRO. JULY 20, 2013.

MARGARET E. BOYLE Bowdoin College

Against a dramatic visual setting of bright oranges and white, the Chilean theater company La Calderona presented a glitzy adaptation of María de Zayas’ 1630 La traición en la amistad (The Betray- al of Friendship). Zayas’ story of love and decep- tion was set against the backdrop of an elegant hotel in the Italy of the 1960’s. The rivalries between long-time friends turned enemies, Marcia (Sara Pantoja), Fenisa (Macarena Baeza), Laura (Javiera Guillén) and Belisa (Lilian Vásquez), were com- plemented and enhanced by live Big Band music, Technicolor costuming, big hair, group dance numbers and an overall emphasis on the frivolous and decadent. Tensions between characters on-stage were amplified in thought-provoking ways by the superficial class constraints imposed by the new settings.

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212 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 León (Ramón Gutiérrez), for example, was the hotel’s bumbling, spectacle-clad singing bellhop in addition to Liseo’s (Braulio Martínez) lacky. Ac- cording to the director, Mario Costa, the films of Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni inspired the choice for the staging and setting of the production. He hoped these visual references would underline a kind of modern sensibility of alienation and apathy throughout the play. This emphasis on big production is especially provocative given we know so little about the stage history of Zayas’ play, yet perhaps it is an apt reflection of the company’s larger intention to bring lesser-known comedias to light to a broad audience. The company brought two female-authored early modern productions to Almagro for the 2013 festival (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Los empeños de una casa was performed the following evening, July 21). To that end, Andrea Pelegri condensed the roughly 3000 line, three-act comedy to a less than two-hour production. The meter and rhyme of the original text were preserved, as were the major plot lines - the love-triangles, the betrayal and sequences of revenge. In her words, “we have made a series of cuts that eases comprehension of the major plot in- trigues.” Sometimes decisions to make the play more accessible to a modern audience meant taking serious liberties with the original text. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the final scene of the play, where Fenisa discovers little by little that she

Boyle 213 is no longer desired by her various lovers. Costa’s adaptation emphasizes the instability of the female protagonist with a particular focus on her psycholo- gy, as suddenly, with a shaking voice and increasing urgency, she reveals to her friends a hidden gun in her handbag. Tension gradually escalates until she finally removes it from her purse and threatens the men and women who have meddled in her love af- fairs. While many contemporary adaptations of early modern plays have substituted guns for swords, here the weapon feels strange because no weapon, apart from Fenisa’s actions throughout the play, exists in the original version. Yet the ludicrousness of the final scene and its reading of Fenisa as mentally unstable resonate with the audience, who burst out in laughter. Still more changes occur in the conclusion of the play after the marriage scene, where in Za- yas’ original text, León announces that Fenisa is left without a match and humorously offers her to the audience. In Pelegri’s version, Fenisa instead voices these final lines. The play thus concludes on a new humorous note that gives voice – and the last laugh – to the outrageous if unstable heroine. Even more, Fenisa joins hands with her cast mates at the play’s close to dance a Mambo with each of her past lovers, again celebrating the excess and thrill of her character.

CABARET BARROCO: INTERLUDES OF SPAIN’S GOLDEN AGE. ADAPTED BY MAR ZUBIETA AND FRANCISCO ROJAS. DIR. JOSÉ LUIS ARELLANO GARCÍA. THE TI- VOLI THEATER, WASHINGTON D.C. SEP- TEMBER 12 – OCTOBER 6, 2013.

KRISTEN CONNOR University of Virginia

Both traditional and non-traditional, this cabaret features loas, interludes, and dances by some of the most important playwrights of Spain’s Golden Age, including Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Agustín Moreto, Francisco Quevedo and others. What is novel about this production is not using loas and interludes, but rather, creating an entire show that includes nothing else. Unlike traditional staging where songs, dances, and short plays would have been performed between the acts, this show takes out the comedia proper and honors all of these “in-between” performances. However, there was never anything lesser about these side-shows and, indeed, there is nothing lesser in this engaging production. In this cabaret, bawdy humor reigns su-

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Connor 215 preme and audience participation becomes a part of the performance, reflecting through a modern lens how these kinds of shows may have felt to a Golden Age audience. Drawing the audience into the show and making them feel like active participants begins with the entrance of the actors onto the stage. As the lights dim and the deep pulses of a heartbeat are heard, joyful shouts, whistles, and general chaos echo through the theater and the audience is unsure where the actors are. They explode from behind the audience, twirling, dancing and talking to audience members as they make their way down the aisles to the stage. The audience must turn their gaze from the stage and look all around them, collapsing the traditional divide between the fantasy on stage and the reality beyond it. Everyone in the room is now part of the show and submersed in the fantasy world of the theater which makes the audience feel as if they have entered a tavern with their friends who are ready to celebrate and have a good time. This familiar atmosphere is enhanced by the colloquial dialogue between the actors’ kissing, yelling, and the playful insults thrown back and forth that create a general rowdiness on stage. The feeling of being one of the gang continues as actors direct asides to the audience that bring them in on the joke. The audience is referred to as “neighbors” in several of the interludes, including during Los Putos, continuing the feeling of familiar- ity and sympathy for the characters. At the end of

216 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 this particular interlude, when the audience has a moment’s hesitation in their applause, one actor breaks the stage/audience barrier to remind them “This is where you applaud.” The audience loves this quip and laughs as the room rings in applause. What is brilliant about this moment, planned or im- provised, is that it continues to emphasize the lack of distinction between actors and audience, but also between fantasy and reality; it is all one and the same. In El Muerto, Eufrasia y Tronera the actress playing Eufrasia speaks to the audience directly like they are in her home visiting her for the afternoon. She sings to the audience, shushes them, makes fre- quent meaningful nods in their direction, and makes direct eye contact with individuals in the audience, making them not only in on the joke, but a part of the prank. And the actors frequently look out to the audience as if looking for reassurance as they go about setting traps and playing tricks on one another. The staging for many of the interludes, and this one most notably, shifts the stances of the actors from facing and talking to one another, to always facing the audience, or to form a half circle on stage, implying the other half of the circle is made by audience members. The audience becomes included as cast members as a result of the staging. At the end the first Act, a Fiesta is held and actors go out into the audience and select individuals to dance with them. Some of these audience members make it all the way to the stage while oth-

Connor 217 ers dance with the actors in the aisles and in the space between the stage and first row. Actors even bring out wine for the first row and play a trick on one group of audience members, making them think that a tray with wine glasses is full and he is about to spill it all over them, but when he finally trips and pretends to throw the wine on them, they learn he was only bluffing and the glasses were empty the whole time. The barriers between actors and audience members break down further and the tricks are now being played on the audience members! When the music comes to an end, an actor turns to everyone and says “Hey everyone, let’s go downstairs, have a drink, and see you in fifteen.” Lines are blurred between fantasy/reality, stage/audience and Spanish/English. At the beginning of the second Act, the audience becomes even more involved, and truly part of the antics, when one actor literally climbs over audience members and scoots down the aisles trying to get away from another actor with a sword in hand. Eventually, the second actor asks an audience member to hold the sword and while he isn’t looking, the first actor steals it from the audience member. The tides have turned and the actor who has lost his sword gives a look to the guilty audience member as if to say “How could you betray me like that?” All of this takes place not on stage, but in the narrow space between the stage and the first row.

