A quiet, beautiful tragedy in a 'House' of pain

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Adele Bruni, TD '02, as Bernada Alba(center), and her daughters in da 'House'.

Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 swan song to the stage, The House of Bernarda Alba, is a play about confinement. Garcia Lorca has set the play in "a very white room," and in La Nueva Tropa Teatral's production, director Pedro Kos, SY '01, sees Garcia Lorca and raises him, placing not only his actresses but also his audience within the confines of four serene white planes--two walls and two curtains. Sitting in the Pierson dining hall waiting for the show to begin, the set seemed too placid for such a brutal script. The curtains quietly rustling in a soft spring breeze with the slender shadows of three silver candlesticks wavering against their blue-bathed whiteness and the simple circle of mismatched chairs at the center of the stage had all the quiet grace of an underwater landscape.

I figured the atmosphere of peace would drop away once the play began, because The House of Bernarda Alba is not a peaceful work, but it didn't. In fact, it never did, not even at the end, when the cycle of destruction set in motion at the beginning was finally complete. Kos' decision to interpret the script in this manner, to emphasize the quiet contours of the characters' suffering rather than punish the audience with their misery, is a brilliant one. Instead of stabbing us, Kos and his players gently slide the knife between our ribs.

The House of Bernarda Alba begins after the funeral of Antionio Maria Benavides, the husband of Bernarda Alba and the father of her five grown daughters. Bernarda has declared an eight-year mourning period for herself and her daughters, forbidding them to leave the house or to wear any color other than black until the term is up. Near the beginning of the play, Bernarda declares that none of her daughters have ever had suitors, and that "they get by very well" without them--but as the play unfolds and a suitor in fact appears (offstage, that is), Bernarda's attempts to keep her daughters sealed from the world of men begin slowly but steadily to crumble from the inside out.

This crumbling is inevitable, of course, and even though the play spirals downward into tragedy, there's something majestic about inevitability. Kos knows this, and so does Adele Bruni,
TD '02, who delivers a damn near flawless performance as Bernarda. She addresses each actress with perfectly focused severity, but her tone is always measured and confident--this is a woman who does not need to raise her voice.

Bruni's carriage is perfectly erect, her gaze piercing and direct, her words richly enunciated. When she first appears onstage, flanked by black-clad mourners (stunning against the white walls), hers is the only face covered in a veil. It's disarming to be introduced to a faceless eponym, but it's also a clever directorial choice, demonstrating Bruni's ability to maximize effect. She is in complete control of her character, just as Bernarda unflag-gingly believes that she is in complete control of her household.

The daughters also understand the value of a subdued performance. When they are onstage together without Bernarda, there is always a hint of tension behind their words, a spoonful of hereditary spite in every portion of sisterly intimacy. They complement each other well, and Colin Spoelman's, MC '01, simple set, bolstered by Makiko Harunari's, ES '01, unobtrusive costumes and props cultivate a naturally domestic atmosphere to contain them. The whole production is overwhelmingly naturalistic, the stage often vacant for a few more seconds than the audience might expect, the pauses pregnant enough to keep the atmosphere taut without creating caesurae. One of the production's few flaws may, in fact, be an excess of naturalism: the women are sometimes speaking so convincingly to each other that we cannot hear them, and the arrangement of the audience makes it inevitable that many of the actresses deliver their lines facing only half of the house. This is all the more frustrating because these actresses' quietly expressive faces are lovely to watch, and it seems a pity to be prevented from seeing each line send its ripples across the faces of the ones who aren't speaking.

Kos is deft at using a period of silence or an empty stage to accumulate tension, emphasizing the women's seemingly infinite confinement and their gradual turn toward destroying each other simply because all they have to destroy is each other. In addition, the subdued severity of the production provides fertile ground for a breathtaking effect here and there--when you keep the energy intense but still pitched in a low register, you leave a lot of room for convincing changes of tone without having to resort to excessive
shrillness.

It wouldn't be Garcia Lorca without a little melodrama, but you can forgive melodrama when it stands on the strong naturalistic foundations these actresses have been able to erect. When the walls finally came tumbling down in the final moments of the production, I was genuinely sorry to leave.

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