Blood Wedding” is not some kind of teenage slasher film, as the title might lead one to believe, but a play about passionate love so doomed that in every page of the script the images of death lurk forebodingly. It was written by none other than Federico Garcia Lorca — possibly the greatest contemporary Spanish playwright — four years before he was executed and thrown into an unmarked grave at the orders of the Franco Regime.
In a medium with many creative forces working toward one end product, the star of this production is without a doubt the director: second year master of fine arts student Gerardo Jose Ruiz. True to his emphasis on Spanish and Latin American work, Ruiz has come out with a bold directorial vision in his first departmental graduate production at UCSD. He takes Lorca’s original poetic play (translated in this adaptation by Langston Hughes) and transforms the musical text into words that dance out into the audience through the vessel of the actors’ songs and the musical accompaniment of guitar and violin (Ruiz is credited as a composer). To read the play is one thing, but to see and hear the lyricism in such a palpable rendition is the only way to do justice to Lorca’s work.
Jennifer Chang, in her last year of the UCSD MFA acting program, shows her growth through the mature performance of Lorca’s elegantly grieved Mother. Onstage a figure of fresh youth, Chang gradually takes us in with her rendition of an aged woman who has seen the blood of her husband and children spilled before her. Throughout the play, she speaks of her wish to scream out at her sadness, but does not. But when her last son is brought back lifeless to a tomb, she does finally scream — not excessively, not hysterically, but with a genuine torment that Chang earns from the audience, expressing all the pain of a woman robbed of the dreams of her life.
The counterpoints to Chang’s performance are A.K. Murtadha and Teri Reeves, who play the forbidden lovers Leonardo and the Bride. The bodies of the two hopelessly bound yet unconsummated youths seem to have invisible strings pulling them together whenever they appear on stage, whether together or not. The audience is left with a feeling of torment: wishing for both of them to fall naturally into each other’s arms, but resting uneasily with the imminent death and sorrow that this embrace would bring.
The most wonderful and chilling scene occurs as the lovers are on the run in the forest, and a fervent beggar (Quonta Beasley) who symbolizes the force of death, asks the moon (Mark Emerson, who plays multiple characters) to light the sky so the lovers will be caught. As the stage fills with blue-white light, we hear the unnerving instrumentals playing not songs, but selected sounds — a bow running across the violin, a string plucked on the guitar — that make us shiver in despair for the two lovers caught under the exposing rays of the moon.
Don’t be dissuaded by the title — no slasher film could evoke the gripping passion and bone-chilling doom in this play.
“Blood Wedding” runs until Nov. 12 at the Mandell Weiss Forum.