218 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 In the interlude El toreador, audience participation becomes central to the unfolding action. At one point, an actor goes in search of the king he must honor and finds him in the audience, crowning him and bowing to him in reverence. But as the actor talks to him, it is soon discovered the chosen king does not speak Spanish and doesn’t understand what they want from him. The “king” responds in English and tells the actor “go fight the bull.” The audience roars with laughter, as do the actors on stage. The “king” is now not only an honorary cast member, but producing guffaws just like the professionals. Afterwards, a queen and a prince are both crowned in the audience with similar humorous outcomes. By the end of the show, the audience is completely taken in and gladly plays along with the antics on stage. A moment of solidarity is produced when in the final song, the audience begins to clap along, unprompted by the actors, and holds the beat to the end. Now, not only are individual audience members a part of the action, everyone is a part of it; actors and audience are one and the same. The feelings of being a part of the show, of solidarity with the actors, of leaving the performance filled with joy and laughter, make for a thrilling experience. The audience has been transported to 17th century Spain, they have found friends, had a drink in a tavern, and seen a piece of culture that is sometimes left out of modern performances of comedias. This

Connor 219 production was a world premiere, but it is hoped it won’t be the last.

EL GRAN MERCADO DEL MUNDO DE CAL- DERÓN DE LA BARCA. DIR ESTHER PÉREZ ARRIBAS. PIE IZQUIERDO, HOSPITALILLO DE SAN JOSÉ, FESTIVASL DE TEATRO CLÁSICO DE GEFAFE (MADRID). 9 DE JU- NIO DEL 2013.

ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Sarah Lawrence College

La compañía independiente Pie Izquierdo radicada en Valladolid y dirigida por Esther Pérez Arribas ha sido una de las pioneras en llevar el teatro clásico al público infantil en verso, en España. En su primer montaje, La dama boba de Lope de Vega (2008), la directora ya logró transmitir con éxito el significado crítico, moral y social de esta comedia gracias a la creación de a un marco didác- tico inspirado en unos protagonistas infantilizados y en el seguimiento de su crecimiento moral y social a lo largo de la trama. En su más reciente adaptación, El gran mercado del mundo de Calderón de la Bar- ca, Pérez Arribas parte nuevamente de un acerca- miento y consigue divulgar, una vez más, entre los

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Fernández 221 más jóvenes, la esencia de un complejo auto sacramental.

Fig. 1. Escena del Gran mercado del mundo. La Soberbia y la Humildad. Foto de Marta Vidanes, cortesía de Pie izquierdo.

Pérez Arribas opta por una adaptación libre en la cual la directora compendia a los dos protagonistas originales—el Buen genio y el Mal genio— en un joven llamado Eugenio que por conseguir una guitarra inicia un periplo por el “gran mercado del mundo”, donde conocerá a toda una serie de personajes alegóricos actualizados, los cuales pondrán a prueba la pureza de sus intenciones y de sus senti- mientos. En efecto, para simplificar el argumento de la trama y hacerlo más sugerente para el joven espectador contemporáneo, además de suprimir los personajes alegóricos más complejos, la directora añade algunos apócrifos que se adaptan mejor al

222 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 lenguaje escénico, tal como se indica en el siguiente cuadro: Personajes elimina- Personajes apócri- Reparto completo dos de Calderón fos de la adaptación El buen genio Eugenio Eugenio EL mal genio Prisa Padre La malicia Paciencia Madre (Gracia) La inocencia Sabiduría Soberbia La gracia Amor Humildad La culpa Tabernero Desengaño La fama Tabernero La gula Prisa El mundo Paciencia El susto Culpa La fe Sabiduría La heregía Amor La soberbia Música La humildad El padre de familias La penitencia El desengaño La hemosura La lascivia La música

Además de condensar el reparto de personajes, Pérez Arribas simplifica también la trama al estructurarla de modo esquemático alrededor de las dos salidas iniciáticas de Eugenio al “mercado del mundo”. En la primera, el protagonista se deja llevar por sus instintos sin tener en cuenta las conse- cuencias. Por ejemplo, cuando Eugenio conoce por

Fernández 223 primera vez a la Soberbia y a la Humildad, éste es- coge impulsivamente a la primera, lo que le lleva a recibir una lección del Desengaño. Más adelante, el protagonista se encuentra con la Prisa y la Pacien- cia—encarnadas respectivamente en una camarera de comida rápida y en una cocinera tradicional—y elige el menú de la primera pero se arrepiente des- pués de que la culpa, le empuja a reflexionar sobre su errónea decisión. En su segunda salida, Eugenio se muestra mucho más cauto y maduro al dejarse aconsejar por la Sabiduría y el Amor. De vuelta en casa, el protagonista es premiado por sus padres con su anhelada guitarra.

Fig. 2. Escena del Gran mercado del mundo. La Prisa y la Paciencia. Foto de Marta Vidanes, cortesía de Pie izquierdo.

Sin embargo, más que esta acertada simpli- ficación de los personajes y de la trama, el mayor acierto de este espectáculo recae en el conjunto de las distintas artes escénicas que se dan cita en el es-

224 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 cenario para crear un espectáculo que mezcla con armonía música, danza, teatro de sombras y de títe- res, mimo y máscaras. La directora logra sincroni- zar perfectamente este amplio abanico artístico para crear una variada y sorprendente función capaz de encandilar tanto al espectador novel como al públi- co adulto.

Fig. 3. Escena del Gran mercado del mundo. La Sabiduría. Foto de Marta Vidanes, cortesía de Pie izquierdo.

Con esta adaptación, Pérez Arribas nos de- muestra que la refundición infantil en verso de una obra tan rica en símbolos y significados como es El gran mercado del mundo no implica crear un espec- táculo infantiloide o ingenuo, sino identificar los aspectos más complejos y suavizarlos hasta lograr que el público más joven pueda relacionarse con ellos. Como consecuencia, estos espectadores, hoy niños, se acercarán el día de mañana sin miedo a los

Fernández 225 clásicos y serán capaces de dejar atrás ese imponen- te respeto que tiende a mantener a los dramaturgos del Siglo de Oro alejados del imaginario infantil. Esta puesta en escena es, por lo tanto, una prueba más de cómo una obra de teatro clásico—tan complicada como puede resultar un auto sacramental—rebasa las barreras de la obligación escolar al convertirse en una actividad única para público más joven, sin que por ello pierda toda una serie de retos intelectuales, como es el acostumbrarse a la sonori- dad del verso o el familiarizarse con un contexto histórico alejado del presente más inmediato o del mundo fantástico de los cuentos de hadas.

