Shotgun Players catch-up: Yerma, The Wolf Play, Hedwig & the Angry Inch

Not many performances for me this month so I'm catching up on some past stuff, starting with Shotgun Players. Their first show this year, Marivaux's The Triumph of Love, was wonderful (my write-up is here). The second play was Lorca's Yerma, & when the season announcement came out it was the Marivaux - Lorca one-two punch that made me decide to renew a subscription that I had let lapse during the pandemic. For years I have waited to see one of Lorca's plays on stage. I'm still waiting, because this mess didn't count as Lorca.

Yerma: The play was translated & adapted (emphasis on "adapted") by Melinda Lopez & directed by Katja Rivera. In her director's note in the program, Rivera mentioned that 1934, the year Lorca wrote Yerma, a play (to summarize baldly) about a woman frustrated by her inability to become pregnant, was also the year her grandmother died from complications of childbirth (the child also died). This coincidence led Rivera to move the location of the play from rural Spain in the 1930s to rural southern California in the 1930s. With all due compassion for the director's family tragedy – though I also have to mention that it is not something that is going to resonate for anyone outside of her family, which would of course include pretty much all of the audience – the relocation was this production's first major mistake.

Rural Spain in the 1930s was a place where the strictures of family (which encompassed those of Church & State as well) lay heavily on individuals. You were to do as had always been done, world without end amen; otherwise you were disgracing yourself &, even more importantly, your family. The United States, however, even in isolated rural sections, even in the 1930s, is a place where change – moving on, moving out, remaking yourself – is practically a cultural imperative. Moving the action from Spain to California undercuts the stifling conventionality of Yerma's society. It also makes nonsense of the ancient pagan remnants still holding on in the countryside: for example, the strange fertility ritual that the desperate Yerma goes to towards the end of the play. In Spain it seems like some atavistic survival of pre-Christian times, lying beneath the official religion, still surviving because it speaks to some weirdly deep need. Transfer that to the California hills & it becomes . . . what, exactly? Some kind of weird musical comedy interlude, complete with Victor, the young man the married Yerma is longing for, dressed in a silly looking bull outfit. (During this episode Yerma is wearing just a slip, & the performer had what I first thought was a large bruise on her upper chest, which turned out to be a large tattoo, which pretty much rules out any time other than the last 10 or so years. I will never understand why actors get visible tattoos.)

Earlier Victor had told Yerma that his family has been ranching in these hills for 100 years, which is pretty impressive by California standards but not so much by Spanish. In Lorca's play, when he announces that he's moving his herds to a different area, it comes as a seismic shock: people just don't move around that much, & his departure means Yerma's longings will never be satisfied. When he makes the same announcement in California, it doesn't mean much because of course he's moving to a better place – that's just what Americans do. This is one of many moments that fall flat because of the switch in locale.

Lorca's character The Old Pagan Woman has been renamed (which, under the circumstances, makes sense: what pagan past could she possibly represent in a community that came to California from someplace else?), & we completely lose the sense that she is somehow outside of Church, State, & Family, a remnant of an older order, one rooted in Nature & the body. Here she's just another one of the conventionally & frankly tediously bawdy women, only a little older than the rest of them. In Lorca's play, when she tells Yerma that her husband, like the rest of his family, is sexually feeble, it has the force of someone speaking truths no one else dares to speak. But in this version, it is another line that falls flat; based on what we've seen of Yerma's husband & their relationship, the description is way off base. In this version, we are told repeatedly that the two have a warm, loving relationship. Yerma feels deeply for him. He feels deeply for her! Juan (Caleb Cabrera) is a charming & sexy guy. He's very sensitive to her desire to get pregnant; when he suggests adopting a baby, it is a considerate & thoughtful approach, not a dismissive one. This version of the play opens & closes with scenes of the two having sex together, & they clearly have a playful, considerate, affectionate, & very physical relationship. & that's the second big mistake this production makes. But before I go into that, a little digression:

