Word: casona
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Alejandro Casona, author of The Jacaranda Tree, currently running at the Tufts Arena Theatre, has led a life as eventful and passionate as any character he has created...
...Casona was born 53 years ago in the Asturias country in northwest Spain, but left home at an early age to attend high school and college in Murcia and Madrid. Imbued with a flair for the romantic and an avowed democrat politically, he was an ardent supporter of the Republican government in Spain and used his rapidly developing literary talents to aid its cause. After service in various important cultural positions, he was forced to flee the country in 1937 in the face of approaching Fascist armies...
Since that time he has lived in Argentina and produced some nine plays, all of which exhibit the optimism, poetry, and drama that have endowed his life with a richness beyond what his Spanish environment could warrant. From Casona's early ventures in poetry we see in all his later work a romantic, fictitious atmosphere, sprinkled with metaphors and emotional stimuli...
...kidnapping moral? Is deceit laudable? Does the end justify the means? The answer is yes in the fantasy world offered by the Tufts Arena this week: the New England premiere of The Jacaranda Tree, by the 53-year-old Spanish playwright Alejandro Casona...
...many of his other plays, this one is a comedy-fantasy with serious underpinning; it is a sort of religio-moral allegory in which people "practice charity the poetic way" by doing "welfare work for the soul" through illusion, collusion and delusion. The idea yields an intriguing story, but Casona tends to create character stereotypes instead of individuals (even introducing irrelevant personages for their gimmick potential in act one). Although Casona may at times hammer his points too strongly, he has sprinkled the play with witty epigrams, e.g.: "But, Grandmother, architects don't build old houses-time does," or "When...