DON JUAN: MEMORIA AMARGA DE MÍ. DIR. MARIA CASTILLO. ADAP. MIQUEL GA- LLARDO Y PACO BERNAL. COMPANYIA PELMÀNEC. ESPACE MICHEL-SIMON (SALLE JEAN MARAIS) FESTIVAL CHEMINS DE TRAVERSE NOISY LE GRAND (FRANCIA). 24 DE MAYO DEL 2013.

ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Sarah Lawrence College

Miquel Gallardo, director artístico de la Companyia Pelmànec (Piera, Cataluña) desde el 2008, nos ofrece con este montaje una adaptación del mito de don Juan desde una serie de innovado- res enfoques que retratan psíquica y artísticamente a este personaje de manera nunca vista en escena, hasta la fecha, en España. En primer lugar Gallardo crea su Don Juan a partir de cuatro obras significativas, El burlador de Sevilla de Tirso de Molina, Don Juan de Moliere, Don Juan de Zorrilla y los cinco textos del poeta y escritor catalán, Josep Palau i Fabre—La tragedia de Don Juan, Don Juan en los infiernos, Esqueleto de Don Juan, Príncipe de las

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Fernández 227 tinieblas, El exceso y Don Juan loco—, escritos todos ellos entre 1951 y 1954. El resultado a nivel de la trama es una historia que diverge de la original de Tirso, al presentarnos a un protagonista envejecido y sometido a los cuidados de un joven fraile, Jaco- bo, que amparará al universal burlador durante sus últimos días.

Figura 1. Don Juan: memoria amarga de mí. Foto de Chan, cortesía de la Companyia Pelmànec.

Si tomamos la obra de Tirso como punto de referencia, este espectáculo entraría dentro de la ca- tegoría de la adaptación libre. No obstante, aunque la trama se aparta considerablemente del original, esta versión ofrece al protagonista la posibilidad de recapacitar y juzgarse a sí mismo en un mundo donde la justicia terrenal y divina le ha alargado la vida, relegándole a un convento, en un estado físico y psíquico extremadamente vulnerable. ¿Podríamos pensar en un peor castigo para este hombre de ac- ción, que llegó a jactarse de su eterna juventud y de

228 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 la impunidad de sus burlas? En este sentido, no podemos negar que la obra presenta al don Juan desde una perspectiva original y de gran riqueza psicoló- gica. A este novedoso tratamiento del protagonista, cabe añadir la utilización de títeres inspirados en las técnicas pioneras del titiritero australiano Nevi- lle Tranter, a través de las cuales el manipulador/actor comparte escenario, en solitario, con marionetas de látex y goma espuma de tamaño natural. Esta técnica titiritesca, no obstante, demanda de la dramaturgia la creación de personajes que exhiban relaciones muy íntimas entre manipulador/actor y marioneta para que una tal codependencia física y psíquica resulte justificada y no se reduzca a un mero efecto visual gratuito. Gallardo en su papel de Jacobo, confidente y enfermero del anciano don Juan, encarna a la perfección esta estrecha relación entre él y el protagonista.

Figura 2. Don Juan: memoria amarga de mí. Foto de Tercer Polo, cortesía de la Companyia Pelmnec.

Fernández 229

Además de don Juan, hay otras dos marionetas de tamaño natural que intervienen en distintos momentos de la trama, el Padre Luis y la Muerte, las cuales, en sus papeles de antagonistas, contribu- yen a reforzar una atmósfera asfixiante de pasiones reprimidas y recuerdos dolorosos. Las conquistas pasadas del protagonista tienen también su lugar en esta adaptación. Éstas aparecen en formas de visiones/imágenes proyectadas en el fondo del escenario cuyas quejas parecen resonar en forma de ecos en la mente del burlador. Es innegable que desde un punto de vista puramente plástico resulta impresionante ver mo- verse y “respirar” sobre el escenario a marionetas tan realistas, manipuladas con una extraordinaria naturalidad por parte de Gallardo, hasta el punto de convertirse ante nuestros ojos en verdaderos personajes de carne y hueso. Desde una perspectiva ideo- lógica, Don Juan: memoria amarga de mí, es una obra oscura, intimista, en donde los personajes cavi- lan morosamente y recapacitan sobre su pasado y su presente. El espectador no puede evitar sorprender- se de principio a fin de la representación al encarar- se, inesperadamente, con un don Juan caduco, amargo y atormentado que, no obstante, nos deja entrever la posibilidad de un lado más humano, del cual solemos olvidarnos por su estatus de icono literario, cultural y universal.

REINAR DESPUÉS DE MORIR. BY LUIS VÉ- LEZ DE GUEVARA. DIR. INÉS GARCÍA. RE- PERTORIO ESPAÑOL, NEW YORK, NY. JULY 2013. (PLAY’S RUN: 27 JUNE – 7 JULY 2013) EL LOCO POR FUERZA. BY LOPE DE VEGA. DIR. LEYMA LÓPEZ. REPERTORIO ESPA- ÑOL, NEW YORK, NY. 28 JULY 2013. (PLAY’S RUN: 25 JULY- 4 AUGUST 2013) LA FUERZA DE LA COSTUMBRE. BY GUI- LLÉN DE CASTRO. DIR. FREDDY MANCI- LLA. REPERTORIO ESPAÑOL, NEW YORK, NY. 22 AUGUST 2013. (PLAY’S RUN: 22AUGUST – 1 SEPTEMBER 2013)

CHIRSTOPHER D. GASCÓN State University of New York College at Cortland

The Van Lier Directing Fellowship once again provided grants for three young directors to stage new productions at Repertorio Español during the summer of 2013 with the support of New York Community Trust. As in 2011, all of the directors produced plays from the Golden Age; however, this group proved even more daring in their selections,

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Gascón 231 ranging outside the canon of comedias normally undertaken to present challenging plays that have rarely graced the modern stage. Vélez de Guevara’s Reinar después de morir, directed by Inés García, featured solid performances by the entire cast. Nanda Abella portrays the monarch’s anxiety well, displaying an emotional gamut that ranges from physically sick, nervous, and agitated to angry, resigned, and depressed as her character shoulders the burden of having to order the execution of the noble and charming Inés, played with spirit and vivacity by Natalia Miranda- Guzmán. Carmen Cabrera’s Infanta Blanca is haughty, seductive, and at times explosive; Jorge Morales’ Prince Pedro and Miranda-Guzmán’s Inés have a wonderful chemistry that shines especially in their tender act three love embrace, which is both playful and poignant. As Brito, the prince’s servant, Mauricio Pita shows great range and a mastery of Vélez de Guevara’s art, as he handles both comic lines and narrative expositions with grace, wit, and poetic sensibility.

