Playwright: Federico Garcia Lorca
At: Caffeine Theatre at the Athenaeum
Phone: ( 312 ) 902-1500; $15
Runs through: Nov. 20
The plays of gay poet Garcia Lorca ( 1898-1936 ) are easier to appreciate than to like. The tragedies cementing his theatrical reputation are intense, grim representations of repressive traditional Spanish society. His comedies are flipside burlesques of the Spanish code of honor. Dona Rosita or The Language of Flowers falls in-between.
Lorca loves and pities women. He's concerned with men only as they impact his female heroes. In Dona Rosita, set in well-to-do Granada, 1885 to1911, a vibrant young woman pledges her troth to an ardent cousin, who promptly moves to Argentina. In the ensuing years, he deceives her with love letters and a marriage-by-proxy but secretly weds an Argentine.
How could Rosita and her loving guardians—her aunt and uncle—be so trusting, so naive? Why not give the young man an ultimatum? Or sail to Argentina? Well, that's neither the Spanish way nor Lorca's way. Even among Granada's educated, women were so circumscribed that an honorable betrothal and perpetual virginity outweighed the shame of abandonment. For Lorca, Dona Rosita isn't a slice-of-life, but a poetic study of a hothouse culture, much of it in jest.
Dona Rosita features both obvious and subtle metaphor, plus the comic exaggeration of social satire. The obvious metaphor is Rosita's name, echoing a precious rose that blooms blood red in the morning and withers to white by sunset, shedding its petals. Lighting and costuming in this handsome production precisely parallel the floral metaphor.
Freshly translated by Caridad Svich and staged by Caffeine Theatre artistic director Jennifer Shook, Dona Rosita echoes Chekov with a vaguely discontented but inert leisure class that cannot shake off stultified routine to save itself. Only the feisty housemaid—the peasant—voices the truth. Flowers are 'sad things' that remind her of dead children, church altars and nuns. For all her slowly-fading life, Dona Rosita might as well be cloistered or dead; another passive victim among the many widows, spinsters and barren women who populate Lorca's plays.
It's more intellectually interesting than emotionally impactful. The production drips with visual and verbal atmosphere, and Shook paces it well with plenty of energetic moments—and too much male bluster—as various mostly-female visitors come to call. Still, it never comes fully to life despite being lively. Perhaps I lack sympathy for a social mindset so different from our own. Then again, Lorca is far more interested in style and theme than in creating deep characters. The trio of Bridget Dehl ( Aunt ) , Lisa Mauch ( Housekeeper ) and Dana Black ( Rosita ) are what's best about the show, as they should be.
Kevin Hagan's sunroom set and Joshua D. Allard's costumes are Off-Loop lavish. They aren't Spain circa 1900, but neither are they here and now. They suit Lorca's poetic and comic fancies.