Puro Lope

The closing night of the 2014 Siglo de Oro Drama Festival, held on March 2, welcomed a piece titled Puro Lope, a collaboration of the Spanish companies Cambalache Teatro and the Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático (ESAD) de Murcia, celebrating the work of the Comedia’s grand architect, Lope de Vega. Under the direction of Francisco José García Vicente, a seasoned veteran of the festival, the evening presented a pastiche of scenes chosen from eight of the author’s most memorable plays, including El perro del hortelano, El castigo sin venganza, El caballero de Olmedo, La dama boba, Fuenteovejuna, La hermosa fea, La discreta enamorada, and El anzuelo de Fenisa. Given Lope’s legacy of engaging stories, masterfully crafted language and complex characters, it would seem a tantalizing prospect for both audience member and performer alike to spend an evening doting on a few jewels from the collection. Sadly, while the evening began strong and did produce the occasional gem along the way, the performance as a whole ultimately failed to live up to its dramatic potential, suffering most notably from the lack of adherence to a clear, thematic focus and from the consistently undeveloped execution of characters and conflicts.

As any director will affirm, one of the greatest creative challenges to organizing a performance of collected vignettes, excised from their original settings, is arriving at a surrogate frame that will link each piece to the next toward a new goal. In this regard, the company wasted no time in positioning the play’s purpose as an exploration of Lope himself. The play began with a single spotlight penetrating the black void at center stage to reveal seven actors (four men and three women) tightly packed together, staring into the audience. Barefoot and dressed in white linens largely devoid of any reference to time or place, the ghostly figures seemed haunting, perhaps even menacing, as they leaned toward the audience with a lengthy exhale and uttered the opening lines of the play, sometimes individually and sometimes in chorus:

Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio. Nacido de Francisca y de Félix en noviembre de 1562. Fénix de los ingenios. Monstruo de la naturaleza. Hoy has muerto y estás cerca de alcanzar la paz de Dios. Pero, atendiendo a tus pecados y a cómo pagaste por ellos, nos envían a decirte que tu obra no ha resistido el fuego. Tus pecados no han sido todos ellos perdonados. Has muerto en la gracia y la amistad de Dios, pero imperfecto. Deberás recuperar tus vivencias y enfrentarte con tus miedos hasta que este doloroso estado quede resuelto.

The dispassionate, uneven and somewhat accusatory manner of the delivery contributed greatly to establishing an otherworldly tone, and, while in word at least it appeared that Lope represented the object of scrutiny, the use of “tú” combined with an unbroken gaze into the audience was enough to make the viewer squirm a little on Lope’s behalf.

By the end of the monologue, the group gradually dispersed to reveal an eighth performer, García Vicente in the role of Lope, kneeling upstage. He came to his feet and dictated what, in theory, would guide the rest of the evening:

¿De quién fuiste en ello? … ¿Quién es Lope? ¿Quién he sido? ¿Por qué hice tal o cuál cosa? Son preguntas de inconciencia. Yo no voy a responder. Mis actos hablan por mi y si alguno de ellos calla para eso están mis obras, mis personajes, mis ideas.

Remarkably, in the opening minutes of the performance, Cambalache and ESAD effectively proposed a unique and compelling frame for their pastiche: Lope will stand at the judgment bar of history with only his works to both defend and define him.

Nonetheless, as quickly as the members of the company identified a stirring framework for the performance, they just as quickly began to stray from it. Following his refusal to speak for himself, Lope did exactly that and launched into a lengthy monologue taken from the Arte nuevo, delivered entirely devoid of the passion or purpose of a writer on the...