Years ago at ACT I saw a production of Hedda Gabler in which Judge Brack came across as very obviously a gay man – not a repressed gay man, but the kind of happy-with-who-he-is guy who would go on Bear weekends with the hubby & bring you a casserole when your cat died. He clearly had no sexual interest in Hedda or any other woman. It was so cozy when he called her "Miss Hedda!" When he urges her to think over the details of her involvement in Lovborg's suicide, there was no undertone of menace or threat; he sounded genuinely anguished as he urged her, "Think, Miss Hedda!" If this production had happened more recently I might have considered that they were experimenting with "queering the classics"; instead I sat there somewhere between amazed & amused: did they really not understand the sexual subtext there? How were they making sense of the ending if they didn't have Brack setting a blackmailing sexual trap for Hedda?

Something similar happens here with sexual subtext. (Are people in these less repressed times just unable to interpret these things? Do they have to be spelled out before people will see them, no matter how obvious they are?) Yerma's inability to become pregnant may well be due to how her body functions, not his. We don't know because apparently she never goes to see a doctor – something else that makes sense in rural Spain & much less sense in California, even in a fairly isolated rural area in the 1930s. The only way we can be sure it's her husband's responsibility is if he's not sleeping with her, or having only a bare minimum of sex. I feel I should put that sentence in italics. He & Yerma do not have an affectionate, loving relationship. They insist they "love" each other because that is what husbands & wives officially feel, & to feel otherwise, to long for the more virile Victor, much less to cheat with him, is an unthinkable violation of social & religious norms (unless you're the Old Pagan Woman, who looks askance at these oppressive formalities). Think of the family name! Unless you see that Juan is neglecting Yerma physically, the action of the play doesn't make much sense – &, indeed, it didn't make much sense in this version.

No one really seemed to know what to do with this play. Lorca's lean drama is padded out with various irrelevant excrescences, including some extended musical numbers. Another example: when Juan berates his sisters for not keeping a close enough watch on his wife, he mentions that they're eating his bread & drinking his wine without being useful. Bread & wine have a certain sacramental resonance in a Catholic country, of course, but also that's just what you mostly eat & drink in rural Spain. But the mention of wine apparently prompted someone to decide that Juan should have a drinking problem. There had been no signs of it before, but suddenly he's lurching around the stage in ever-increasing states of inebriation – until the end, when he's suddenly sober & he & Yerma realize this has all been some sort of misunderstanding (I guess?), because they love each other so deeply, so they reconcile (again, I guess?), & have sex again. Which is when she kills him by choking him to death. Why? (To Lorca's point, though not this version's: Juan would have to be a physically fairly feeble man if he could be choked to death so easily by his wife.)

Lorca wrote a swift tragedy about a woman whose sexual longings, represented by a regenerative, Life-Force wish for a child of her own, are thwarted by the crushing conventional pieties of Family, Society, & Church (probably in that order), with tragic results. This version is the meandering tale of a sexually satisfied woman who is not dealing in any realistic way with her increasingly nutty (&, I have to say, increasingly tiresome) obsession with getting pregnant (& her failure to do so, again, may be due to her physiology, not her husband's), which leads her to murder her husband, who is a considerate, attentive, & sensitive lover & companion. Why exactly am I supposed to sympathize with her rather than with him?

Another thing, about those conventionally bawdy women & the sisters who are supposed to monitor Yerma (a purpose that was not made clear enough or oppressive enough in this production): the director isn't the only one with family associations with this story; my father's side of the family comes from a very similar Latin culture to the one Lorca portrayed, & I am old enough to remember some of these women in real life. The notion that they were slyly subversive of gender norms & of "the patriarchy" is a contemporary American fantasy. They would not be sympathetic at all to women like Yerma; they were there to make sure she toed the line. That is why Lorca had to speak for her.

