Sex and a Monster Mother Seething in Sunny Spain
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: March 7, 2006
"Seven Sex-Starved Women Found Festering in Sealed-Up Mansion!" Thus might a tabloid headline or a B-movie trailer sum up "The House of Bernarda Alba," Federico García Lorca's 1936 tragedy of repression in provincial Spain. This simple, sensationalist sentence also captures, more or less, the tone of "Bernarda Alba," Michael John LaChiusa's musical adaptation of the play, which opened last night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.
Not that this production, directed by Graciela Daniele and starring a miscast Phylicia Rashad in the title role, exactly courses with erotic energy or the sort of luridness that demands exclamation points. On the contrary, this latest offering from the prolific Mr. LaChiusa, already represented this season by "See What I Wanna See" at the Public Theater, often feels wan and weary.
But the show's central focus is unmistakably what can happen to women when they are deprived of the chance to pursue what comes naturally with the opposite sex. Much that is implicit in Lorca's text is made noisily and redundantly explicit. The all-female cast members are given to running their palms over their haunches, making strident noises suggesting animals in heat and solemnly singing, "My pains, mother, are not the pains of hunger." Yet the ominous, oppressive atmosphere that makes Lorca's poetic play so much more than a potboiler is mostly missing in inaction.
This crucial lack of tension comes in large part from the characterization of Bernarda herself, a steel-girded, cane-wielding, scandal-fearing matriarch who locks her daughters up in a house of mourning after the death of her husband. She has been memorably portrayed in London by such forbidding powerhouses as Glenda Jackson and, more recently, Penelope Wilton as a scary, proto-Franco Fascist in a mantilla.
In his rendering of her, Mr. LaChiusa has allowed empathetic access into Bernarda's heart and loins, so that she seems less a terrifying tyrant than a passion-singed victim of the husband who betrayed and humiliated her. ("You took my love, my love, my love/ And made me your whore!" she sings to his spirit.) This Bernarda responds wistfully to the hopeful romantic ditties of her servants, remembering that she too was once young and juicy.
This is not difficult to credit, given that Ms. Rashad — whose gallery of strong maternal figures ranges from "The Cosby Show" on television to her Tony-winning performance in "A Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway — looks pretty juicy herself in her widow's weeds. (Toni-Leslie James did the all-black costumes.) Generously curved and luscious-faced as she adjusts her capacious bosom or bathes her arms, she seems less her daughters' jailer than their secret competitor. And instead of conveying a dried-up martinet, Ms. Rashad brings to mind a generally jolly suburban matron in a bad mood.
The same mismatching of actress and role is evident in the portrayal of Poncia, Bernarda's earthy peasant housekeeper, by Candy Buckley, a slim, brittle woman who here vaguely suggests how Florence Henderson might look in a "Zorro" film. An even larger problem, though, is that neither of these talented actresses, and most of the younger ones who play Bernarda's daughters and servants, seem at ease with Mr. LaChiusa's brooding, flamenco-steeped score.
The music, though superbly orchestrated (by Michael Starobin) and played (by a finely coordinated ensemble led by Deborah Abramson), goes places that singers used to hard-sell Broadway pizazz cannot follow. The punctuating yelps; the wavering sustained notes in minor keys; the labyrinthine interior musical paths; the eruptions into antimelodic harshness — these are all more the stuff of mid-20th-century chamber operas than conventional show tunes.
The touchingly game performers, who include musical pros like Daphne Rubin-Vega (a haunting presence as the ugly daughter) and Yolande Bavan (as Bernarda's senile mother), inevitably stumble over such challenges. (It would probably take someone with the training and vocal variety of Audra McDonald, a prime LaChiusa interpreter, to make the songs take flight.) Even the percussive stomping and clapping that often set the rhythm for the numbers come across as self-conscious, a damning quality for a score meant to be visceral.
Sally Murphy, as the most naïve of the daughters, plies her crystalline soprano to winning effect in a sweetly sensuous account of watching a boy by a stream. And Mr. LaChiusa's softer variations on Spanish folk motifs, especially in the songs chanted by the servants as they clean, are lovely. The big arias of confrontation and recrimination verge on self-parody, as when Poncia sings, "You may lock us all behind your prison walls./ But who will you turn to when/ The house of Bernarda falls!"
Ms. Daniele's flamenco-ish choreography, too, sometimes leans toward the unintentionally comic. But her story-theater staging makes efficient use of Christopher Barreca's dramatically spartan wooden set, and she keeps the narrative clear, even when the performers double as other characters (including a randy stallion and a receptive mare).
What she does not achieve is the hypnotic aura of fatalism that would keep the audience riveted. Nor does Mr. LaChiusa's music, at least as sung here, avoid a nagging repetitiveness. This makes it all too easy to identify with Judith Blazer as the seemingly narcoleptic daughter who has a habit of nodding off as the women around her scrap and seethe.
Bernarda Alba
Words and music by Michael John LaChiusa; based on the play "The House of Bernarda Alba" by Federico García Lorca; direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele; sets by Christopher Barreca; costumes by Toni-Leslie James; lighting by Stephen Strawbridge; sound by Scott Stauffer; orchestrations by Michael Starobin; music direction, Deborah Abramson. Presented by the Lincoln Center Theater, under the direction of André Bishop and Bernard Gersten. At the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, 150 West 65th Street, (212) 239-6200. Through April 9. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Phylicia Rashad (Bernarda Alba), Saundra Santiago (Angustias), Judith Blazer (Magdalena), Sally Murphy (Amelia), Daphne Rubin-Vega (Martirio), Nikki M. James (Adela), Yolande Bavan (Maria Josepha), Candy Buckley (Poncia), Laura Shoop (Young Maid), Nancy Ticotin (Servant and Prudencia).
