Mentidero: El Chamizal 1998

MENTCDERO EL CHAMIZAL 1998 From February 27 through March 7, the twenty-third Siglo de Oro Drama Festival at the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas entertained a broader and more varied audience than has been usual over the past several years. In addition to students and faculty from various colleges and universities in Latin America, the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, the people of Juárez and El Paso—including children, their parents and grandparents—were regaled with a variety of dramatic presentations calculated to please a large and diverse public. The direction given to the festival during the administration ofthe former superintendent ofthe Chamizal, William Sontag, has fortunately continued. The festival is now drawing a broader audience including the youth ofEl Paso and Juárez. The late Everett Hesse, to whom, no doubt, every North American scholar ofthe Comedia owes some personal debt of gratitude, during his last three years in attendance at the Festival and at the Golden Age Drama Symposium stressed the necessity of bringing this work to young people, to children, as well as to students and serious scholars. He would have been very pleased to see many public school buses at the theater this year. Were there not children in the aposentos and in the cazuela of the corrales and in the salones de comedias ofthe alcázares and on the palatial estates of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Were there censors' decrees prohibiting children from attending the theater? Based upon the reaction of the young people in audience at the Festival this year, there is no doubt that even the most complicated capa y espada play, such as Tirso de Molina's La celosa de sí misma, staged on the first and second days of March by the USA Thalia Spanish Theater from New York, challenges inexperienced spectators to follow the intricate complications of plot and language until the Mercedarian makes it clear how a young woman, pretending to be someone else to escape her parent's censure by speaking in disguise to her gallant suitor, can allow her emotions to become so unruly as to turn her 117 118BCom, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Summer 1998) jealousy against herself. In spite oftheir obvious struggle with the language in verse, Thalia's actors succeeded in conveying Tirso's message to an inexperienced audience. For those who have seen very many comedias and developed a keen sense ofrecognition oftruly excellent performances, such as the former superintendent of the Chamizal, Franklin G. Smith, who is reported to have seen every Golden Age play presented at the National Memorial since the first festival in 1976, the work ofZampano Teatro from Madrid in bringing Calderón's El secreto a voces to opening night on February 27th left nothing to be desired. The most discerning fan of the Comedia left the National Memorial impressed. The Universidad Interamericana from Puerto Rico brought exuberance and humor to their performance of selected texts from Cervantes on March 3rd. The high school girl's dream of Don Quijote charging windmills to contemporary music was not exactly a comedia but the lanky actor performingfazañas left no doubt among the audience ofhis madness and engaged the young woman's sympathy enough to convince her to assume the role of Sancho Panza. The question the director Antonio Garcia del Toro presents the audience, however, is how to relate his company 's lively staging ofCervantes' entremés "El juez de los divorcios" and of his adaptation of Cervantes' novela "El celoso extremeño" to the young girl's transgression of gender barriers. By contrast, Venezuela's contribution to the festival this year in the Compañía Teatro-Canto Orofuego's recitation of another collection of texts from numerous Golden Age dramatists and poets to express the suffering that love can bring, a performance which they simply called "Las flechas amorosas," was, etymologically speaking, thoughtless. The lack ofdiscernment in the selecting and ordering ofthis recited anthology, the monotony ofthe theme, resulted in the talented actress who dramatized the pieces losing interest. Something very enlightening occurred in the Borderlands Theater and Pima Community College's production of Lope de...