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Article on LIFE IS A DREAM

Sunday, January 28, 2007

A 'Dream' revisited
Director and translator see relevance and beauty in the masterpiece of a Spanish playwright.

By PAUL HODGINS
The Orange County Register

Pedro Calderón de la Barca isn't a name that sparks instant recognition, even from theater know-it-alls. The 17th-century Spanish playwright wrote well over 200 works during his long and productive career, but unlike Shakespeare, Calderón was writing mostly for a select audience: the court of Spain's King Philip IV.

Even his universally acknowledged masterpiece, "Life Is a Dream," is more read and talked about than performed. The only recent major American production was held at Brooklyn's BAM Festival in 1999.

That kind of obscurity is just fine with director Kate Whoriskey and playwright Nilo Cruz. Whoriskey is directing Cruz's new translation of "Life Is a Dream" on South Coast Repertory's Segerstrom Stage; it begins previews this week.

"I'm a purist; I like to have my own personal response to the material," said Whoriskey, an associate artist at SCR whose work there ("Antigone," "The Clean House," "The Caucasian Chalk Circle") is often characterized by bold visual and thematic concepts.

Whoriskey once watched other versions of a Shakespeare play she was going to direct. "It didn't work. What happens is I'll go, 'Oh, that's a good idea, this is a good idea.' I like to come up with my own thread. If I see a great piece of theater that's a (production of) a classic, then I don't want to do it."

"I like to start with a clean slate," said Cruz, a busy Cuban-American playwright whose "Anna in the Tropics" won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. "I speak Spanish, so I looked at the original script. There were a couple of editions that had slight changes here and there. But I wasn't interested in looking at other translations."

Cruz saw a staging of "Life Is a Dream" years ago in Miami. "I was a very young man; it was before I was involved in theater. They were really trying to honor the play. People were dressed in fur. It was in the original Spanish, which is like Shakespeare – it takes me a few minutes to adapt my ear, then I'm fine."

Whoriskey had never seen a production. "I just read the script and got really interested," she said. The play's themes struck the director as potentially resonant to a 21st-century American audience. "It's about fate and revenge and what it means to be a good or a bad leader."

At first glance, the story seems set in a universe completely removed from the here and now. Calderón placed the action in Poland, which was then a far-off and exotic locale for a Spanish audience. Whoriskey and Cruz are less specific about the setting, but they have chosen to make it otherworldly. Walt Spangler's sets feature jagged, blood-red mountains, hovering celestial objects and a huge, menacing bird.

"It's set in an entirely fictional landscape," Whoriskey said. "We're not pulling from any one area. We're making our own vocabulary."

Born under a bad sign
In his review of the 1999 production, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley described "Life Is a Dream" as "part morality play, part fantastical allegory and part gut-grabbing revenge tragedy, with a cosmic sweep that looks back to Sophocles and a pointed, playful awareness of theatrical illusion that anticipates Pirandello." Dense, obtuse, full of repetition and odd subplots, it defies easy staging.

Calderón was inspired by the age-old philosophical quandary about life's waking and sleeping moments. How do we know what's real and what isn't? When does life begin and dreaming end?

The play's plot is as strange as anything Shakespeare ever devised. Segismundo, a prince, has spent his whole life in a barren jail cell because his father, Basilio, a firm believer in astrology, is convinced that his offspring will turn out to be bad news. According to his life horoscope, if Segismundo ascends to power he would bring doom to the kingdom.

Nearing the end of his life and reign, Basilio finally decides to set Segismundo free. The young man is drugged, brought to the court, and restored to royal splendor. But his vengeful behavior seems a strong confirmation of astrological predictions, so he is returned to his cell and told that his brief visit to the palace was all a dream.

Like most plays of the Spanish Golden Age, "Life Is a Dream" is crowded with subplots, minor characters and romance. Whoriskey and Cruz have kept most of those details, although they did cut Calderón's script liberally.

"There is a lot of repetition," Cruz said. "It's not a short play. But when I worked on (Shakespeare's) 'Taming of the Shrew,' there's a whole segment that's left out at the beginning." Whoriskey pointed out that "Hamlet" and "The Tempest" are frequently trimmed as well.

"I feel that Nilo had a real respect for the playwright that I didn't share at first," Whoriskey said. "At the workshop I said, 'We've got to change that ending. It just doesn't work.' He said, 'No, we can't just change it. We have to work within certain parameters.' "

The ending has been altered, but carefully, the director said. "In the original, it's basically about being able to triumph over your emotions. I think we are living in a time where emotional truth leads you to the right intellectual decision. We've been tweaking that ending so that it's not jarring for our audience."

No horses, please
One major alteration Cruz made was ignoring Calderón's rhyming couplets in favor of free verse. "I've never liked rhyme. And what I wanted to do was maintain the fluidity that it has in Spanish without going into rhyme. When one is doing a translation for the sake of rhyme, one loses the context of what the characters are actually saying. I wanted something that was a little more modern-sounding and yet maintained the eloquence and beauty of the language."

Though Whoriskey describes the play as "a parable for modern America" in several respects, she has been careful not to make the parallel too overt. "In rehearsal, we put a hood on somebody and I said, 'Whoa, that's Abu Ghraib in a way that's so bald, and it pulls the audience into trying to make an association at a moment when the story should stand on its own.' We're constantly coming up against the issue of how much (the audience will) infer."

The director also found that while the play is full of opportunities for humor, it has to be used judiciously.

"How you go from one moment to the other is essential. In rehearsal I thought, 'Oh, this part will be funny,' and it was. And then I put it up against the previous moment and realized, 'This is awful because it undercuts the weight of the scene.' "

Whoriskey made some curious discoveries about the play's dream sequences. The concept of dream vs. reality is crucial to the plot, but the difference between the two worlds isn't as clear as she initially thought.

"The play goes in and out of dreamscape all the time. l discovered the dreams aren't just when it says, 'This is a dream.' The moments that are supposedly real, there are dream sequences hidden inside of those, too."

Whoriskey promises that her production will do justice to the play's grand scope and Calderon's heroic and sweeping vision. But there are practical limitations. The play opens with a spectacular scene of runaway horses – something that any theater director would find challenging.

"I've seen horses portrayed beautifully on stage, but the effect is always really expensive. To spend all that on something that just lasts a moment is a waste." She smiled. "But I do include a riding crop!"

Cruz isn't new to the challenges of translating and adapting Spanish classics. He has worked on four other plays, including two by Federico Garcia Lorca, often considered the most difficult modern Spanish playwright to translate.

"I really try to honor the writer. I love Lorca very much, and I learned a lot about language in translating his work. When I was doing my first translation of Lorca, 'The House of Bernarda Alba,' I found that most translators don't honor his language. There's a very simple line: 'Pepe el Romano camina con la luna,' which translates as 'Pepe el Romano walks with the moon.' It's often translated as 'Walks by moonlight.' Well, that's pedestrian." Cruz showed his disdain with a shrug. "But to walk with the moon – that's beautiful and very theatrical.

"People sometimes don't trust what the writer is trying to do. You just have to pay close attention, that's all."

LIFE IS A DREAM at South Coast Repertory's Segergstrom stage. Previews begin Friday, February 2nd. Opening night: Friday, February 9th. Closing night: Sunday, March 11th. More info at: www.scr.org, or call: 714 708 5555

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