2013 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, Chamizal

La vengadora de las mujeres by Lope de Vega

“Mi industria comienza ahora”: these words, uttered by Lisardo of Lope de Vega’s La vengadora de las mujeres, set into motion a charming reflection on love’s transformational power in the midst of heated intellectual debate, battles of will, and an unflinching redemption of woman’s place in seventeenth-century Spain. Lisardo, actually Federico of Transylvania, has his eye on Laura, a mujer esquiva more interested in bookish learning and the vindication of women than in choosing a partner for marriage. Aware of her fierce independence, Federico poses as a secretary, luring her with new books and delaying any direct amorous pursuit. As Laura begins to fall in love with her new debate partner, she finds herself negotiating her self-imposed identity as resident vengadora de las mujeres with a newfound one as lover.

The play, staged by Cambalache Teatro on Thursday, March 7, 2013, at the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, and directed by Francisco García Vicente, offers another ferocious female lead after last year’s staging of Antona García by the Grand Valley State University’s drama department. The trend is hardly incidental, given the rich tradition of strong female characters within Golden Age drama. Cambalache’s production featured visual vignettes, simple and true to the play’s historical origin, with period costumes and a minimal set of two benches and a set of vine and floral covered arches. Subtler aspects of their staging, nevertheless, made a gesture to the performance’s contemporary context. Between scenes, several pieces from Peter Breiner’s “Beatles Go Baroque” played, referred to as “los Beatles barroquizados” during García Vicente’s discussion of the performance earlier on Thursday at the AHCT conference. The Beatles’ invasion continued as Laura sang, instead of reciting, the verses that express her realization of her love for Lisardo to the tune of a slowed-down “Lady Madonna.” The idea came from Clara Ruíz, the actress playing Laura, as a way to demarcate Laura’s discovery of the positive aspects of romantic love. The performance’s nod to the twenty-first century came later, when the actors transformed their final dance into a sudden “Gangnam-style” tribute.

These extratextual moments were brief and not terribly invasive, insofar as the major portion of the staging remained faithful to the original playtext. The introduction of modern music and dance seemed to occur for the sole purpose of added entertainment value—for the fun of it. Other changes were more practical. The company chose to reduce the play to 95% of its original verses in order to cut down on repetition and long speeches and thus better sustain the attention of a modern audience. The roles of three servants were subsumed by the character Julio, Laura’s confidant, since these roles added little and did not merit the hiring of three additional actors. The play’s king became a queen, due to the gender distribution of the company. Finally, Camablache Teatro’s version of La vengadora de las mujeres created a character, representing a referenced hechicero, through brief appearances by the company’s head of dance, Antonio González.

González opened the play in this role, donning an ensemble of what amounted to tattered rags, a glaring exception to the company’s otherwise graceful costuming. He appeared again later to act out the enchantment of Julio, which causes Julio to fall in love with Alejandro when he passes by. The presence of the hechicero serves to veil the open depiction of homosexual desire from the stage, making it instead a joke that the other characters can chuckle over, particularly as Julio falls out of the spell and realizes his former confusion. The performance, by turning textual reference into a whole new enacted scene, seemed to intensify, rather than diminish, any such veil in favor of added visual flair and comical sexual enredo. Julio played the scene with notable camp, earning the most laughs from the audience. Though Julio pulled off excellent physical humor befitting his character’s frequent peanut-gallery comic relief commentary to...