Lookingglass' 'Blood Wedding' can't

canyou take Federico Garcia Lorca away from Spain? Can you remove this genius, arguably the finest dramatist of all time to work in the Spanish language, away even from the Spanish diaspora?

Those are good questions — and they'll likely dance in your head during the Lookingglass Theatre Company's new production of "Blood Wedding," Lorca's 1933 masterful fusion of symbolism, poetic agony and sexual repression. The director, Daniel Ostling, has set the piece in the United States, not among Latinos, per se, but in the kind of Dust Bowl, rural California world of "The Grapes of Wrath": all barren, brown, soiled, windswept space and monochromatic angst. We're not talking flamenco music. With original music by Rick Sims, this is more the world of Woody Guthrie.

I'm rarely given to blanket prohibitions — my stock answer to those very au courant issues of who has the right to tell whose story is "I would need to see the show." And you could well argue that Lorca, like Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams, has now become one of those universal poets whose works belong to no one culture nor, really, any of the groups into which we insist on dividing ourselves. And since the story — of a sexually ignorant young woman who is supposed to marry one sexually ignorant young man but who prefers a sexually knowledgeable married man who rides a horse — relies inherently on adherence to a restrictive social code and on physical isolation, you can see why Ostling thought this would be an interesting idea. After all, Lorca wrote his plays for an ensemble company, La Barraca, not unlike the way Lookingglass works.

But heading out into the night Saturday, I couldn't find a way in my head or heart to declare that this show in any way worked. The ideas are distinctive and the risk-taking admirable. But the show feels disconnected. And it rarely feels true.

This is not just a consequence of a setting that does not match the yearning poetry of the language, although it does not. Lorca was an earthy scribe, for sure, but his words also soared into the air. There is a verdant quality to his poetry that this conceit entirely misses. So, frankly, does this translation, which is by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata.

"Blood Wedding" by Federico Garcia Lorca at Lookingglass Theatre Company. (Liz Lauren photo / HANDOUT)

The deeper issue, though, is a lack of emotional connectivity among the actors, not all of whom are well cast. It is hard, for example, to believe that neither Helen Sadler (who plays the Bride) nor Chance Bone (The Bridegroom) have never known a member of the opposite sex. They don't read that way. And, from the other end of the dramatic scale, I similarly did not believe the supposedly magnetic, let's-risk-everything attraction between Sadler's reluctant Bride and Kareem Bandealy, who plays Leonardo, an old flame and the current object of her desire.

For this play to work, you have to believe that Leonardo and the Bride have had this forbidden date with each other from the beginning. It all has to be rooted in an incendiary mixture of innocence and desire. Alas, this is a production where the characters seem more fueled by a kind of impoverished desperation, which is just not the kind of soil that really allows Lorca to bloom. Add in some very grim pronouncements from Christine Mary Dunford's bleak-house Bridegroom's Mother and we get immediately trapped within a somber, harsh, unrelenting milieu that really telegraphs the terrible end to the story long before it arrives. To put that another way, the optimism of the piece, the sensual potential of the young characters striving for happiness, always feels crushed. Lorca is indeed writing of its bloody ultimate destruction. But we have to be allowed to hope.

When you add a lot of music despite a cast that is not really composed of singers, you've got further problems.

Related：http://www.sheindressaustralia.com/grey-bridesmaid-dresses

"Blood Wedding" is really about sex, as filtered through desire, morality and control. What else are these isolated characters going to do with their time? When they're young, they want it. As they age, they settle for controlling how the young do or do not get it, trying not to be left alone or impoverished themselves. Yet there is just nothing sexy about this show. Nothing. It's more like "Medea" in its gloomy inevitability.

I should note that the grim sobriety of my complaint here does not extend to all the visuals. This is, at times, quite a beautiful production — Ostling is one of the best designers in the Midwest — and there are some gorgeously rich and textured visual pictures on display, including some atmospheric but pinpoint collaborations with the lighting designer, TJ Gerckens. Visually, you can see where everyone was trying to go. But the journey has to come through the actors too.

Related：http://www.sheindressaustralia.com/one-shoulder-bridesmaid-dresses

Consciously or not, everybody on stage is playing the bloody wedding right from the get-go. Thus humor is in very short supply. Pity. I've always thought Lorca had a spectacular sense of self-actualizing fun.