2013 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, Chamizal

De burladores y burlados

The National Park Service and Los Paisanos de Chamizal added a new twist to the 38^th Siglo de Oro Drama Festival in El Paso—a matinee—as the festival’s final performance. Presented at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 10, and featuring Morfeo Teatro Clásico in a “Compilation of Comical Interludes” billed as De burladores y burlados, this innovation was a resounding success. The audience proved large and lively, responding to the three-member troupe from Burgos (who presented their absorbing El coloquio de los perros on Saturday night) with enthusiastic applause during the performance and eager questions during the well-attended mesa redonda that followed.

How did Morfeo achieve this triumphant finale to an impressive festival? How did three actors transport an audience across four centuries for ninety minutes, when such feats of captivation eluded other compilations recently seen at Chamizal (such as 2012’s funny but uneven collage of one-act plays, Tiempo de Carnaval, and 2011’s stylish but emotionally empty collection of monologues, Entre clásicos anda el juego)? The keys to De burladores y burlados’s success become evident in the compilation’s clever incorporation of context, in the troupe’s expert manipulations of performance text, and in the show’s instructive strategies for creating and exceeding audience expectations.

De burladores y burlados dramatizes the birth of a theater company—the historic partnership formed by Antonio de Escamilla, María de Quiñones, and Mateo de Godoy around 1650. The performance opens with Escamilla (played by director Francisco Negro) discovering that all his actors have gone AWOL and attempting to recruit new talent from the audience (“¿No hay cómico en la sala?”). He soon encounters out-of-work thespians Quiñones and Godoy (played by Mayte Bona and Felipe Santiago) and hears them audition with a burla in which Quiñones persuades Godoy to impersonate a chicken and creates the illusion that he has laid an egg. Then Escamilla sets his new company to work rehearsing a repertory of one acts. The setting is a convincing corral de comedias, evoked by pieces of period furniture that move against a beautiful backdrop, painted by Ricardo Blackman. The costumes are a gorgeous collection of period clothing, copied by Mayte Bona from paintings and museum pieces and housed in a handsome trunk, center stage, where actors don new characters in full view of the audience and in time to recorded classical music. The production’s show-biz storyline, authentic look, and transparent theatricality work together to contextualize the script’s eclectic parts. Every element in the compilation—each occasional poem and one-act play imported from the Siglo de Oro, plus the dialogue that Morfeo has created to connect them (written in Golden Age rhythms)—gains resonance from this rich context.

In the hands of this talented cast, play texts take on new dimensions, too. Four one acts form the core of the new company’s repertory: Lope de Rueda’s El rufián cobarde, Luis Quiñones de Benavente’s La ronda and Don Satisfecho, and Bernardo de Quirós’s El muerto. Each play within the play sparkles onstage, thanks not only to the quality of its playwriting (which wins it a place in Morfeo’s “más elegante selección del teatro burlesco del Siglo de Oro”), but also to the liveliness of Morfeo’s performance choices, which respect the stageworthiness of these scripts too deeply to treat them as museum pieces. Under Negro’s inspired direction, these entremeses become master classes in comic characterization, memorable blocking, and effective editing. Real-life husband-and-wife team Negro and Bona are particularly skillful at endowing characters with mannerisms that instantly identify them as comic types while clearly connecting them with enduring cultural anxieties. For example, in Don Satisfecho, the story of an unlikely engagement that unravels when the bride-and groom-elect challenge the genuineness of each others’ luxuriant hair, the prissy walk and precious diction that Negro uses to introduce the title character prepares the comic climax by stirring anxiety about Satisfecho’s sexuality (how...