Nilo Cruz' Life is a Dream adaptation lush with color and poetry
Written: Feb 16 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A treat for all the senses
Cons: Actors weren't yet comfortable with the language
The Bottom Line: While there were a few disconcerting moments, Life is a Dream contains great pageantry in the tradition of Shakespeare and Marlowe--even when set on Mars.
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| Redlass's Full Review: Life is a Dream - South Coast Repertory |
Los Angeles is not a town that caters to the pop culturally ignorant.
As a person who has seen relatively few movies and who hasn't owned a television since the mid-80s, the actors I'm most familiar with are those who tread the boards in my home state.
Not that I'm complaining. I have a great passion for live theater and feel fortunate to be able to see three to four shows every weekend. Rarely do I see myself as being culturally deprived.
Then I do something like take a trip to Los Angeles. In the course of an 11-day arts journalism institute on theater and musical theater, I saw 10 live shows at theaters across Los Angeles. It was a whirlwind experience that left me with a great appreciation for the vibrancy of that art form you hear so little about out of Los Angeles.
What was amusing to me, though, was my utter lack of recognition of those stars who did make the crossover from screen to stage. It took my other fellows to point out that actors such as Alicia Silverstone, Len Lesser, and Jon Tenney, might be recognized outside of the theater for their roles in such places as Clueless, Seinfeld, and The Closer.
However, every so often I watch television while at the homes of my friends. Given the geeks that we are, science fiction is often the top choice. So while I haven't seen many episodes, I'm as familiar with Star Trek as I am with anything else on the small screen.
It was part of what contributed to an awesome experience here in Ann Arbor, Michigan earlier this year when I got to see Patrick Stewart with the Royal Shakespeare Company perform in the title role of Antony and Cleopatra.
It was also that show that gave me my only moment of star recognition while in Los Angeles.
Nilo Cruz
I was expecting one celebrity encounter on the final Thursday of the NEA fellowship. We were traveling down to South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California. Before the evening's show, we were to have a roundtable and dinner with playwright Nilo Cruz.
Cruz is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright who is one of the brightest shining voices in contemporary drama. Born in Cuba in 1961, he moved to Miami at age 9 and eventually became a U.S. citizen. He’s written a number of original plays as well as translated works from several classical playwrights.
I was surprised by his youthfulness and had I not known about his life, would have placed him in his late 20s.
Life is a Dream
That night was the final preview performance of a play that Cruz had adapted and translated, Pedro Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream. Originally written in either 1636 or 1637, it is a classic Spanish play set in Poland exploring free will versus fate.
It's a play replete with classic themes and motifs. The king of Poland, Basilius, believed a little too devoutly in horoscopes. When they claimed that his only son would bring him to his knees and make war against the country, Basilius broadcast that the child was dead and imprisoned him in the mountains. Like those Greek royals who came before him, such an action would come back to haunt him.
His son, Sigismund, was raised in a dank prison never knowing who he was or why he was imprisoned. Calderon gives him beautiful soliloquies about how even the birds of the air have more freedom than he does.
Meanwhile, Rosaura, an orphan lady who has been scorned by her lover dresses herself as a man to avenge her honor. She arrives at his jail cell just as Basilius decides to give Sigismund a day on the throne to see whether he can behave in a princely fashion. When he instead behaves violently, killing a courtier and attempting to rape Rosaura, he is drugged and returned to his cell. His jailer tells him that his day on the throne was just a dream. From there he must discover who he is and Basilius learns that fate is not so easy to escape.
An American Parable
In the roundtable, Cruz said he and Director Kate Whoriskey wanted to see the play turned into an American parable. Whereas their original reading of the translation was done with an all-Hispanic cast, they chose to diversify the cast for the full staging of the adaptation.
They also loaded it with surprises galore for anyone walking in expecting to see a traditional costume drama filled with sword fighting and pageantry. Granted, it was a costume drama filled with sword fighting and pageantry, but not in the traditional sense. The lights went up on a stage dominated by a large spiky, orange crater-covered mountain with two people in space suits rappelling down it.
The setting was far more foreign than Poland, set instead on an indeterminate planet in the unspecified future. It gave Whoriskey great freedom to take many creative licenses with the story, including the introduction of original music by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen.
The science fiction setting brings a universality to the themes explored in the play. It sheds its site-specific nature so characteristic of Calderon’s work and lets it transcend time and place. There are still some problem moments in it: You're left thinking that the wrong guy got the girl and wondering why the otherwise strong character of Rosaura would turn to the man who tried to rape her for aid.
Likewise, it is sometimes hard to take the mournful signing seriously when the rebel soldiers break out into a tap dance with their machine guns substituting for canes. It's almost as if Whoriskey is tipping her hat to the convention that this play is a comedy despite playing it as closer to a tragedy for much of evening.
The first act dragged at times and many of the actors seemed to still be getting used to the cadences of poetic language, declaiming them in the manner of inexperienced Shakespearean actors. Matt D'Amico, the servant-clown, had the most natural and comfortable of deliveries and brought a broadness to his role that was missing elsewhere. By the second act, the pace increased and the actors became more comfortable with the lushness of the language they had been given.
The South Coast Repertory production treats its audiences to vibrant, vivid pictures, splashing oranges, blues, purples, and reds across the stage. The costumes and flown-in sets are artistic and compelling. There is almost sensory overload as the eloquence of the poetic language is floated atop dramatic music and the pulsating set.
Joel Beers of the Orange County Weekly said it best:
Dance, music, poetry, flashes of lightning, pyramids of crab legs and drooping nets of black seaweed result in a swirling kaleidoscope of colors, sounds and images as stimulating to the eye and ear as it is brooding and poignant. For a play written so long ago to have such depth and resonance is a testament to the remarkable artistic talents of all involved, dead or alive.
It's a play I would gladly see again. It was like going to a spa for the mind.
Pop Culture Moment
So who was it that gave me my one moment of star recognition in Los Angeles? It was when Basilio walked on stage, a man who looked terribly familiar, especially in this science fiction setting.
It was Q from Star Trek. That is, John de Lancie.
Recommended:
Yes
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Redlass
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Member: Bridgette
Location: Lansing, Michigan
Reviews written: 526
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