Yale Repertory Theatre’s Lydia: Tales From Telenovella

David Begelman

Yale Rep, under the artistic stewardship of James Bundy, has had the admirable foresight to enrich its schedule of productions with the works of promising Latino playwrights. It produced Jose Rivera’s Boleros for the Disenchanted in 2008, while Lydia, its current production, is Octavio Solis’s dramatization of events in the Mexican-American Flores family of El Paso during the 1970s. The city is the playwright’s birthplace, as well as a border town that at the time reflected many of its ethnic tensions. Lydia had its world premiere last year at the Denver Center Theater Company, to outstanding reviews.

All the same, one wonders whether the family drama that unfolds during the course of Mr. Solis’s play centers on issues unique to Latino communities. The characters might have been any ethnic minority without substantial forfeiture of dramatic intent or purpose. That they speak Spanish tells you something about their lineage; it tells you nothing about why things happen the way they do in the Flores family. And happen they certainly do.

As drama, Lydia has an unfortunate tendency to have the problems of family members not only intensify (often unbearably) over the two and a half hour duration of the play, they appear to tumble out of nowhere at a steady, yet furious pace. It’s as if some infernal engine were churning out distress at breakneck speed. 

 Claudio, the paterfamilias (Armando Durán), is a night-shift cook who is alcoholic, surly, and abusive. When not stuck in his T.V. chair with headphones, he’s browbeating or assaulting family members, like his sensitive younger son Misha (Carlo Albán), an aspiring poet, or retreating to his bedroom in a snit.

Misha’s budding literary talent on occasion shows promise: “A tear from each eye lay on my pillow to make the moon jealous.” Not bad.

Themes of family disarray swirl around Ceci (Onahoua Rodriguez), a girl left gravely disabled, tremor-ridden, and aphasiac after a car crash before her 15^th birthday, her quincea nera. She had been hiding in the back seat of a Pontiac driven by the boy she loves, Alvaro (Christian Barillas) and her brother, Rene (Tony Sancho). She wound up with the car wrapped around a pole.

Ceci is most of the time confined to a pallet on the floor, except when she rises from it to transform into a wraith-like embodiment of what she really feels inside her spastic exterior. One emotion is unfulfilled sexual longing.

Naturally, all family members are guilt-ridden over Ceci’s tragedy, while other epiphanies over gay-bashing, screaming fits, physical assaults, and sudden revelations about homosexuality follow each other breathlessly during the second act. As if to underscore the theme of sexuality gone amok coursing through Lydia, the curtain falls on Misha doing something incestuous with his stricken sister: a tableau the demonic would die for. Misha evidently feels he has to rise to the occasion in order to satisfy his sister’s sexual longings.

The eponymous Lydia (Stephanie Beatriz) is a character who first seems to be a ray of sunshine in the life of the Flores family. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, she enters the household as a maid who turns out to be a skilled cook born to put the home in order. She even strips plastic wrappings off lamps, to provide better lighting in the living room. Tending to Ceci in a nurturing way, she has the gift of divining the girl’s inner thoughts and sentiments, as if she had aptitude in brujeria.

Lydia’s dark side is not long in coming. Out of nowhere she starts a sexual relationship with dad, further alienating him from his self-sacrificing and devout wife, Rosa (Catalina Maynard). Rosa’s faith in spiritual healing is coupled with negligence over administering Ceci’s medication, much to the chagrin of brother Misha.          

The overall effect of Lydia is one that leaves the audience wondering what other nasty surprises will be sprung during the course of the play. The latter showers you with enough brutal family melodrama to last a lifetime (or at least as long as an extended run on telenovella). You can be battered with concussive narrative just so long, before the result is tedium—precisely an upshot of Lydia.

All performers in Mr. Soli’s play are accomplished; their burden is a script that has them hauling some pretty heavy material around in a never-ending, and calamitous bout of darker telemundo fare.

