Samantha Lambert
Staff Reporter
Walking onto the strange and unsettling set of Blood Wedding seemed to be the proverbial hors d’oeuvre before the main course, the dramatic theatrical entrée.
Blood Wedding is a great play of dramatic events in rural Spain written by the Spanish dramatist, Federico Lorca. The play takes place during a usually joyful occasion, a wedding; a bloodbath ensues over passed grudges, passion, and love.
The audience sits around the perimeter of the main stage and the actors to perform on a defined stage in the middle of the audience. This set-up offers audiences a good view of characters’ faces at all times – no one has tot miss the deep-set emotion so many of these actors convey.
So many scenes of this play were executed with such a defined emotional voice and movement that the audience experiences the same events played out by the young actors. For example, everyone feels the pain of the Mother’s (Jen Solomon) grief over her dead family; most audience members can relate to the apprehension of the Bride’s (Colleen Alford) decision of marriage; and many people can relate to Leonardo’s (Chris C-Mo Molloy) conflicted feelings of love and passion.
Few people can escape feeling remaining actors and actresses’ dark acceptance of the spilt blood on a would-be beautiful day.
The character of death, a Man (Brandon Senter) and the Girls (Shelley Hierstetter, Britt Burr, Ann Hebert, and YiChong”Angel” Li) who depicted the moon put on a wonderful symbolic scene with the woodcutter Boys (Mike McNulty, Ryan Powell). The scenes symbolizes not only death, (death of the end of human life), but also the end of relationships. What is left? An endless, meaningless life.
Shout outs to Katie Cooper and Maggie Powell for their beautifully tragic foreshadowing lullaby, Julia Williams and Simone Davis for adding the touches of warmth when needed, and the beautifully played love scene in the forest between Miss. Colleen Alford and Mr. Chris Molloy.
Director Ron Miller said in his notes that the characters “descend into the darkness of human passion and compulsion.”
And they do — they really do so bewitchingly. Bravo.
