Word: yerma
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...Yerma is largely a women's play. Director Bar-Hillel says that she selected it for performance in part because she wanted to take advantage of the often under-utilized "pool of talented women at Harvard," and this she has succeeded in doing. The actresses in the play's supporting roles do not fade beside Jirmanus's splendid Yerma but instead complement her and each other, bringing a multitextured and vibrant life to the text's potentially flat and symbolic set of characters...
...flexible features and resonant voice of Devin Moriarity '98 lend extraordinary character and strength to the self-assured, smugly knowledgeable elderly woman to whom Yerma turns for advice about her infertility (in fact, Moriarity's delivery is so powerful that at times the echoing acoustics of the Old Library, unfortunately, cause her lines to be drowned out by her own voice...
Nina Sawyer '01 provides a luminous foil for Yerma's intensity in Maria, a village friend of Yerma's who is lucky enough to be blessed with children--and to possess neither Yerma's depths nor her demons. Kate Arms assumes a commanding presence as the most cruel of the washerwomen who gossip about Yerma's barrenness and cast aspersions on her fidelity, but she is equally comfortable in the sympathetic, backgrounded role of Dolores, the witch-woman who provides Yerma with ancient pagan remedies against infertility. Even the minor players bring sparkle and depth to their characters: Kristen Rolf...
...major men's roles are also capably filled. Juri Henley-Cohn '00, who plays Yerma's husband Juan, strikes an admirable balance between his suffocating passion and his painful self-restraint; his performance's major flaw is that, in moments of high emotion, he tends to rip through his lines too quickly to make them entirely comprehensible--a shame, given that so much of the richness of this play derives from the poetry of its dialogue. Dan Berwick '01 does an excellent job in the smaller role of Victor, apparently an object of Yerma's repressed desire; the performers' hesitation...
...there are other elements in Yerma which make the play luminous. One of them is Garcia Lorca's astonishingly beautiful poetry itself; its delicate images and startling metaphors are rendered effectively by a cast which, with few exceptions, is capable of delivering the words without succumbing either to melodrama nor to the temptation to suffocate the lyricism out of embarrassment...