Blood Wedding
Early-20th-century Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca could hardly be more out of step with our time. He loved strong feelings, action, the expression of primal urges. His plays are filled with people who yearn, who hate, who smolder for years and then suddenly ignite, who love with an intensity that overwhelms them. When he does turn his attention to repressed feelings–as in his last play, The House of Bernarda Alba, about marriageable women locked in the house by their disturbed mother–Lorca’s heart is clearly not with the characters who submit to their mother’s whim but with those who rebel against their imprisonment.
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At the center of Lorca’s 1933 Blood Wedding are two thwarted lovers, a headstrong bride-to-be and her former suitor, now married to her drab cousin. On the eve of the Bride’s wedding, she and her ex-lover discover they still burn for each other and run off together. No one around them has any sympathy for their plight. The Bride’s father dreams of her betrothed’s land, and her future mother-in-law is too consumed by hate for the men who killed her husband and oldest son many years ago to notice what’s going on now.
Moreover, Lorca regularly breaks the rules of storytelling–yet his plays remain compelling. When the lovers have run off and we’re eager to learn their fate, he interrupts the action with a series of soliloquies delivered by Death (disguised as a beggar woman) and the Moon. These moments in particular annoyed New York critics to no end when the play premiered in America in 1935. But in a sensitive, intelligent production like this one by the Hypocrites, these scenes are moving as well as strange.
This is not to say the Hypocrites’ production lacks emotion. From the first moments, when the Bridegroom’s mother rails against her lot as a widow who watched one of her sons die, we feel in the pit of our stomachs every twist and turn of Lorca’s emotional roller coaster. In the end we feel–and feel deeply–not for the lover who’s died but for those who survive and believe their half-lived lives are enough.