Usually Shotgun's outside murals do a wonderful job capturing the essence of a play. Here they showed Yerma blowing seeds from a dandelion puff with the tag line "Give me something to hope for." This seems . . . awfully soft for a play about a sexually thwarted woman who murders her husband. Did no one involved have the slightest idea what this play was actually about?

The Wolf Play: Written by Hansol Jung & directed by Elizabeth Carter, this was a bit of a disappointment. It started off strong, with a kind of metatheatrical speech by the boy who thinks he's a wolf (his personality split was portrayed by having the actor voice his thoughts while he manipulated a puppet who interacted with the others on stage). Maybe it started off too strong, because I was expecting something a little wilder than the more straightforward "issue" play we got. The basic situation is that the boy had been adopted by a couple who ended up having another child of their own & decided to unload the adopted boy via the Internet. He winds up with an interracial lesbian couple, one of whom is a professional boxer being trained by her partner's brother. Then the original couple splits up & the man decides he wants the boy back, especially once he finds out that the new family is same-sex.

Maybe if I were more familiar with what is apparently an actual thing that happens – people unloading adopted children via Internet chatboards? that seems only dubiously legal, but what do I know – then some of what happens would have made more sense to me. For example, there is a lawsuit at the end which was staged by having the participants (first adoptive father, the brother, the two women) yelling at & over each other. It was pretty effective but would have been more so if I'd had a clearer idea of the legal issues in play. I was also a little disappointed that the brother (Caleb Cabrera again), who started off making some excellent points to his sister, who is trying to figure out how to raise this new child, about how boys & men are treated & expected to behave in the world, & how he (the brother) can help the child with that, is turned into an easily manipulated, guys-should-stick-together guy once he talks with the original adoptive father.

The child takes a dislike to the brother, & it's not clear why, as the only person he's drawn to is the boxing member of his new family. Why would he resist the brother, who also boxes & was trying to bond with him? It's almost as if the child has to like the Black lesbian boxer because not to do would be uncool. (This notion is reinforced by seeing that the original adoptive father, a fairly dweeby white guy, is really put off by having lesbians raise "his" son – that's a surefire way to damn someone in the eyes of a Berkeley audience.) The other woman was the driving force behind the adoption, barely got her partner's agreement, & seemed to have little idea about what she'd do with a child once she had one; she just knew she wanted one. Maybe I had residual impatience from Yerma a few months earlier, but I didn't have much interest in or sympathy with her. Children are not toys for the mother's amusement! Mikee Loria was very good as the adopted boy, but the whole "I'm a wolf" thing started to drag over the course of two intermissionless hours; the boy just keeps saying, "Wolves do X" or "as a Wolf, I feel X"  & nothing develops or changes.

On the whole, not a disaster like Yerma but a bit disappointing.

Hedwig & the Angry Inch: The John Cameron Menzies / Stephen Trask musical, directed by Richard A Mosqueda. This turned out to be a pleasant surprise, & aside from the Marivaux, the best thing this season. I didn't go in with high hopes; I had seen the movie years ago & liked it, but the words "rock musical" are not ones that set my soul ablaze with excitement & I frankly didn't remember much about the show. Also, Shotgun tends not only to amplify their musicals (for reasons I don't understand: it's a small space; if your voice can't fill it you probably shouldn't be performing professionally) but to over-amplify them. I saw Hedwig on one of the nights when Chris Steele was performing, & a lively & thoughtful performance they gave. The band, Skip the Needle, was energetic & fun. The show was about an hour & forty minutes, no intermission, & before & after I ended up having a pleasant conversation with the woman next to me. She & her wife were visiting from Denver (I think they knew people in the band; they had bought tickets at the last minute, so the wife had one of the stage seats & the other woman was in the front row with me). All in all a very enjoyable evening. I don't have much more to say about it. I have a lot to say about the final play of the season, Babes in Ho-lland, & its audience, but that will have to wait as this is long enough already.