Juliette Carrillo’s direction is accomplished, and Beth McGuire’s Vocal and Dialect coaching lent an authentic aspect to the Latino lilt of English. Jesse Belsky’s Lighting Design had a sameness about it in most group scenes, although put to advantageous use in Ceci’s transformation into her glowing, articulate self.

Although this reviewer was seated in the middle of the house at Yale Rep, some of the dialogue was difficult to hear. The playbill was helpful in translating several idiomatic Spanish terms spoken in Lydia, although longer passages of dialogue in this language tended to disadvantage audience members who are not bilingual.

When one of the characters asks Rosa why misfortune seems to be the lot of the Flores family, she responds, “ Why? There is no why.” Spirituality sometimes makes a good point.  

 

Lydia opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street on February 6 and continues until February 28, 2009. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at (203)-432-1234 or online at yalerep.org.

Website of the Connecticut Critics Circle, www.ctcritics.com. 

 

 

Richard II at Yale Repertory: Mounting Larks and Shrieking Owls

David Begelman

            Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, authored around 1595, is the first in the Henriad, the tetrology of plays including Richard II, Henry IV, part I, Henry IV, part II, and Henry V. The play is written completely in blank verse, unlike other of the bard’s dramas varying poetry with prose passages. This might be a key to understanding its meaning, since the soaring poetry has an underbelly: a saga of royal ineptitude, treachery, and backbiting that come close to being unparalleled in the canon. Only the down and dirty tricks of Richard III exceed those of this play’s monarch in royal scurrility.

Nor are some of the other principal characters in the play above reproach in this regard. Their lines are gorgeous, often ending in a rhyming couplet; yet they turn on one another as if language was out of keeping with the world sponsoring it. The play consequently maintains a poetic decorum atop the grubbier realities in which its characters are enmeshed. 

Ironically, Richard’s poetical bent waxes more sublime the more his royal position deteriorates. Close to assassination, he intones: ”—of comfort no man speak /. Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, / Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes / Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.” Poetry doesn’t get much better than this. Maybe Richard would have been better suited to a life in a modest garret with quill and parchment, rather than inherit the English throne.

Richard is a bit of a spoiled brat. He ascended the throne in his youth, and when events go against him, his principal existential mode is whining. He has little inkling of what it takes to be a king, much less a realistic grasp about how to survive in such a role. One reason for this is that he hews to the doctrine of the divine right of kings (a medieval philosophy strains of which survive today in national leaders convinced they are heaven sent). Richard cannot bring himself to realize that even royal prerogatives have to be informed by politically sensible acts. Monarchs can be toppled if they don’t watch their regal step. Richard will have none of this. Insouciantly, he puts his foot in his mouth every time he opens it. He is also not above a distasteful sense of humor. As his uncle John of Gaunt lies dying, Richard, relishing the prospect of appropriating the old man’s wealth, spurs his entourage to the sick bed by wisecracking: “Come, gentlemen, let’s all go visit him, Pray God we may make haste and come too late!”

            Throughout the play, Richard’s penchant for making enemies never comes up for air. He banishes Henry Bolingbroke for a crime he himself has perpetrated: the death of another uncle, the Duke of Gloucester. He levies burdensome taxes, rents out English land, confiscates the wealth of noblemen like John of Gaunt, and, like an arrogant Coriolanus, downgrades “courtship to the common people.” Even the fratricidal King Claudius in Hamlet knew the power of commoners; it was precisely this consideration that stayed his hand against murdering Hamlet on Danish soil.

To top off the stupidity, Richard elects to invade rebellious Ireland, leaving an opening back home for his enemies to gather forces against him. Henry Bolingbroke, who has amassed an army of sympathizers and has embraced many—including commoners—is a shoe-in for becoming the next king of England, Henry IV, after Richard abdicates and is later assassinated in prison. Bolingbroke feigns shock at the murder, and undertakes a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to atone for an act for which maybe, just maybe, he pretends to be ignorant.

