Promotional Art for SOU Theater’s “Blood Wedding”, by Federico García Lorca
“Blood Wedding” is as lively as it is tragic, a play about small and jaunty family life in the Spanish countryside as much as it is a warning against violence and militant heteronormativity. The play centers around a young man, The Boy (Sean Glover) who is marrying the love of his life, The Wife (Joan Kathren), to the protests of The Mother (Artemisia Chargualaf). Unfortunately, The Wife is still in love with her childhood sweetheart, Leonardo (Isaac Glace, the only named character in the play).
“Blood Wedding” is musical. Throughout the entire thing, there’s a guitar Ensemble (Vincent Bohren, Nicolas Budde, Sara Cook) on stage right, just two feet from the first row of viewers, and theater observers will be impressed by how the music is used to control the audience’s gaze and attention. The mood of the play easily shifts from the joy of wedding time in the Spanish countryside to the embodiments of the Moon and Death bringing terrible tragedy on the cast.
The play is inspired by real life events in the life of Federico García Lorca, a Spanish playwright who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. None of the characters in the play, not even Leonardo and The Wife, are really evil at all but the circumstances and their beliefs about the world drive them to greatly destructive acts. The Mother’s devotion to her family’s honor and long grudge against Leonardo’s relatives, who killed her husband and other son, stops her from appreciating her living son’s wedding. Leonardo and The Wife’s inability to let dead dogs lie, meanwhile, sparks the play’s drama. Every character’s continued insistence that there is only one right way to run a family, love, and manage one’s household leads to gruesome, avoidable tragedy, all because of one tiny knife smaller than a man’s fingers.
The play reflects Lorca’s worldview. Lorca was an openly gay activist in both America and his native Spain, and the play was written in 1933, before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Other plays he wrote in rural settings that were similarly critical of repressive sexual culture and barriers to women’s rights in his home country (alongside “Blood Wedding”, “Yerma”, and “The House of Bernarda Alba”) drew the ire of many powerful people in Spain.
And in many ways his storytelling was predictive. Because of his views and artwork, Lorca was eventually murdered by the fascist Francisco Franco regime, which would keep power in Spain until 1975. However, his work survives anyway and is enjoyed by a wide audience across the world. The SOU Theater Department’s production, directed by Paul Barnes, is a particularly compelling adaptation, and since students get two free tickets they should take advantage while they can.
