Blood Wedding: New York Director Channels Spanish Playwright’s Passion
April 30, 2009 • By Tim Chapman, The Breeze
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Consider a play synonymous with a puzzle. You need all the right pieces — the right playwright, the right director, the right actors and the right set.
All the pieces fell in place Tuesday in the premiere of Blood Wedding, directed by Victor Maog.
“It’s sort of like, oh gosh, Michelangelo,” said Maog, following the show at Latimer-Shaeffer Theatre, “when you choose the right piece of stone and from that emerges the beautiful thing. And I think we’ve gotten a chance to absolutely pick the right students.”
Maog, a New York City-based stage director, has met countless JMU alumni in all aspects of the big-city theatre business, so coming to Harrisonburg was a no-brainer.
“In the professional world, I’ve met some incredible alum of the school who are great artists,” Maog said, “but also unbelievable human beings, and so I knew that something was happening right, here at JMU.”
Knowing he would find the right students for one of his productions, Maog’s greater task was choosing the right play.
Blood Wedding, or “Bodas de Sangre,” is a 1932 piece written by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. The play centers around themes of jealously, strong familial ties, legacies and, perhaps one theme most reminiscent of Lorca, himself was suppressed feelings.
The Nationalist Party assassinated Lorca in 1936, as Spain was on the brink of civil war. While Lorca was considered one of the greatest poets of the time and a friend of surrealists like Salvador Dali, he never aligned with any political movement. It is believed that Lorca’s homosexuality played a role in the conservative party’s actions.
Lorca’s struggles with an unaccepting society and unrequited love, likely influenced the internal conflicts with characters in Blood Wedding.
“He wants to communicate a sense of suppressed passion,” Maog said. “What do you do when the world doesn’t allow you your free voice and true self? I think that is at the crux of it; when you want to sing and yet someone has a foot on your throat.”
To Maog, a great part of theatre is about desperation, and Lorca was desperate to express his feelings in some form. “I absolutely believe that he was a man that needed to tell a story of forbidden love,” Maog said. “And it translates directly to the play, even though it may not be a specifically homosexual stories, that’s when a story like this goes across all sense of belief… because no one actually wants to be knocked down for what they hope to achieve, which is a sense of living and a sense of happiness.”
The passion needed for Lorca-like expression was best exhibited in the role of the groom’s mother, played by junior Christie Steele.
Steele exploded in anguish and anger in scenes, including one where she backhands her son’s deceitful bride. She said Maog really knew how to light a fire in her and the other performers.
“A good director, you can see them in the their work,” Steele said, “and Victor just had this passion for directing and this drive to make the play wonderful and to really tell the story.”
In her best “victorism,” Steele vividly explained with her hands how Maog was so great about “pulling things” out of the actors.
Maog felt that the JMU cast really understood the play, explaining that sometimes “it’s on the nose and sometimes it’s just in the air.” He complimented Steele’s performance, calling it “searing.”
But Maog emphasized that it was the playwright’s voice, not his directing that was infused in the actors.
“My job as a director is to be an interpreter of their work and extend the ideas that they have to a 3-dimensional form,” Maog said.
And it looked easy as if Lorca was there Tuesday night, directing Steele and fellow performers.
“I think this play just speaks to people,” Steele said, “because it is a about something real and it is about passion and who doesn’t understand passion?”
Contact Tim Chapman at breezeeditor@gmail.com
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