Yale Repertory Theatre opened its fall season with the play. The production has its ups and downs, as does its lead actor, Jeffrey Carlson, in the title role. It also has its eminently watchable moments. Mr. Carlson plays Richard as an effete, temperamental monarch, a plausible interpretation of the role. However, he overreaches when his Richard becomes distressingly campy. The affectation is more noticeable at the beginning of the drama than it is during the deposition scene, Richard’s farewell to his wife, Queen Isabelle, or in his prison monologue. Here, Mr. Carlson is more emotionally connected, projecting real anguish rather than frivolous mannerisms.

In general, several of the experienced troupers in the cast turned in more satisfying performances than other featured players. These included George Bartenieff as Richard’s uncle, the Duke of York, and Alvin Epstein as John of Gaunt. Ironically, both actors play characters who have reservations about King Richard’s reign or about rebellion against his duly constituted authority. They were believable in their roles, while Mr. Epstein, as the ailing Gaunt, delivered the famous celebratory speech about England with persuasive ardor. This reviewer was particularly taken with the cameo appearance of Caroline Stefanie Clay as the Duchess of Gloucester. She turned in a focused, taut, and emotionally calibrated performance, one more impressive than her hyperkinetic characterization when doubling as the Duchess of York.

Other actors turned in either lackluster performances or, as in the case of students at the Yale Drama School in minor roles, somewhat stilted ones. In their case, difficulties in managing Shakespeare’s verse was apparent. Caitlin Clouthier, as Richard’s spouse, Isabelle, was an unfortunate case of garbled dialogue: because of her accent, very little of what she said was understandable, although she graced the stage physically. Director Evan Yionoulis seemed to have difficulty staging scenes with only two or three actors. These usually involved minor characters who milled around in static postures, even as they exchanged dialogue charged with dramatic moment.

The production had the advantage of an impressive lighting design by Ji-Youn Chang, commendable sound design by Sarah Pickett and original music by Mike Yionoulis. Scenic design often paralleled a disconcerting symmetry in blocking actors: stage right and stage left groupings frequently seemed like mirror images. Nonetheless, Brenda Davis’s set was impressive, with ingenious use made of shifting levels of metal platforms. Of striking interest was the installation of ten illuminated effigies, presumably of deceased monarchs, stationed at the higher reaches of the set. At the end of the play, Richard’s body in the form of a similar prone effigy is raised slowly above the stage, with stunning visual effect.

Melissa E. Trn’s costume design was imaginative, although its restriction to predominantly white and beige tones seemed anemic for a period in history when  pageantry was often lavish in coloration. While the light touch highlighted performers against the black upstage backdrop, the attire of the royal entourage, especially during opening scenes, was more like what one might expect in the castle kitchen, not the throne room. Ms. Trn’s costumes were well coordinated and imaginative in design to be sure, but their achromatic cast made one long for a spot of color, a hankering relieved in the third scene by Richard’s red cape, along with blue cowls of several court officials.

Richard’s assassination at Pomfret castle involved another directorial stretch: he is beset by a team of hooded figures with spears he attempts to stave off in a choreographed brawl remarkably strenuous for an overindulged potentate. (The text indicates Richard is felled only by Exton, although it also mentions more than one murderer, permitting Ms. Yionoulis to go hog wild with numbers of assailants.) The contest ends, of course, with Richard succumbing like a stuck pig, although the necessity for a band of gothic ruffians to do him in made what should have been a simple whacking (as it was for Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III) seem like a caper from Star Wars, or a tumultuous rumble in some futuristic video game.

Richard II is reputed to have intrigued Queen Elizabeth, especially around issues of succession. The play was also a favorite of the magisterial poet, William Butler Yeats. Theatergoers might follow the example of these two worthy predecessors, and familiarize themselves with the play at Yale Rep before it closes.

Richard II opened on September 13 and plays throughout the week until October 13 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT. Performances are at 2 pm and 8 pm, Tickets are $35 to $58 for reserved seating, and can be purchased by calling (203)-432-1234.