The Speedy Rise and Fall of Fuente Ovejuna

Fuente Ovejuna

directed by Sarah Toby Stewart

on the Loeb Mainstage

through October 30

The cliche contends that the Spanish are a proud and passionate people; Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna hardly strives to dispel the stereotype. After a spot of flogging and rape foreplay, loopy Lope really gets the juices flowing with graphic onstage torture and decapitation. Gorier than "Commando," racier than "Emmanuelle on Taboo Island," Fuente Ovejuna makes for old-fashioned family fun. Yet for all its mainstage status, its interesting script and its many strengths, the Loeb production retains on overwhelming air of student drama of the cardboard shield and plastic sword school.

The play recounts two parallel plots which merge in the conclusion. While the peasants of the wee Spanish hamlet of Fuente Ovejuna groan under the rapine yoke of their wicked overlord, Fernando Gomez de Guzman, that same overlord joins in a rebellion against their Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella, of fifth-grade history fame. But in the spheres of both high politics and human resources, Fernando "Hubris" Gomez oversteps the limit, with positively diabolic consequences.

Written in the first years of the 17th century, Fuente Ovejuna stuns the audience with its precocity. Lope de Vega pokes fun at P.C. euphemisms, impractical intellectuals, outmoded patriarchal feudalism and classist snobbery. He addresses what we though were 19th and 20th century causes celebres: social revisionism, empowerment of the masses, demogoguery, mob violence and group identity. Furthermore, his plot simultaneously explores the development of the nation-state in Spain, and its effects at an individual level. Lope de Vega's mature, witty, gutsy script presents these topics engagingly.

Dramatic crackerjack that it is, Fuente Ovejuna still lands its director in all sorts of difficulties. Lope de Vega sticks to the courtly writing conventions of his day: his shepherds display admirable eloquence, intellectual curiosity and a penchant for Socratic dialogue; his washerwomen have quicker wits and sharper tongues than Oscar Wilde, and all his characters indulge a fondness for spontaneous poetry in the throes of battle, rape and torture. Nor did the author subscribe to total proletarian emancipation: Subcurrents of aristocratic patronage and the social contract irk modern-day viewers. And the script deserves to be adopted as the acid-proof test for actors, directors and technical crew: It calls for snap transitions from jovial wedding festivities to ghoulish capering around severed heads to whiling the day away on the rack. Even with cast and crew in high gear, the audience has to work hard at suspending the old disbelief.

The Loeb production starts well. A monumental village plaza impresses the audience with its scale and ambition. The radical foreshortening of the town hall does induce a momentary spate of seasickness, but for the most part the set inspires confidence.

Mark Fish, as the callous, sexually insatiable, unspeakably cruel Gomez sets the action rolling. He packs incalculable arrogance, sneering and self-satisfaction into every swaggering footstep. Fish balances deft comic timing with a chillingly impassive sadism.

Fish plays off the youthful enthusiasm and integrity of both Andrew Burlinson, as the spring chicken Master Knight, and Matthew Strack, as the starry-eyed peasant. Strack carries off the difficult role of infatuated youth and ardent revolutionary, whispering sweet but wholesome nothings into his love-muffin's ear at one moment, rousing the masses to glorious martyrdom in defense of liberty and justice the next.

Yvonne Roemer faces the same challenge, spiced with a pinch of rape trauma. She glides effortlessly from coquettish flirting to ranting bloodlust. She grapples with the most rhetorical speech in the play, and succeeds in varying her tone without reducing the dramatic crescendo.

J.C. Wolfgang Murad puts the wit into twit in his portrayal of Mengo, the village idiot. His buffoonery provides much-needed comic relief, but he rises to the manly occasion of preventing his cousin's rape convincingly.

The direction also begins promisingly. Sarah Toby Stewart marshalls her gaggle of country folk effectively, generating a bustling town-about-its-business atmosphere with relatively few people. She makes imaginative use of the mainstage space, and thinks carefully about the blocking of her cast.

But this thoughtfulness eventually takes on a mannered, self-conscious tone. The audience can see the actors rearranging themselves after every speech; meaningful glances are bandied around pointedly during the opening scenes a la Perry Mason, and Stewart won't surrender an inch of the theatre to dead space. The action studiously invades the left and right side stages and even the aisle.

The acting, too, begins a precipitous descent. On each successive appearance, Matthew Bakal, as King Ferdinand, becomes increasingly wooden. Jennifer Breheny interprets Queen Isabella as a Marie Antoinette-Queen of Hearts hybrid, gleefully discussing mass executions in the off-with-her-head mode. Kitt Hirasaki portrays the severe Master of the Order of Santiago like a spoilt schoolboy, ready to stamp his feet with frustration.

Somehow, Fuente Ovejuna loses the serious dramatic atmosphere with which it began. Countless details, each insignificant in itself, conspire to undermine the production's credibility. The secondary sets look flimsy and unrealistic. The actors obviously fluff their lines. The lighting crew blunders, keeping the audience in the dark for a minute after the curtain calls. The director embellishes the wedding and decapitation scenes with radically inappropriate music and choreography. Gomez's severed head screams fake. The technical crew fails to distinguish between night and day, keeping the action in a perpetual half-light that isn't eerie so much as confusing. A bizarre, frumpy flamenco routine lends little authenticity to the festivities. With all the resources available to a mainstage production, such blatantly amateurish lapses should be eliminated.

The cast and crew of Fuente Ovejuna struggle valiantly with a difficult play. While the production contains the seeds of success, it loses its momentum in an embarassing regression to Christmas-pageant style gaffes.