La lozana andaluza

On February 27, 2014, Morfeo Teatro, under the direction of Francisco Rico, performed its adaptation of Francisco Delicado’s La lozana andaluza. Most companies that perform at Chamizal use seventeenth-century comedias as their performance script and express their interpretation of it through stage design, costuming, blocking, and other choices. Taking such a long and complex work as La lozana andaluza to the stage, however, required significant adaptation. The company’s approach to adapting it was to take scenes and motifs from throughout the source text, recontextualize them, and then piece them together to create an original play. Although Morfeo Teatro was fairly free with the creation of the script, other artistic choices reflected an intense effort to authentically recreate the sixteenth century.

The main action of the play consisted of three entremeses held together by a frame story in which Delicado, played by Rico, is serving out his sentence in purgatory for having written such a salacious book. He knelt on the stage at the start of the play and between each act, addressing the twenty-first-century audience and describing his experiences in sixteenth-century Rome. This effectively drew the audience into the play’s fiction, but sometimes his monologues seemed a bit too long.

The three entremeses, which were presented as flashbacks in relation to the frame story, followed a similar pattern of creating new situations based on material from the source text. In contrast with the over 150 characters in the novel, the entremeses featured only three characters: Lozana, her servant Rampín, and Francisco Delicado himself. In each of these entremeses, Lozana and Rampín played pranks on the rather gullible writer who had come to profile them for his book. The pattern for each prank was for Rampín to appear in disguise as someone requiring Lozana’s services, and in each case, her interaction with this pretend client is a performance meant to shock Delicado. In the first, Rampín appeared as a young nobleman anxious to lose his virginity with Lozana’s help. In the second, he was disguised as a mute pregnant woman. Lozana diagnosed the baby in her womb as missing fingers and ears and prescribed sexual relations in order to give it the missing parts. In the final prank, Rampín was dressed as an elderly black woman with indigestion. Lozana enlisted Delicado’s help in pumping the woman’s arms and legs in order to release the painful gases. Although none of these scenes was completely identical to ones from the source text, the pattern of prank-playing gave the production a cohesiveness that worked well on stage.

The Chamizal performance was this play’s American debut after a six-year run in Spain. While the audience seemed to find the scene with the elderly black woman wildly entertaining, there was also a detectable note of discomfort because of Rampín’s use of blackface. When one audience member raised this concern during the question and answer session after the performance, the cast was shocked that that would be considered in any way offensive. It is true that their use of blackface was not accompanied by the intense mockery of black stereotypes with which it is normally associated, so it did not come across as maliciously offensive. On the other hand, the lack of any commentary on racial attitudes, combined with the fact that the scene was of their own invention and not in the source text, made the use of blackface in a comic scene appear gratuitous.

Other than this misstep, Morfeo Teatro’s effort to reproduce the sixteenth century authentically, while at the same entertaining a twenty-first-century audience, was successful. The cast noted during the postperformance round table that the costumes were based on portraits by Titian, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci, with an eye for authenticity in every detail, including the movement of the fabric. Lozana’s dresses were particularly elaborate. The result was a sort of moving work of Renaissance art that immediately transported the audience to the period. The Renaissance masters also seem to be the inspiration for the set design, which consisted...