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BY NINA PELAEZ

In print | Published April 15, 2010

This coming weekend, the theater department will be putting on a production of “Bodas de Sangre,” a tragedy written by Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. The play is the culminating honors directing thesis of McFeely Sam Goodman’s ’10.

“Bodas de Sangre,” translated into English as “Blood Wedding,” is a chronicle of violence, passion and mayhem. Lorca’s play recounts the story of a man and a woman who are about to be married. However, the Bride is in love with Leonardo, the son of an enemy family, and she runs off with him on the wedding night. The Groom pursues the pair into the forest where the events reach a tragic conclusion.

Goodman’s adaptation, however, goes far beyond the text of Lorca’s play. “We are performing Lorca’s play as written but we have added on top of that,” Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 said.

His adaptation uses Lorca’s text as a vehicle to explore the ways that people create realities, try to shape their lives into narrative and “perform” multiple selves. The result is a complex performance that moves the text from a removed event to something much more universal.

“Sam’s adaptation celebrates reflexivity, celebrates theater, without being solely about reflexivity or theater,” Nolan Gear ’12, another one of the production’s actors, said.

The play also utilizes the idea of “inside” and “outside” of “the box.”

“I really wanted to create a performance that lets the audience see the people underneath these archetypal characters,” Goodman said. Goodman does this by making all of the characters visible to the audience at all times through the use of screens, through which the audience can see.

“The idea is that the characters are ‘acting’ as themselves because they can’t be seen by the audience, but really they can,” Bang-Jensen said.

“It has a very performative quality,” Goodman said. “I hope that the audience can take away that the people ‘outside of the box’ are performing these archetypes ‘inside of the box’ as a way of expressing themselves.”

The play recounts the events in Lorca’s play and looks into what the characters are left to deal with in the aftermath of the events. In this adaptation, the events take place in a Las Vegas wedding chapel, which is also reminiscent of an old movie theatre. The characters too have been transformed from the original, into “a group of punkish neo-flappers,” as described by Bang-Jensen.

Goodman did his own English translation of Lorca’s text, making changes to some of the language and tone, which vacillates between modern and more dated speech.

“The language helped shape the way we wanted the designs to look,” Samantha Panepinto ’13, the production’s costume designer, said. The designs, which are often anachronistic, reflect some of the play’s motifs.

“The costumes go with the disjoined sense of reality in the play, “ Bang-Jensen said.
The costumes also took influence from surrealism, which heavily influenced Lorca’s writing. Panepinto also drew inspiration from popular culture in creating the designs for the play.

“I was also inspired by Lady Gaga because anybody who says they aren’t inspired by her is lying,” she said.

Goodman also sees the play as a metaphor for Lorca’s own experience as a poet and playwright. “Bodas de Sangre” explores sexual politics and shows the experiences of individuals with passions that are repressed and constrained by society.

Lorca’s own repressed sexual identity can be seen reflected in the narrative of his play. Goodman’s adaptation looks closely at the way that these characters in the play, and all people, attempt to weave stories, in order to create an identity.

“We need stories so badly, so that we can feel like we belong in the world,” Goodman said. “That’s what we like about stories and theater; we identify with them.” The play promises to be an evocative and complex adaptation of this Spanish theater classic.

“Where other shows (tritely) collapse the divide between audience and actor, Sam is instead collapsing the interface between interior narratives and exterior realities, exploring how we write our own plays and perform them, what happens when our private narratives get screwed up, how we pick up the pieces,” Gear said in an e-mail.

The play will debut this Friday, April 16, at 8 p.m. with additional performances on Saturday, April 17 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, April 19th at 3 p.m. It will be performed in the Frear Ensemble Theatre.

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