Daniel Ostling is known throughout the theater world primarily as a set designer, though he's also designed costumes and lighting, too. But now Ostling is making his Chicago directing debut with the 1933 tragedy Blood Wedding for Lookingglass Theatre.
Blood Wedding is Ostling's favorite play and he has long identified with its gay author Federico Garcia Lorca, who was executed in 1936 by fascist forces amid the Spanish Civil War.
"It was like I had this artistic blood brother in Lorca," said Ostling about his first exposure to reading Blood Wedding on a flight while crossing Lake Michigan. "I had such a sort of visceral, immediate reaction as if someone had plugged me into the wall with his words."
Ostling has been an ensemble member with Lookingglass since 2003, and he is famed for his collaborations with Tony Award-winning director and fellow Lookingglass ensemble member Mary Zimmerman. Their projects range from the Chicago-to-Broadway transfer and revivals of Zimmerman's Ovid exploration Metamorphoses, to an upcoming new production of Dvorak's tragic fairytale Rusalka at the Metropolitan Opera.
Despite his long track record, it took some convincing on Ostling's part ( plus a few artistic retreats and workshops ) for the Lookingglass artistic brass to let him direct and design a production of Blood Wedding.
Ostling had only made his directing debut in 2011 for Two River Theater in New Jersey on a production of the revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Yet that assignment largely came about when the original director dropped out late in the game due to health reasons.
"It put the production in a strange position because my set had such a singular point of view that it would have been an uncomfortable thing for another director to walk into," said Ostling about his first crack at directing. "I just had the greatest time. I felt very at home and it felt really what I had been doing for the past 30 years as a designer, but it felt wonderful to have total control."
To research Blood Wedding, Ostling took a couple of trips to the Andalusia region of Spain to soak in the location and atmosphere to Lorca's rustic tale of lust, betrayal and revengeful murder. Nonetheless, Ostling decided not to use the play's original Spanish setting.
"When you do an older play, you try not as a museum curator to put onstage what someone has written but actually find the vibrating core of a play and make that as powerful as you can," Ostling said. "I was trying to find a way to make it more immediate."
So Ostling has reset his Blood Wedding to California's Central Valley in the late 1930s. He instead wanted Chicago audiences to hopefully have a closer sense of recognition to the drama.
"It needed to be rural and it needed to be a place where people were connected to the land and a place where there was real heat," Ostling said. "It's also a place where these different cultures came together—Mexicans from the south and refugees from the Dust Bowl and the settlers and Asians from the East. That created a very unique moment in time like Andalusia where you had the Moors from the south, the Roma people from the east and the Catholics from the north."
To help bring about his vision of Blood Wedding, Ostling is reteaming with costume designer and fellow Lookingglass ensemble member Mara Blumenfeld. He's also happy to have aboard composer Rick Sims, who is writing original music that is so crucial to Lorca's strange and symbolic lullabies that appear early in the play.
Ostling is also glad to be back in the Chicago area where he build his career as a designer and a professor at Northwestern University from 2003 to 2011. Ostling said he shocked many colleagues when he left his tenured position to move to San Francisco so he could live with his longtime partner, Leo Chang.
Ostling also revealed that he's taking fledgling steps as a playwright by adapting Andrew Holleran's 2006 novel Grief, which is about a middle-aged gay man mourning the loss of his mother. But now all of Ostling's attention is on Blood Wedding, and he hopes it will speak to many people, in particular LGBTQ audiences since he himself found such a deep connection to Lorca's life and work.
"The pain of 'the other' that [Lorca] felt as a gay man in Spain in the 1920s and '30s was not acceptable to the general population, so he uses this metaphor to find something that people can relate to—this pain of death that is universal and uses that to help the audience to understand the pain that he felt or any sort of marginalized people," Ostling said. "Not that [Blood Wedding] only works on that level, but I think anyone who is gay or lesbian who reads Lorca and his play will have a deep, profound sort of connection to these struggles."
Lookingglass Theatre's production of Lorca's Blood Wedding continues through Sunday, April 24, at Chicago's historic Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave. Tickets are $40-$75; call 312-337-0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org for more information .
