In 2003, Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his magnum opus “Anna in the Tropics,” making him the first Latino to win the prize. Only a year later did he produce “Lorca in a Green Dress,” a unconventional work that flirts with the absurd and, at points, metatheatre. However coy the drama may be to understanding, it can be said that the California State University of Bakersfield troupe this past Friday at the Dore Theatre has taken a play that was difficult and likely to offend your sensibilities (Especially if you haven’t seen Samuel Beckett or Luigi Pirandello performed) and made it enjoyable to watch.
The play begins when the poet Federico Garcia Lorca awakens from his murder in a “Lorca Room,” a specialized and guarded chamber of purgatory. This is a station that we learn Lorca has earned for his endeavors on earth, his poetry, which caused his readers to turn a fresh eye to experience. This is unlike the cast of characters that he meets in the afterlife who are condemned to play the role of different aberrations of Lorca’s personality. There is a shrill-voiced youth who is echoes Lorca’s childhood. There is a mute Flemenco dancer and thuggish man who are emblematic of Lorca’s nefarious aspect, and a man in a green dress who manages Lorca’s dreams and represents his feminine and sensual side. All of whom are actors in the Lorca’s afterlife drama trying to help him understand his mortality and his soul’s evolution.
How Lorca perished and was thrown into the “Lorca Room,” and what he is to do being wrapped in the conundrum as he is.
In flashback scenes from moments of his life and death, we are told that Lorca was gunned down because he was suspected of being a communist in 1930’s Spain, then under the fascist thumb of Francisco Franco. And this very well could have echoed the poet’s demise, for his death is still veiled in enigma. The poet in the drama is forced, again, to stand trial and defend himself from the charge of being a red, which he whimpers and denies in the afterlife. Further, we discover that Lorca has been condemned to this limbo world for forty days, and that, in order to ascend into the higher spiritual realm, he must attain a certain amount of points. However, how points are won and how you attain them, we are never told.
At one point, the poet begs to return to his earthly existence only to find that his parents and sister cannot acknowledge his wraith. At another, he relives the time he spent with Salvador Dali and his sister on the beach in his youth. The afterlife itself is at one point likened to a surreal Dali painting, then to a play. Since Dali paintings tend to lack the logic and order, this is a rich analog by Lorca. Understanding eludes the poet, and the audience, like a cat does water. One can only wonder whether this is the desired effect?
Nevertheless, there were some terrific performances. Particularly notable were Zachary Gonzalez, who acted the terrorized Lorca, and Hudson Sanders, who played the embodied thug of Lorca’s personality. Throughout the play Lorca was crazed, nervous, sad, and Gonzalez’s performance was thoroughly believable. Sanders mastered the slick and smug sort of 30’s gangers who had the movements and cheekiness down near perfect.