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Jorge Morales, as el Príncipe Pedro, and cast of Reinar después de morir. Photo by Michael J. Palma

A number of directorial innovations make this production interesting. Music and dance add flavor to the action: The play opens to the energetic rhythms and dazzling guitar work of Rodrigo and Gabriela, as the cast dances flamenco-style, then sings in praise of Doña Inés’s beauty. Later, Mo- rales strums a guitar while Marisel Polanco (Vio- lante) and Miranda-Guzmán sing Luis Vaz de Ca- mões’ poem “Saudade minha, ¿cuándo vos vería?” García creates an interesting ambiguity with respect to King Alonso’s gender by casting a female actress (Abella) as the King. While García changes at least one reference from masculine to feminine when Abella says “Os lo pido como madre, os lo mando como rey” (406-7), others are left in the masculine, as characters address her as “Señor,” and she refers to herself in the masculine. Though viewers may be

Gascón 233 confused as to whether she should be considered male or female, they also may be intrigued by the question of if or why it should matter. The most significant novelty of this production, however, is the casting of Morales as the Prín- cipe, and his playing the prince as young, jovial, naive, and idealistic. Through Morales’ performance, the audience comes to understand the tragedy here as resulting in great part due to the young prince’s failure to assess the situation as life- threatening to his beloved mistress Inés. In his care- free state of bliss, Morales’ Pedro fails to take seri- ously the signs that point to her execution – as if he simply does not believe that it will come to that. The action thus plays out like a coming-of-age story in which a young prince discovers, tragically, the burden of being the heir to the throne and the ex- tremes of ruthlessness and brutality to which those in power – even one’s own parent - will go in order to retain that power. None of this would come across as clearly without an actor like Morales, whose smiling, playful demeanor captures perfectly the Prince’s naïveté, in contrast with the more worldly, pragmatic, and cynical attitudes represent- ed by the other three protagonists (Inés, Blanca, and the King). While Reinar is characterized by a relatively simple argument and a manageable number of principal characters, the second play in the Van Lier series, El loco por fuerza, presents the challenge of a seemingly endless parade of characters and a

234 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 plotline that becomes increasingly more convoluted the closer we get to the conclusion. This production is nevertheless the most successful of the three, mainly due to director Leyma López’s ability to create stunning stage pictures and scenes that capti- vate with a transcendent, emblematic quality.

Clarinda (Elena Mohedano) finds Feliciano (Erick González) in the Hospital de Locos in El loco por fuerza. Photo by Alejandro Taquechel.

López transforms the tense scene in which Clarinda finally finds the apparently broken and insane Feliciano in the asylum into a sensual and haunting love scene. Feliciano is wheeled in, strapped to a metal gurney, wearing protective headgear, hands tied. She laments his descent into insanity, takes off his head gear, unties his hands, and lies down on the gurney with him. Gentle Asian music plays in the background as the lights dim to a

Gascón 235 lone spot on the two of them. They embrace, trade caresses, and kiss. Feliciano ultimately explodes in anger, accusing Clarinda of leaving him, but the scene up to that point is oddly touching. The fact that it all takes place on a gurney in an insane asylum makes it edgy and off-beat, but also poignant, poetic, and emblematic of what love, in all of its insanity, may be at any given time. Another memorable moment occurs just after Feliciano angrily flees from Clarinda. The lights dim to a single spot on her, in her red dress, as she swings her golden cape around and throws it on the floor. She dances a tense, silent flamenco homage to the fallen cape, gradually increasing the tempo of her tapeo, raising her skirts, and ending with a fierce stomp. Every step, pause, and silence palpi- tates with absence and longing in this poignant expression of angst at having lost her lover to insanity.

Feliciano (Erick González) confronts el Maestro de locos/ el Justicia (Fermín Suárez) in El loco por fuerza. Photo by Alejandro Taquechel.

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Another powerfully emblematic scene occurs when the Justicia visits the asylum to speak to Feliciano, and the two adversaries confront each other, separated by a divider made of lengths of fabric roped together that stretches across the stage. Here, as the only two characters in the play that act realistically rather than in a farcical manner face each other across an arbitrary demarcation between sanity and madness, we wonder which is crazy, which sane. Scenery and light designer Eduardo Navas creates an elegant setting for Freddy Mancilla’s staging of La fuerza de la costumbre: rose-gelled lights create floral designs on white curtains that hang from ceiling to floor; a chandelier hangs over center stage; a bench and some musical instruments rest to the audience’s right. The playful tone and style of the production is evident from the beginning, when, after a lengthy exposition, Natalia Col- lazo (Doña Costanza) breaks the fourth wall and directly asks the audience, “¿Entendieron eso?” The company then “rewinds” to repeat the key exchange concerning the protagonist siblings Hipólita and Félix changing into more “gender appropriate” clothes. Collazo adds life to her character, playing Costanza as much more youthful, sensual, and fun- loving than Guillén de Castro’s rather prudish, con- servative, middle-aged mother. Nanda Abella shows that she can also do comedy, once again turning in a strong performance

Gascón 237 as the masculine Hipólita. She struggles in high heels, but nonetheless impresses all with her swordplay. Abella brings wonderful intensity to her act three soliloquy in which she rages against Don Luis when she is misled into believing he has left her for another. Her fiery, passionate outburst is enough to make one believe that perhaps there is something capable of more fury than a woman scorned: una mujer varonil afrentada. Her counterpart, Daniel Anthony Hidalgo, plays the awkward, timid Félix believably; he speaks so softly at the outset of the action that he can barely be heard, but comes on strong as his “conversión” to masculinity progress- es.

Hipólita (Nanda Abella) crosses swords with Galván (Ricardo J. Salazar) in La fuerza de la costumbre. Photo by Michael J. Palma.

Guillén de Castro’s play concludes that the power of love combined with dispositions inherited through bloodlines will overcome the “fuerza de la costumbre” that supposedly resulted in Hipólita and Félix’s “incorrect” gender alignments. It is some-

238 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 what surprising that a New York production in this day and age would not attempt to subvert such a notion; the play and its assumptions are certainly ripe for ironic scrutiny and interrogation. The audience and cast, nevertheless, appeared to immerse themselves in the playful spirit of the work, which proved action-packed and thoroughly entertaining. Overall, the 2013 Van Lier Festival was a great success. With the impressive number of sixteenth and seventeenth century plays Repertorio Es- pañol has produced in recent years, it can truly be said that no other theater company in the United States does more to promote Spanish Golden Age drama to contemporary audiences. With these productions, Repertorio makes a strong case for an ap- preciation that extends beyond time-honored classics like La vida es sueño and Fuenteovejuna to embrace as well the rich and varied work residing on the edges of the canon.

AN EVENING OF CERVANTES: TWO EN- TREMESES (IN SPANISH). DIR. BARBARA MUJICA. DAVIS PERFORMING ARTS CEN- TER, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY. APRIL 28, 2013.

