The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden

Everyone knows what happens when an impotent old man takes a voluptuous young wife, and it happens in Federico Garcia Lorca's "erotic allelujah"--five times on the wedding night alone, with "representatives of the five races of the earth" successively taking the part of the third party. But this time the old dance ends with an ensanguined emerald dagger, a "glowing branch of precious stones." Lorca's fifty-minute experiment in refurbishing the materials of farce into something approaching tragedy has been hailed far and reasonably wide as a fully realized masterpiece, but on the cramped makeshift that serves the Poet's for a stage it is more intriguing in its oddity than telling in its power.

Don Perlimplin wears his horns with a difference: he gives up his life trying to plant a soul in the "white and soft trembling body" of his wife Belisa. But he is not planted deep enough in our affections for his sacrifice to be moving, and he emerges half a conventional figure of farce, and half a not-quite-realized concatenation of subtleties. As for Belisa, she has hardly any psychology at all (in fact the play turns on the attempt to endow her with some); until near the end she is the undiverted incarnation of open, intense eroticsm.

The play's mood is a ripely romantic one of bloodred cloaks and nights "of mint and lapis lazuli." The comic side of this romanticism is sometimes mildly funny, as when Perlimplin appears with a huge and very palpable pair of horns, but at other times it comes dangerously close to the chi-chi. The more sombre effects come off better, before they turn merely routine near the end. Some of Judy O'Keeffe's langorous, amorous murmurings as Belisa ("I have felt your warmth and your weight, delicious youth of my soul") strike notes somewhat reminiscent of the Song of Songs.

Lorca's romanticism, however, is directed as much to the eye as to the ear, and the Poets' little loft is simply too small and too ill-equipped for the sustaining of the necessary mood. Victor Gabriel Junquera's direction is decent enough, but he gets nowhere toward surmounting the insuperable. Miss O'Keeffe has the requisite ability to be erotic without self-consciousness or coarseness; Judge Springer as Don Perlimplin gives a good performance in a realistic vein, which may perhaps not be the right vein. The supporting performances hover in the neighborhood of adequacy--but Don Perlimplin seems to require a superb production in order for it to be much more than merely peculiar.

By arriving at the Palmer Street atelier half an hour late, it is possible to miss The Last Word, or What They Say about It, which precedes Don Perlimplin on the program. This might not be a bad idea, although James Broughton's more-or-less Ionesconian whatzit does not last long enough to get really boring. I liked it, for some reason, when Mr. Rusty Augenblick turned to Mrs. Dusty Augenblick and said, "You're Dusty Millstone, the apple-cheeked girl on the Airedale farm," but the rest is mostly discontinuous burble of a fairly low quality. Mrs. Dusty is played by Margery Gitter, who is a good deal more interesting to watch than the play deserves; Jack Rogers goes on impersonating Mr. Rusty (doing it well, as near as I could make out) long after a less conscientious actor would have chucked it and gone home. The setting is "the Last Chance Bar at the end of no passing zone," and the topic of discussion is the end of the world.