Z/Web

I drove up to Ashland, Oregon this weekend to see some plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. First up was this one, about the controversial Spanish poet, Fredrico Garcia Lorca. The description of the play intrigued me, but while the execution was superb, the play itself was flat. The description promised Daliesque surrealism and that was certainly present. The play is about Lorca waking up after he’s dead and in a sort of limbo, a 40-day quarantine, during which he’s to reflect on his life and become convinced of his own death. A series of actors dance around him, reenacting various scenes from his life: childhood, on the beach with Dali and his sister, the courtroom trial where he was accused of being a Communist, his death being shot by soldiers, etc. As Lorca struggles to remember and understand, we learn more about him. Unfortunately, despite the weight of the material, the play isn’t especially illuminating about death, Lorca, or anything else: it uses the conceit to bring in surrealistic imagery and concepts, but doesn’t deal with the deep philosophical issues it brings up. There are no answers here, and very few questions. For instance, I was surprised to find no mention of God in the entire play! For a play about the struggle between life and death that’s a striking omission. Even if Lorca didn’t believe in God, he surely would be questioning that belief when he wakes up dead! Instead the play’s mostly about drama and presentation, or “shocking” the audience with revelations such as Lorca’s homosexuality. That said, the play’s not bad: the set’s awesome and there’s some wonderful imagery and the acting was excellent. But we don’t really get to know Lorca that well, the surrealistic presentation distances us from him emotionally, and the lack of depth in subject makes for a weak play. It’s possible that my lack of knowledge about Lorca hurt my interpretation; a Lorca fan would probably get much more out of this.