Word: ovejuna
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...have this fab boyfriend who I really like a lot, but there's a problem. His extracurricular activity is theater. Specifically, tech stuff. As a result, I go with him to every single play that goes up at Harvard. Every single one. "Heidi Chronicles." "Fuente Ovejuna." "Merlyn." "No Second Troy." "La Cage Aux Folles." "Deathtrap." You name it, I've seen it. I'm running out of "Opening Night" clothes. Why couldn't he be on the hockey team or be on the U.C. or even The Crimson? or even a capella, for God's sake! I'm sick...
Written in the first years of the 17th century, Fuente Ovejuna stuns the audience with its precocity. Lope de Vega pokes fun at P.C. euphemisms, impractical intellectuals, outmoded patriarchal feudalism and classist snobbery. He addresses what we though were 19th and 20th century causes celebres: social revisionism, empowerment of the masses, demogoguery, mob violence and group identity. Furthermore, his plot simultaneously explores the development of the nation-state in Spain, and its effects at an individual level. Lope de Vega's mature, witty, gutsy script presents these topics engagingly...
Dramatic crackerjack that it is, Fuente Ovejuna still lands its director in all sorts of difficulties. Lope de Vega sticks to the courtly writing conventions of his day: his shepherds display admirable eloquence, intellectual curiosity and a penchant for Socratic dialogue; his washerwomen have quicker wits and sharper tongues than Oscar Wilde, and all his characters indulge a fondness for spontaneous poetry in the throes of battle, rape and torture. Nor did the author subscribe to total proletarian emancipation: Subcurrents of aristocratic patronage and the social contract irk modern-day viewers. And the script deserves to be adopted...
Somehow, Fuente Ovejuna loses the serious dramatic atmosphere with which it began. Countless details, each insignificant in itself, conspire to undermine the production's credibility. The secondary sets look flimsy and unrealistic. The actors obviously fluff their lines. The lighting crew blunders, keeping the audience in the dark for a minute after the curtain calls. The director embellishes the wedding and decapitation scenes with radically inappropriate music and choreography. Gomez's severed head screams fake. The technical crew fails to distinguish between night and day, keeping the action in a perpetual half-light that isn't eerie so much...
...cast and crew of Fuente Ovejuna struggle valiantly with a difficult play. While the production contains the seeds of success, it loses its momentum in an embarassing regression to Christmas-pageant style gaffes...