A Limited Vista 

¡Bernarda! 

The new production by Teatro Vista at Steppenwolf’s intimate 1700 Theatre, ¡Bernarda!, is a play by Emilio Williams based on the classic Andalusian drama by Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, La Casa de Bernarda Alba.  

The play, both Lorca’s original and Williams’ streamlined, one-act version (I am reluctant to call it an “adaptation,” as Teatro Vista’s own press materials eschew this term) concerns an elderly, very traditional Andalusian woman named Bernarda Alba, just widowed for a second time and perhaps beginning to lose her grip, and her four daughters (downsized from five in the original.) There are no men onstage in this play, directed by Wendy Mateo, though male influence and dominance is a central theme.  

The story concerns the discord, jealousy and violence that ensues when, immediately after the death of the family patriarch, the eldest daughter, Angustias — the inheritor of a fortune from Bernarda’s first husband —becomes betrothed to a dashing local fellow named Pepe el Romano.  But Angustias’ younger, prettier and healthier half-sister, Adela, has other ideas, and acts on them. The other daughters have their own notions about Pepe.  Marriage is seen as an unassailable ideal by mother and daughters alike, even though, it is cynically asserted, “15 days after the wedding, men abandon the bedroom for the table, and then the table for the tavern.”

All of this is taking place even as the iron-willed matriarch attempts to keep herself and her daughters confined to their home, and in an extended period of mourning.  The pressures generated by the volatile intermixture of youthful sexual passion and ancient tradition lead to inevitable clashes.  The last such conflict is a truly lamentable one that may remind audiences a bit of the tragic misunderstanding that brings Romeo and Juliet to its devastating conclusion. 

¡Bernarda!, co-produced by Steppenwolf, is a completely woman-centric play, and a woman- and femme-centered production.  But the play itself is not particularly “feminist” in nature, except in the limited sense that a male-dominated Spanish society has ineluctably created a family of women that has extremely limited opportunities outside of marriage and motherhood, and that is obsessed with vanity, cupidity, virginity and tradition.  

Indeed, through much of the play, Bernarda and her daughters seem focused mostly on money and looks (there is much talk of ugliness) to a Kardashian-like degree, and on the supposed appeal of Pepe el Romano.  This is no doubt historically accurate — and one wouldn’t wish for an anachronistic, PC version of the original play in which the women somehow are able or willing to confidently reject the patriarchy and tell Pepe to go to hell — but it does call into question both the need for a modernized take on Lorca’s classic as well as what has actually been modernized at all, other than some elements of the set. (There has been a recent version of Lorca’s play set in modern-day Iran; now that sounds interesting.) Not having re-read Lorca’s drama in connection with this review — and assuming few if any other audience members will have done so either — one is left questioning the necessity of this new take as opposed to a fresh production of the lengthier and more nuanced original play.  

One of the elements this abbreviated version leaves out is much sense of what village life was like in the extreme south of Spain in the pre-Franco summer of 1936.  The set — a small grouping of canted walls upon which slowly moving images of landscapes are projected — seems too rudimentary to evoke much at all, though the costumes, by Sarah Albrecht, are attractively designed.  And the acting is, at times, surprisingly pallid and passionless and, here and there, seems a bit under-rehearsed.  

Teatro Vista has a rich, 33-season history of presenting predominantly Latino-focused theatre, including many world premieres.  I saw their wonderful production of Anna in the Tropics at Victory Gardens Theatre and the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.  Compared to these great productions, and to the expectations raised by the other past work of both Teatro Vista and Steppenwolf Theatre itself, ¡Bernarda!  comes across as rather less ambitious than one could have wished for, and a bit flat and perfunctory.  

Somewhat Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented by Teatro Vista Productions at Steppenwolf Theatre’s 1700 Theater

Tickets are available at teatrovista.org and at steppenwolf.org.

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