ROBERT STONE United States Naval Academy

Recently Washington, DC has enjoyed a mini-boom in the mini-genre of the entremés. In 2003, DC’s GALA Theatre brought a selection of the one-act plays by Cervantes to a stage in the sub- urbs. This year, in their new downtown home at the lovingly refurbished Tivoli Theatre, the same group produced a selection of amorous entremeses written by other Golden Age playwrights such as Calderón. In the meantime, a production of “El retablo de las maravillas” and “La cueva de Salamanca” has graced Georgetown University’s stage with yet another welcome dose of Cervantes. All of these plays are performed in Spanish with English surti- tles, and so are meant to engage a wide audience. The problem is how to make verbally dense and playful texts accessible to the uninitiated. In their

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240 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 own day, the entremeses had to fit themselves between acts of longer dramas, and at times they literally screamed for attention. Their melodrama and hyperbole compensated for a lack of elaborate sets and props, but now that the works are the main event, and not merely some diversion, this no longer has to be the case. Thus, in contrast to the classically sparse treatment given by GALA, Barbara Mu- jica’s production at Georgetown is arresting from the get-go in its gesture towards modernity. A short film of two helmeted motorcyclists speeding along the curvy hills of an ostensibly Spanish highway sets the scene. But these are no Hell’s Angels; they are the con-man and woman Chanfalla and Chirinos. Chanfalla is played by the charismatic Yoel Castillo Botello, who also portrays the deviously clever student of Salamanca in the second play – both are pícaros of a sort, and Castillo Botello fully embodies their unguent charm. Indeed, it is hard not to be impressed by the cast as a whole, made up almost entirely of graduate and undergraduate students with little or no formal training in theater. Both plays -- and this makes them a fine choice as a double bill -- turn on the phenomenon of willing dupes, of a society’s fervent belief in its own my- thos. These ideas readily translate into the modern age, but their rootedness in a Spain constrained by strict Catholicism and a stricter honor code presents a challenge that is harder to overcome. In an effort to bridge the gap, the director has taken more than a

Stone 241 few liberties with the original texts, added an iPod or two, and included some impressive dancing that is decidedly more jip-jop than cante jondo. As a result, there is a never-quite-resolved tension between the desire to be true to the original and the wish to appeal to a youth-oriented audience. The effect is often comical, but it is sometimes also jar- ring, making Spain’s obsessions seem more archaic than perhaps they should. Having said that, it would be nice to see more productions like these, which attempt to bring classic comedias and entremeses into the twenty-first century. Easier said than done – but preferable (to all but the fustiest academic) to those that evoke a Spain forever bound in the chains of its own Golden Age. If Hispanic classical theater is ever to take its place alongside Shakespeare and his ilk, a modicum of moderniza- tion is definitely in order.

TRIED AND TRUE (LA FIRMEZA EN LA AU- SENCIA). BY LEONOR DE LA CUEVA Y SILVA. TRANSLATED BY SHARON D. VO- ROS. DIRECTED BY DAVID PASTO. OKLAHOMA CITY UNIVERSITY (THEATRE OCU STAGE II, OKLAHOMA CITY, OK) RUN: NOVEMBER 21 THROUGH NOVEM- BER 24, PERFORMANCE REVIEWED NO- VEMBER 23, 2013.

KERRY K. WILKS Wichita State University

In the fall of this past year, the American Midwest enjoyed a show that was more than 300 years in the making – the first performance of Le- onor de la Cueva y Silva’s La firmeza en la ausencia. Lovingly and carefully translated by Sharon Voros as Tried and True, this English adaptation of Cueva’s only known play was well received in Ok- lahoma City. The audience was exceptionally re- sponsive, often providing raucous laughter that promoted a symbiotic relationship with the cast of the show that led to an even higher energy level for the production. The extremely intimate setting of

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Wilks 243 OCU’s black box theater, that had an industrial feel with its surrounding brick walls and capacity for less than 75 persons, encouraged this relationship. The simple black stage consisted of only two items, a blue chaise lounge located downstage (stage left) and a simple table with two chairs upstage (stage right). Pasto took full advantage of the space by incorporating verticality into the production in two separate scenes - one of which was the balcony scene towards the end of the first act when Juan, energetically played by sophomore Robert Charles Jamerson, Jr., declares his love and faithfulness before he must leave Naples to fight the French at the King’s request. Armesinda, ably played by fellow sophomore Jasmine Richman, lis- tens to his pledges from above on the catwalk with Leonor (Lillian Lantigua) before returning her own pledge of faithfulness. Once the protagonists exit, Tristán (Mike Newton) leaps upon the table, adding even more dimension to the playing space, as the servants perform their parallel declarations of fidelity. The blocking was exceptionally effective for the balcony scene, but Pasto also utilized the space with success during the second act when Juan recounts the battle history with his men. Since the scene immediately follows one in which Carlos and Armesinda speak about him in the palace, the verticality provides a fitting distance, literally, for the scene that takes place much farther away in the world of the play.

244 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 The translation was well served by David Pasto’s judicious use of line cuts in the production. Pasto, though faithful to the original plot (also reflected in the translation), eliminated a significant percentage of verses without destroying the essence of the piece or the monologues that are characteris- tic (and often problematic) of the genre. The feel of the extended monologue was still present and can be witnessed in the two moments of irony that remained during Juan’s opening expository monologue where he claims he has kept his story short and then later adds the qualifier “for I do not wish to bore you / with all the details. . . .” In addition to the line cuts, the monologues were aided by the energy provided by this youthful cast, especially the two leads, Juan (Jamerson) and Armesinda (Rich- man), who are sophomores. The intimate space allowed Richman’s rich facial expressions to shine through during the more demanding monologues and created an entirely sympathetic character. Jamerson maintained a high level of energy during his discourses through both his vocal tone and his use of modern gesticulations – for example, Juan gives Carlos (wonderfully played by the comedic Ian Maryfield) a “bro-hug” at the end of the first scene before Carlos departs. This is only one of several non-intrusive inclusions of modernity in Pasto’s color-blind cast that served to parlay Cue- va’s rendition of the biblical story of David, Uriah and Bathsheba into a more contemporary setting. Pasto even included a present day reference at the

Wilks 245 end of the play, much to the delight of the audience, by using a photo of fellow OCU theater student and Miss Oklahoma winner for the portrait of Madame Blanche. The only moment the carefully constructed world of the play seemed to dissipate, though, occurred with one of these (seemingly) instants of modernity when Juan (Jamerson) cried out “Jesus Christ,” though it seems that this is where Voros had called for “Jesus help me.” The words, combined with Jamerson’s delivery, were slightly jar- ring in this scene where Filiberto, King of Naples (played by Lucas Haupert) discovers Juan at the palace/balcony. Such a detail, though, is minor when considering the production’s unique blend of seventeenth-century Spain (via Naples) within a contemporary setting. This feeling of modernity was aided by Pasto’s costume choice, as each actor brought items from his/her own closet for the production – black pants (male roles) or skirts (female roles) with a solid colored top. Though the director claimed it unintentional during a discussion after the show, the most striking wardrobe aspect occurred with Armesinda (Richman) whose skirt included very small rhinestones, which were also used as buttons on her blouse. These elements seemed to lend more weight to Armesinda’s metaphor when she referred to herself as a “diamond-hard rock” and later as a “diamond” to describe her steadfastness during Juan’s absence. As one may expect, the role of the gracioso, Tristán, (ably played by Mike Newton), added

