Garcia Lorca's "Blood Wedding at Cornell"

By Ross Haarstad

Federico Garcia Lorca, the great 20th century playwright and poet of Spain, had too brief a career, his life cut short by a Falangist’s bullet in 1936 in the Spanish Civil War, which previewed the coming Second World War.

Trained as a classical pianist, he turned to poetry, and achieved early fame in his country in 1928 with the publication of his Gypsy Ballads. The folklore of Andalusia, and the Surrealist movement of the 1920s influenced his plays: Salvador Dali was a colleague and confidant. After a sojourn in NYC to study at Columbia, Lorca returned to Spain and took on a government-sponsored theater company that toured the rural provinces. From the soil of these provinces arise his great dramas, including Blood Wedding, which bring a sense of Greek tragedy to Spanish peasant roots, in which nature, paganism and Catholocism come together in a seething mix.

Blood Wedding plays in the proscenium theatre, the Kiplinger at Cornell’s Schwartz Center at 7:30 p.m. April 24 to 25 and May 1 to 2, with a matinee performance at 2 p.m. on May 2. Co-directing it are Ed Intemann, Resident Lighting Designer, and guest faculty and alum Emily Ranii ’07.

Passion is the key word they come back to in an interview just before tech rehearsals. Ed proposed the play with the intention of returning to the Kiplinger after seven semesters that had only seen departmental dance concerts or rentals. And he proposed that Emily be brought in to codirect it.

They have developed a partnership over the years with Ed designing and Emily directing at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC. Emily describes their relationship during tech on previous shows as a collegial tossing back and forth of ideas. They both wanted to take it a step further, and co-direct a piece.

They were looking for “an ensemble piece with meaty parts for students as well as something inexhaustible, that would keep giving us challenges as we went back to it,” explains Emily. Ed had been enamored of Blood Wedding since experiencing Carlos Suarez’s film version of it when he was an undergraduate.

“This play is about those things make us deeply human; now, we sometimes dismiss our own humanity because of technology,” he says. “We've become very mediated ... this play deeply touches those things that can't be mediated ... the most deep & raw human emotions.

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“Another thing I would say about why it drew me, is that it's a wonderful play because it has high poetry yet highly domestic scenes; it moves between very representational, somewhat naturalistic domestic drama to high, almost Shakespearean poetry.”

And how is it co-directing? Emily exclaimed, “It's awesome!” Ed said, “It's the best. “ Emily: “It really is.” Each gets to lead in their strong suit: Emily with the acting, Ed with the spatial and visual, but still mix things up. It allows each of them time to digest (Emily: “You're always 'on' as the sole director”) and extra energy to give to the actors in the room. “The cast gets double the amount of time and attention to work on things,” she adds.

The text is rich in visual and aural elements. “In Lorca's play when the prose can no longer hold the passion, it changes to poetry, when the poetry can't hold it to song, when the song cannot, to dance,” said Emily. This gives full play to the rest of the creative team bringing the show to fruition: faculty choreographer Jumay Chu, and resident designers Kent Goetz (scenery), Sarah Bernstein (costumes), Warren Cross (sound) and composer Danny Bernstein '14.

“We’re striving for a richness of image and poetry achieved through spareness,” said Ed. The richness is amply on display at the first dress rehearsal. Two immense beds full of brambles and flowers hang with mystery and menace over a barren landscape, riven by a bloody channel, the distance a silhouette of rising hills, on stage a lone tall wooden chair in a tight square of light, rope makes vertical slices on the sides. Costumes are traditional black with vivid flashes of color (orange, green) hear and their, plus deeply hued yellow for the Bride before her wedding.

An excellent ensemble of a dozen undergraduates move from plain speech to poetry to song and dance, filling the large expanse. As the drama intensifies fog seeps in, the Moon appears, a pagan deity, woodcutters become a Greek chorus. The beds turn, an eerie soundscape.

It’s a fabulous, sensuous experience and a welcome return for Cornell to its proscenium stage.

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