The House of Bernarda Alba: caged women and a crack in a diva
17 Apr 2022

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by John Lauener

They are rotten to the core.
No, they are women without men, that is all.

Not that men are that great. As matriarch Bernarda Alba pronounces, "Men leave the bed for the table, then the table for the bar." And she has experience, she is burying her second husband. She announces to her five daughters and two female servants that there will be eight years of mourning. Eight years with the doors and windows boarded up. Locking eight women (and one grandmother already consigned to a locked room offstage) who are all in some variation of seething sexual heat up for eight years seems extreme and dangerous, particularly as it is the height of summer and sweltering. But Bernarda Alba's only concern is appearance, that the town not be given anything to gossip about.

Needlework and sewing are supposed to occupy the daughters, the servants are very occupied trying to live up to Bernarda's exacting standards, but quickly sexual tension and struggles for power begin to simmer. The boarding of the doors and windows was not effective as the sisters are managing to compete for the affections of Pepe el Romano, the handsomest, but not the wealthiest, man in the village. The youngest daughter cries out that "there's a fire in my mouth and between my legs and I need to put it out," and "I want him so much that when I look in his eyes, it's like drinking his blood." Like any women in prison movie, or reality tv soap opera pitting women against women, terible things are inevitably going to happen.

The House of Bernarda Alba premiered in 1945 and at that point it may have been shocking. Playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca is revered as a poet and revolutionary and was assassinated for both his politics and his homosexuality. That martyrdom turned his work into sacred texts and this production of The House of Bernarda Alba is very reverent. Perhaps too reverent. Yes, the sexual tension simmers and the performers vibrate on the edge of emotional explosions, but The House of Bernarda Alba never boils. Like Aluna Theatre and director Soheil Parsa's previous Lorca adaptation Blood Weddings, The House of Bernarda Alba aches to explode into camp. Lorca's symbolism - the white stallion, the green dress, the poisoned well vs a river - is poetic and direct but it is also trite. 

Parsa stages The House of Bernarda Alba in black and white, evoking a melodramatic women's picture from the equivalent time period, but without the zip and shading of a Davis or Crawford. When a phallic stage light slithers from the ceiling to illuminate a dinner scene, or the jump scare sound of the stallion's hooves against the barn door, needing to break free and breed, shakes the theatre's foundation, the play sparks to life. When the entire cast cheerleads the jubilent bloodthirsty stoning of an unwed mother, it is schematic instead of shocking. Not that the cast playing the daughters - Lara Arabian, Monica Rodriguez Knox, Nyiri Karakas, Elizabeth Der and Theresa Cutknife - are ever less than exemplary, it's just that drag queens would have made more sense. Humanizing the characters, giving them three dimensions, making pawns into flesh and blood, gives an unfortunate misogynistic edge to the proceedings.

Top billed Beatriz Pizano as Bernarda Alba is imperious and, exerting a prima donna's force, she almost manages to make the malevolent matriarch frightening. Her exchanges with her maid Rhoma Spencer crackle,  the two understand that the contrast between repressive ambition and earthy pleasure is more important than the dialogue. Pizano is ramrod straight, her spine unbending as the play revolves around her, while Spencer sprawls in a chair or powers the set changes at her own pace. Spencer and the other milti-hyphenate servant Soo Garay manage to turn the opening exposition into mild comedy, if only the entire play had been allowed to boil into farcical horror. At the climax, as propriety trumps humanity in the most horrible way, Pizano chills by revealing a mere sliver of doubt in her resolve. A brief glimpse of light being snuffed out. A crack in a diva is more terrifying than an army of caged women in heat.