246 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 greatly to the comedic moments that characterized this production. Newton proved to be an extremely effective gracioso, a role often challenging for younger actors, incorporating facial expressions and body movement in his speeches throughout the play. The audience’s response to the actor suggested that Newton is genuinely funny, making this casting especially appropriate. Returning to the idea of the symbiotic relationship between the cast and audience, Newton seemed especially impacted by this and developed more gracioso-esque qualities as the show progressed. This crescendo culminated near the close of the show when he extemporane- ously added a line at the close of the play – “just finish the show” – as opposed to the “hurry up” hand gesture called for by the director. Though the line did provoke much laughter, perhaps from New- ton's classmates who seemed to populate the audience, Pasto did wryly comment after the curtain call that it is best not to ad-lib/invent dialogue for the finale of a production. The comic tones throughout the evening were so marked that Sharon Voros, the translator who was in attendance for the performance, commented that she was surprised that several of the lines provoked such a strong audience response. The crowd’s energy and responsiveness to both the play and its actors was definitely a hall- mark of the production. In addition to the exceptional energy, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the show occurred during Armesinda’s monologue toward the middle

Wilks 247 of the second act after Carlos has given her the false news of Juan’s marriage to Clavela, in order to tempt her to capitulate to the King’s advances. In this moment, the actor, translator and playwright seemed to fuse to offer a moving reflection on gender stereotypes:

Women who trust a man with such a changeable nature fall into error. He turns his back on his lady for only two days and there is nothing that he doesn’t desire. Whoever said that in- constancy is engendered only in woman, because she is weak, speaks ill!

The speech called attention to the inherent irony created by a female playwright and caused a moment of almost feminist exhilaration as a response to the speech. Unfortunately, these issues still resonate today due to the plethora of issues related to gender expectations and inequalities. Leonor de la Cueva y Silva’s comedia may have waited many years to begin its performance history, but poignant monologues such as this one, combined with the warm reception received from its audience, remind us that the small corpus of plays from our Golden Age female playwrights are well-suited for contemporary productions.

Book Reviews

Pérez, Mirzam C. The Comedia of Virginity. Waco, Tx: Baylor UP, 2012. Paper. 173 pp.

ANTHONY J. GRUBBS Michigan State University

In her monographic study The Comedia of Virginity, Mirzam C. Pérez examines three early modern Spanish plays that present distinct treat- ments of the Virgin Mary. Pérez offers innovative analysis of these works, which have been largely overlooked by comedia scholars. The author demonstrates the effects that different religious and secular perspectives concerning the legend of the Virgin Mary in seventeenth-century Spain had over these dramas. The introduction to the study explains the polemic of the Immaculate Conception and contex- tualizes this with the presence of the Virgin Mary in the Hapsburg Spain of Phillips III and IV. Her ubiquity formed a connection between the arts, reli- gion, and the court as an unmistakably pure and idealized figure. Pérez suggests, however, that the Virgin Mary was actually a more complex character that many artists used to undermine patriarchal au-

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Grubbs 249 thority; she was as a role model for many women in the Spanish court. The first three chapters combine into a unified study of the concept of the Immacu- late Conception, Lope de Vega, his comedia La limpieza no manchada, and the socio-political as well as religious circumstances surrounding its performance at the University of Salamanca. In Chap- ter One, Pérez offers extensive background information about La limpieza no manchada that include the circumstances of Lope accepting the commission to write the play, its importance to the Univer- sity of Salamanca, the performance of the work, and its propagandistic character. She suggests that La limpieza no manchada be analyzed strictly in relation to the cult of the Immaculate Conception and not in comparison to other plays, since it was written for different purposes. The second chapter con- centrates on an examination of the comedia, highlighting the visual imagery in the third act. She interestingly points out how Lope challenged self- perception of a homogeneous Spain at the time. In fact, his inclusion of many races in the play pointed to the widespread worship of the Virgin Mary. Pé- rez notes that the play offered an opportunity for acculturation through the adoration of Mary. In the third chapter, “Mapping Faith at the University of Salamanca,” the author examines a festival book with the intention of drawing conclusions as to the relation between various spaces in Salamanca and the presentation and performance of theatrical or para-theatrical events. She claims that the overrid-

250 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 ing ideological beliefs of certain zones in the city either helped or hindered the presence of the pro- cessions or plays. The fourth chapter discusses the motherly aspect of the Virgin Mary in Ángela de Azevedo’s Dicha y desdicha del juego y devoción de la Virgen, and the play’s influence on Queen Is- abel of Borbon. Although this chapter is marred by overgeneralizations such as the comedia “is a genre characterized by the absolute absence of mothers and maternal figures,” the author proceeds to tem- per her statement and makes connections between the exemplarity of the Virgin Mary and the Queen of Spain, explaining that Azevedo was compelled to praise the queen for a number of financial and political reasons. What stands out most in this chapter is the astute analysis of the use of horizontal and vertical space in the final scene of the play. Also provocative but not fully developed is Pérez’s sugges- tion that Azevedo intercalated the challenges faced by women writers in the play. The final chapter, “Spanish Mother to an American Daughter. The Virgin Mary in Moreto’s Santa Rosa de Peru,” offers a good analysis of the play, which Pérez claims supports a Catholic agenda, improves the weak public image of contemporary Spain, and bolsters Cre- ole pride. The author’s treatment of the integration of indigenous goods, silver and cacao, in concert with the retelling of St. Rosa’s hagiography is inci- sive. The conclusion of the study includes some overstatements but it sufficiently reminds the reader

Grubbs 251 of the important role of the Virgin Mary in Haps- burg Spain. The study is affected by some shortcomings in addition to those mentioned earlier. In general, it seems that only Lope’s is actually a Marian play, the others feature the appearance of the Virgin Mary, but she is not a protagonist. The introduction would benefit from a brief acknowledgment of the Marian tradition in early and early modern Iberia. There is more than one instance of repetition of historical background or plot summary. What is most evident, however, is the structure of the study, which is uneven. The three chapters dedicated to Lope, Salamanca, and La limpieza no manchada upstage the final two, making them appear somewhat lacking. Finally the fascinating and fundamental polemic of the Immaculate Conception, along with Pérez’s graceful explanation of the notion fade at the end of the book. All of this being said, the positives of this study far outweigh the negatives. The author’s study of three Marian comedias in Hapsburg Spain effectively demonstrates and offers explanation of the dynamic manifestations of the Virgin Mary on stage. Her keen insights on a surprisingly understudied topic make this innovative and relevant monograph a timely addition to the corpus of research dealing with early modern Spain and its theatrical traditions.

Fernández Biggs, Braulio. Caleron y Shakespeare: Los personajes en la Cisma de Inglaterra y Henry VIII. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica. Iberoamericana- Vervuert, 2012. pp. 366 € 44.00.

