Fuente Ovejuna

Fuente Ovejuna – City Lit Theater

In 1476, in the Spanish village of Fuente Ovejuna, the villagers rebelled and killed the military commander using the village as his base. Don’t worry; he really, really had it coming. He harassed, kidnapped, and assaulted the women in the village, treating them as little more than livestock. If someone tried to stop him, he had them tortured. When the King sent an investigator to find out who murdered an official, the townspeople, even under torture, would only say that “Fuente Ovejuna did it.” With no one person he could prove a case against, the king pardoned the town. The play recounting these historical events was written by Lope de Vega in 1612, and this week, an adaptation of that play gets its premiere at City Lit.

While the source material is undoubtedly interesting, I found this one a little difficult to connect to at first. It has that patina of age that you find in a Shakespeare play. There’s the arcane and complicated European politics. There’s even a few characters digressing on the nature of love and justice, but without the familiar poetry or the more familiar historical events, the gap was a little harder to jump. More importantly, at least in the first act, I could still see the seams of the show. Even the most avante garde theater succeeds or fails in how well it makes the audience forget it is watching a show. For most of the first act, I was very aware that I was watching Actors Act in a Play. Once we get to the climax of Act One and into the surprisingly grisly Act Two, I was better able to connect to the characters and the story.

Several of the actors were quite good. Carolyn Plurad as Laurencia was particularly effective in creating a organic character who felt a part of the world the show was portraying. She delivers a searing speech to the men of the town for their failures that serves as the call to arms for their revolt, and especially in the intimacy of City Lit’s small theater, was quite moving. Val Garcia as Mengo was the comic relief, and another of the commander’s unfortunate victims, and by and large, he definitely succeeded in leavening the darker moments without derailing their momentum.

The center of all this, the Evil (capitalization is necessary here) Commander, played by Varris Holmes, is a bit harder to analyze. In this, the Golden Age of Television, complex-antiheroes and layered, tragic villains are a dime a dozen. Not the Commander. He is simply…evil. The idea that theater should look as close to real life as possible is a fairly new innovation, and in both the period the original play was written and when it was set, characters were much broader. They weren’t the meticulously sketched human beings in an Albee play; they are characteristics given form. In a modern work, it’s fun to identify with the villain, sometimes against your will because the performance is so charismatic, and sometimes with your cooperation because their story is tragic enough, even in light of their actions, to gain your sympathy. With the Commander, there is no such nuance. He is a malevolent force, nothing more, nothing less. The problem is that he gets about half the stage time in the first act, and at least as a modern theater goer, it’s hard to invest in that when it takes center stage. I saw the show with a friend, and he commented that in a Shakespearean tragedy, the villain gets a monologue to give you some kind of insight and that kind of writing was part of what made Shakespeare so innovative. Without something to latch onto to either add depth or simply break up the landscape, the Commander becomes a bit of a drag on the story, rather than the source of the drama. Holmes is clearly a good actor, but I don’t think he quite found a way to make the Commander more than two-dimensional, but with that said, I’m not sure if any actor could.

By the time the show reached it’s surprisingly bloody climax in Act Two, you are absolutely rooting for the Commander to go down, but that’s all I’ll say on that point because I want everyone else to be as surprised as I was. I’ll end by pointing out the sad timeliness of the show. After dispatching the Commander, the villagers will be tortured in the ensuing investigation. The world didn’t care that the Commander was kidnapping and raping women on their wedding night, but it will care that the peasantry rose up against their betters. The parallels to the way our society treats perpetrators versus victims of violence against women should not be difficult to find.

The show clocks in at 80 minutes, including the intermission, so there is not much time to comment on the events of the story; there’s just enough time to present them. I think that works to the show’s benefit, since it leaves the analysis to the audience to do on its own. While I continue to think the first act somewhat uneven, the show as a piece was an interesting and unexpected, but ultimately enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.

Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented January 4 – February 17 by City Lit Theater Company, 1020 W Bryn Mawr, Chicago.

Tickets are available in person at the box office, by calling 773-293-3682 or by visiting www.citylit.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.