The House of Bernarda Alba
Theater’s unlikely new It Girl is Bernarda Alba, one of the most pitiless, irredeemable characters in world literature. Over the last few years this brutal matriarch, the “heroine” of Federico Garcia Lorca’s harrowing 1936 play, has shown up at the Mark Taper Forum (played by Chita Rivera) and England’s Orange Tree Theatre and in new ballets in Germany and New Zealand. Last spring David Hare’s translation debuted at London’s National Theatre to ecstatic reviews. Lincoln Center is developing a musical version with a book by Richard Nelson. And Greasy Joan & Company is staging a world-premiere translation by Karin Coonrod and recent Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz.
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What can account for the fascination with a traditional Andalusian woman who dooms her five daughters to house arrest because she has a mania for keeping her family respectable? The House of Bernarda Alba opens with the protagonist imposing eight years of strict mourning on her daughters after their father’s funeral: it’s the 1930s, and they’ll live as though she’s “covered the doors and windows with bricks.” She tries to maintain near silence in the home, and in a perverse attempt to create domestic harmony occasionally beats her daughters with a scepterlike cane. The daughters, who range in age from 20 to 40, aren’t Bernarda’s only prisoners. She also keeps her senile mother locked in a spare room.
Like most of Lorca’s dramas, this one borrows as much from Andalusian folklore and Greek tragedy as from real life. And like most standard translations, Cruz and Coonrod’s 1998 script rightly adheres to the nonnaturalistic conventions of folktales and Greek classics. The House of Bernarda Alba has a minimal plot, so what gives the play its tension and stakes is primarily the mythic weight of Bernarda’s oppressive tactics and the turmoil they create. In this production, however, the work’s passions become merely human and seemingly muted, as is the color scheme. Scenic designer Scott Neale’s interiors are mottled sand, not white. Costume designer Alison Heryer drapes the daughters in gray, not black. The stage world created here may be familiar and accessible, but the emotion and poetry central to Lorca’s vision are largely replaced by a sense of measured concern.
