A visually dazzling, inventively staged production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s tragedy Blood Wedding, performed by a mix of 16 female and nonbinary Emory University students and professional actors, runs until November 19 at the Mary Gray Munroe Theater on campus.
The script, translated by the poet Langston Hughes and adapted by Melia Bensussen, addresses how perpetual cycles of violence plague people who seem incapable or unwilling to escape the doom caused by knives and weapons. The 1932 Spanish play’s argument is that we as a people have learned these deadly lessons over and over. How much loss must we sustain before we stop killing each other?
The topic is certainly timely, yet, sadly, there has never been a time in human history when it wasn’t relevant.
The way the play addresses these themes is through an emotional, compelling story of a doomed love triangle, yet the characters — only one of whom has a name — also speak poetically about the themes in an allegorical way.
This leads to a mix of performance styles on the stage. Some actors play up the dynamic emotions of their characters, while others seem to speak in proclamation about the general ideas, as though they are espousing moral lessons with detachment. The ones who fare best and draw the sympathy of the audience are the ones who enrich their characters with feeling, playing the story as well as its larger contexts.
The show opens with a young man (Ashley Alves) announcing to his chatty, overprotective mother (Dionna D. Davis) that he plans to marry a nice, pure girl (Andreanna Kitas) from a nearby farm. He also asks his mother for a knife so that he can tend to his vineyard.
The mother has cause to be concerned at both instances, for the boy’s father and older brother were once killed in this town by the knives of the Felix family. And the prospective bride once dated Leonardo Felix (Emma Clapp), though Lorenzo Felix is…
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