Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, a seamless blend of poetry, music and dance, is full of the colorful passion and violence of its author’s short life. The play will be performed this weekend by the Oberlin Theater Department as the final piece in a month of Lorca, which also featured a series of poetry readings and film screenings devoted to the prolific Spanish poet.
Director and professor of theater Mirla Criste turns Lorca’s strange tale of romance and revenge into a breathtaking visual and musical experience for the viewer. Set in the Spanish countryside, the tragic story involves a woman who abandons her fiancée on the day of their wedding to run off with her childhood lover. Supposedly Lorca was inspired to write Blood Wedding by an event that he read about in a newspaper article.
As the title suggests, the ending of this story will not be a happy one for the village. Lorca, whose opposition to fascism led to his execution, may have intended Blood Wedding as a metaphor for the decay of traditional values and way of life brought on by the approaching Spanish revolution. Just as in the play two deviant youths awaken their village from its innocent slumber, Lorca watched as rebellious Falangists tore the Spain of his youth to shreds.

What makes Blood Wedding so interesting is that it is an unusual mix of classical Spanish art and surrealist theater. Wishing to preserve traditional Spanish art in the face of modern trends, Lorca filled his play with native song, dance and poetry. Unfortunately, most of Lorca’s musical compositions were lost, so Criste wrote her own pieces for the production.

This haunting guitar music that flows through scenes in velvety wisps was by far the most beautiful and memorable aspect of her production. It is surprising that these pieces could have been written by someone without any formal musical training. According to Criste, who began writing music at the age of twelve, her compositions were inspired by everything from Filipino folk song to Celtic harmonies to Gregorian chants.
“I’ve included a plethora of genres in the music,” Criste said. “It goes along with my goal to explore Lorca’s universal themes.” Inspired by his budding interest in modern art, Lorca also included certain surrealistic elements in Blood Wedding. In 1929, the poet traveled from his sheltered country home in Spain to New York City, where he briefly attended Columbia University. Mingling with eccentric artist types, Lorca was dramatically influenced by the modernistic aesthetic values he encountered in America and incorporated them into his art.

Hints of magical surrealism creep gradually into Blood Wedding as it progresses. An ominous figure wearing a rat mask sniffs about the stage at key moments, and the moon is a creepy white figure that dances above the set and gazes hungrily at certain characters. Both symbolic figures become more prominent later in the play as things begin to spin apart.

In general, the acting was very good. Particular standouts were juniors Katya Metha as the bride, and Duncan Gale as the father. But one gets the sense that in Lorca’s work characters are merely vehicles for his art. The dialog was pure poetry that was sometimes hard to follow, but quite rewarding once carefully examined.
The set is purposely very minimalist. Senoir set designer Meagan Forney kept the props simple and natural looking to reflect the influence of nature in the lives of the villagers. In constant motion, the characters and set spin about the stage to the cyclic rhythm of the guitar music.

In the end, Blood Wedding leaves the viewer with a sense of wonder and awe at the artistic power of its author.
“I can only hope we’ve done (Lorca’s) extraordinary play some justice,” Criste said.