RUTH SÁNCHEZ IMIZCOZ University of the South

Este libro de la Biblioteca Áurea presenta una interesante comparación entre dos obras de teatro que tienen un mismo tema histórico como base de su trama, mientras que a la vez ambas se escri- ben desde dos puntos de vista totalmente diferentes y en dos países que en aquel momento no siempre se veían como amigos. Como el autor va a indicar en diferentes momentos, la obra de Shakespeare es- tá muy cercana en el tiempo a los sucesos históricos que relata, ya que se escribe aproximadamente cuando James Stuart sube al trono de Inglaterra. La obra de Calderón es más tardía, aunque no por muchos años. La base de la comparación va ser La cisma de Inglaterra, el análisis más profundo se va a centrar al rededor de la obra española y del personaje de Enrique VIII especialmente.

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Sánchez Imizcoz 253 El libro está dividido en cuatro capítulos, el primero dedicado a la historia de la cisma de Ingla- terra; el segundo examina la recepción que tuvieron ambas obras y examina las fuentes en las que se ba- saron ambos autores a la hora de crear las obras; el tercero presenta las obras como tragedias y finalmente el cuarto y más largo de los capítulos presenta el estudio de los personajes. El primer capítulo es una introducción histó- rica al problema que crea Enrique VIII con su deseo de divorciarse de Catalina de Aragón y el autor presenta las ideas reformistas que aparecen en Europa con Lutero y como con el tiempo este rey que había sido nombrado “defensor de la fe” termina creando un cisma dentro de la misma iglesia que en su momento defendió sin ninguna duda. El análisis de las fuentes mantiene también la trayectoria histórica y como diferentes historiado- res hicieron hincapié en distintas cosas, pero tanto Shakespeare como Calderón eligen lo que les in- teresa de sus fuentes y no las siguen al pie de la le- tra. Para Calderón la fuente base es Rivadeneyra y para Shakespeare son Holinshed, Foxe y Hall. Y aunque ambos autores no pueden cambiar la historia la obra del bardo inglés sigue más una trayectoria teatral, mientras que la del español refleja más lo humano de esta tragedia y los problemas que causa. La última parte del capítulo trata de la cooperación entre Fletcher y Shakespeare al escribir esta obra y la duda que existe sobre cuanto de la creación es o no de Shakespeare.

254 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 En el tercer capítulo lo primero que Fernán- dez Biggs presenta es la cuestión de si ¿existe la tragedia en España? ya que el capítulo analiza ambas obras como tragedias. De todas formas, parte del capítulo va dedicado a la clasificación de la obra inglesa dentro de la producción shakesperiana y junto con qué grupo debería de clasificarse o estu- diarse. Le presta varias páginas de atención al subtí- tulo (¿título alternativo, título original?) de la obra “All is true”. El cuarto capítulo es el dedicado al los personajes. Son cuatro los que analiza en detalle porque se centra en los cuatro que son comunes a las dos obras, aunque, como ya se ha mencionado, siempre va a supeditar la obra inglesa a la española. Los personajes a estudiar son Enrique, Catalina, Ana y Vosleo/Wolsey. Sin embargo, las dos obras tienen toda una serie de personajes secundarios, muchos más en la inglesa (más de 30) que en la es- pañola (12), y algunos de ellos forman una parte importante del desarrollo de sus respectivas obras. Una selección de estos personajes es analizada al final, en dos secciones diferentes una dedicada a la obra española y otra a la obra inglesa. Como es de esperar el primer personaje ana- lizado es el rey Enrique, un personaje que según el análisis es más humano en la obra española que en la inglesa y por lo tanto su caída es más dura. Sha- kespeare por su parte presenta un rey más frío, y sobre todo evita meterse en cuestiones de religión, y evita usar palabras como “católico” y “protestante.”

Sánchez Imizcoz 255 Sólo en esta obra se permite el uso de la palabra “luterana” para describir a Ana Bolena. A Catalina la presenta como “víctima de una injusticia” (208) en ambas obras. Aunque presenta diversas teorías sobre este personaje como hizo antes con Enrique, es obvio que la figura de Catalina en ambas obras es casi igual. Es la antagonista moral del rey. Vivirá, sufrirá y morirá como reina. Y al final de ambas obras ambos reyes la reconocen como reina. El tercer personaje que analiza Fernández Biggs es Ana Bolena, un personaje que aparece en ambas obras pero su importancia como personaje es diferente, ya que casi no aparece en la obra inglesa. Lo interesante en ambas obras es como el personaje de Ana Bolena mejora en sus descripciones físicas de lo que fue la realidad, pues incluso la reina Cata- lina, en La cisma, va a reconocer su hermosura. Pe- ro así como es guapa no es de fiar, arrogante y va- nidosa van a ser dos de los adjetivos que la descri- ban. La Ana de Shakespeare sólo aparece dos veces en escena y se la menciona otras, pero no tiene la titularidad que tiene la Ana de Calderón. Para el inglés su presencia no es tan importante, el eje de la historia no tiene tanto que ver con ella y su presencia, sino con Wolsey. Con todo la historia no puede cambiarse y Ana será acusada de traición y adulterio, y terminará decapitada. De esta forma devolverá la cordura al rey, aunque Catalina no lo llegue a ver por haber muerto ya.

256 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 El cuarto personaje es Volseo/Wolsey al que ambos autores van a dibujar de forma muy semejan- te: un ser ávido de poder, quiso ser papa y no lo consiguió. Al poner en marcha todo el proceso para conseguir el papado, el mismo va a dar pie para que empiece su propia destrucción. En ambas obras, se- ñala Fernández Briggs, Volse/Wolsey es acción y mueve la acción aunque de diferentes formas. Es interesante que Shakespeare afirme el catolicismo de Wolsey frente al protestantismo de Ana Bolena. Éste ha estado dispuesto a ayudar al rey, siempre y cuando sus intereses fueran paralelos, pero la boda con Ana Bolena no formó nunca parte de sus planes y como dice Fernández Briggs Wolsey “piensa y decide en católico” (311), por lo tanto una boda con una luterana nunca hubiera formado parte de sus planes. Con todo cada personaje va a tener un final diferente, es decir una muerte diferente, el final es el mismo pues el Wolsey/Volseo verdadero perdió el favor real y todo lo que ello conllevaba. Calderón hace que se suicide y que muera sabiendo que la reina lo había amparado. En la versión inglesa muere de causas naturales y arrepentido. Las últimas páginas del libro están dedica- das al análisis de los personajes secundarios que el autor cree merecen mención por su participación en los dramas. De La cisma analiza a Carlos, la infanta María, Pasquín y Tomás Boleno. De Shakespeare analiza a Buckingham, el arzobispo de Canterbury y Cranmer. En ambos casos, ya ha hablado de los personajes cuando analizaba los cuatro comunes a las

Sánchez Imizcoz 257 dos obras, y lo único que hace es añadir algunos detalles más, teatrales e históricos. El libro termina con apéndice con los aspectos escenográficos de La cisma de Inglaterra de Ruano de la Haza. El libro es interesante, está lleno de infor- mación, hace un análisis detallado de las dos obras y sus personajes con todo tipo de fuentes para apoyar lo que presenta, pero a veces considero que son demasiadas las citas y las referencias a otros trabajos o a las obras mismas, complicando un poco de esa forma lo que podría ser una lectura mucho más placentera.

