2016 International Siglo de Oro Drama Festival

THE 2016 INTERNATIONAL SIGLO DE ORO Drama Festival ran from March 30 to April 2, and, while similar in scope to that of years past, this year's festival was distinctive in that it featured the American debut of a recently discovered play by Lope de Vega (Mujeres y criados) and marked the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes with a bilingual presentation of selected entremeses (Entremeses cervantinos). A new theatrical adaptation of La Celestina and a unique staging of Lope's lesser-known El príncipe ynocente, featuring the ñaque style of theater, rounded out the festival's program. The performing troupes hailed from Spain (Madrid), Mexico (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico City), and the United States (El Paso), performed in both Spanish and English, and contributed meaningfully to Chamizal's efforts to promote and understand "a culture which has had a significant impact on our own" ("About the Festival"). The following reviews reflect the diversity of staging, acting, and texts that make Chamizal's annual Siglo de Oro festival a perennial favorite among community members, academics, and theater practitioners alike.

Mujeres y criados: Lope's Recovered Comedy at Chamizal

In January 2014, Spain's National Library and the Grupo de Investigación PROLOPE of the University of Barcelona announced the discovery of Mujeres y criados, a long-lost comedia by Lope de Vega. (Lope most likely wrote the play in 1613 or 1614, almost exactly 400 years before its rediscovery.) The following month, Alejandro García-Reidy's article, which described the process of finding and authenticating the work, appeared, and in May of the same year, García-Reidy published the first edition of the play with Editorial Gredos. Sometime during those exciting months, Rodrigo Arribas received a phone call asking if his theater company, Fundación Siglo de Oro, would consider bringing the newly discovered work to the stage. Arribas and Laurence Boswell (Royal Shakespeare Company) directed the production, which premiered at the Teatro Español in Madrid on April 29, 2015. The troupe gave their 45th performance of the play in El Paso, Texas at the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama Festival on March 30, 2016.

The play opened on a dark stage. A church bell rang three times and then an acoustic guitar played a few bars of baroque music, which suddenly sped up and merged into rock music on an electric guitar. Throughout the show, the music, composed for this production by Xavier Díaz Latorre, surprised the audience and made it difficult to locate the work solely in the seventeenth century. Most frequently, music served to keep scene changes from dragging, and in his conversations about the play, Arribas revealed that the group intended to use the music to make the sets dance. Sometimes the music reflected the mood of a scene. Slow, deep, descending notes built suspense during a night scene and then became animated during a sword fight. When all turned out well, a guitar strummed happy notes, accompanied by castanets. At other times, ceremonial music marked a significant moment in the play and added a comic effect. Before the scene in which Florencio tried to force his daughters to drink acero (medicine to help with anemia), an almost sacramental music played as the servant Lope pushed onto the stage a small cart with the vials of medicine covered by a domed lid. As the sisters stepped slowly toward the dreaded potion, a drum beat the rhythm of an execution. Similarly, whenever Count Próspero entered the home of Florencio, fanfare music to announce the arrival of a dignitary heralded his visit.

Karmen Abarca designed the sets that "danced" to the music and all of the play's action developed in front of them. Her design, reminiscent of Golden Age trastos and bastidores, consisted of a flexible set of interconnected frames with double curtains hanging from each section of the framework. Three frames unfolded across the stage with the center frame decorated by a large, slightly nebulous family crest represented the count's palace...