Vélez de Guevara, Luis. Atila, azote de Dios. Ed. William R. Manson and C. George Peale. Introduc- tory Study by Sebastian Neumeister. Ediciones crí- ticas No. 52, Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009.

ROBERT S. STONE United States Naval Academy

This volume is one in a series of Juan de la Cuesta critical studies of the comedias of Luis Vélez de Guevara. Atila deserves to be one of Luis Vélez de Guevara’s best-known plays, and not just for the catchy title. It is a work laid out with paint- erly care, as staged tableaux and lively imagery oc- cupy the foreground while Atila’s siege of Rome transpires offstage. Atila is no Hun here, but – presumably in an effort to make him less foreign to a Spanish audience – a “godo.” This intentional inac- curacy is understandable given that the Visigoths, Vandals and the other Germanic tribes who precipi- tated the fall of Rome were, to one degree or another, also present in Spain during the fifth century. But it also points to two of the drama’s salient char- acteristics, namely, its gleeful ahistoricity (common enough in the Golden Age) and its ambivalence on

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Stone 259 questions of religious identity. As stated in the introduction, “Atila es el enemigo mortal de la cris- tiandad, pero se presenta al mismo tiempo como el caballero cabal. En ese sentido, Vélez de Guevara refleja la misma incomprensión paradójica de las culturas extranjeras que José de Montesinos ha ob- servado en las comedias moriscas de Lope de Vega” (21). Furthermore, it suggests that Atila and other barbarians of his ilk need only convert in order to become honorable members of society: godos in the Spanish sense of the word. Such ambiguities are unsurprising given that Vélez de Guevara was a descendant of conversos, and that he wrote this drama during the decade of the final morisco expulsion (1609-13). It is perhaps overstating the case to suggest that Atila portrays the tragic consequences that result when an over- ambitious, over-zealous king oversteps the bounds of reason and decency in order to punish a vulnerable, once-great civilization. Nevertheless, at heart the play is less of a siege drama than one of conversion, combining the elements of Greek tragedy with those of the auto sacramental. A martyrdom reminiscent of Antigone’s becomes a sort of resurrection, while a crucial deus ex machina is presided over by the foundational saints Peter and Paul. Pri- or to those climactic scenes, a crucifix bleeds real blood, effecting an instantaneous conversion to Christianity that even Lucifer himself cannot foil. The bleeding cross is just one example of the visual trickery for which Vélez de Guevara was famous in

260 Comedia Performance Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014 his lifetime. Indeed, a modern reader is likely to feel as if he is watching a well-crafted summer blockbuster at the local cinema. He sits back and enjoys the ride of doctrinaire clichés and special effects, realizing at the same time that this work barely conceals a society’s ripe-for-analysis obsessions and insecurities. This edition of Atila comes with a fine introduction by Sebastian Neumeister, which enhanc- es the reading of the play by signaling several of its essential passages. Such an approach will also be useful to theater directors who wish to perform the play, something that a reader of Atila will probably anticipate with relish. George Peale’s meticulous notes on the printed versions of the play will prove invaluable to the textual scholar, and more casual readers will also be glad to find that the work’s more arcane vocabulary is defined at the foot of each page and often elucidated in some detail in interesting endnotes. Peale, furthermore, in prefatory notes on verse and rhyme, posits a date for the writing of the play –“la segunda década de los 1600”– by comparing Velez de Guevara’s versification in various dramas over the course of his career. Final- ly, it should also be noted that the bibliography, while necessarily incomplete, addresses the needs of both generalists and specialists who wish to delve deeper into this noteworthy play. ¡Viva Atila!

Serious scholarship serving academia since 1975.

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA, ® INC. 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200Lanham, Maryland 20706 · 1-800-462-6420 www.univpress.com

BASTILLE WITNESS The Prison Autobiography of Madame Guyon (1648-1717)

Introduction and Notes by Nancy Carol James

Translation and Notes by Sharon D. Voros

This translation of Madame Guyon’s prison autobiography provides a compelling account of her eight years of incarceration from 1695 to 1703.

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA: An Imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 978-0-7618-5772-3 $50.00 Cloth eBook Available

A fundamental book for:

- Early Modern Spanish Stud- ies. - Theater. - Women’s Studies.

‘Aquel Breve Sueño.’ Dreams on the Early Modern Spanish Stage is a collection of ten essays by distin- guished scholars from Spain, France, and the United States. Originally an idea by Ricardo Sáez of the Université de Rennes, France, this volume includes a variety of approaches on the significance of dreams as dramatic discourse. In Part I, “Oneiric Dis- course on the Early Modern Spanish Stage,” contributors are Belén Ati- VOROS (Sharon), SAEZ (Ricardo), enza, Ezra Engling, Ellen Frye, (Eds.), Rogelio Miñana, Charo Moreno, and Sharon Voros. Topics included are Aquel Breve Sueño: Dreams on the the prophetic dream in Lope de Vega Early Modern Spanish Stage. and Guillén de Castro, dreams as motif and dramatic device in Pedro ISBN: 1-889431-51-6. Calderón de la Barca, the metatheatrical function of dream sequences, the dream as dramatic character Order: www.unprsouth.com in Calderón’s auto, Sueños hay que verdad son, and the performance Tel.: 504-866-2791 dream in Leonor de la Cueva y Sil- va’s La firmeza en la ausencia. “Aquel breve sueño” is a line from Fax: 504-866-2750 Garcilaso’s second Elegy.

50% discount for students and senior Contributing to Part II, dedicated citizens (over 65). exclusively to Calderón’s La vida es sueño, are Nelson López, Chris- tian Andrès, Ricardo Sáez, and Christine Aguilar-Adan. Topics include staging and directing La vida es sueño, a comparative study on Pierre Boasituau’s Theatrum Mundi and Calderón’s La vida es sueño and El gran teatro del mundo, poetic structure and style in the redon- dillas of La vida es sueño, and La vida es sueño and the political institution of the prince.

Overlook Press 2013 Now available for purchase at www.amazon.com

Yale University Press 2014 Now available for purchase at www.amazon.com

Bucknell University Press 2013 Now available for purchase at www.amazon.com Upcoming Performances

Wednesday, February 26: Morfeo Teatro (Burgos): La escuela de los vicios (Francisco de Quevedo)

Thursday, February 27: Morfeo Teatro (Burgos): La Lozana Andaluza (Francisco Deli- cado)

Friday, February 28: Cambalache Teatro (Mur- cia): De fuera vendrá…Quien de casa nos echa- rá (Augustin Moreto)

Saturday, March 1: Cambalache Teatro (Mur- cia): El secreto a voces (Calderón de la Barca)

Sunday, March 2: matinee. Calambache Teatro (Murcia): Puro Lope (compilation of the best scenes) (Lope de Vega)