Swami on the Legal Battlefield (Feature) All in a Day’s Work (in National News) Charter Amendment Proposes District Elections for School Board (in Bay Area News) Ultimate Diversions: Breath of Fire II (in Business) APA All-Star Snubs (in Sports) Universal Translations (in A&E) Emil Amok: Fame to the Rescue (in Opinion)

Chay Yew, award-winning playwright/ director/producer/ dramaturge.

Universal Translations

Chay Yew brings new depths to Lorca’s ‘Bernarda Alba’

By Terry Hong
Special to AsianWeek

Bernarda Alba, the title character in Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, makes Mommy Dearest look like an amateur. Alba is a woman with a vengeance: She keeps her house pure, clean and shut off from the rest of her undeserving, non-equal community by literally keeping her five, desperate daughters virtual prisoners.

The play, which opens July 14 at the prestigious Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, is the West Coast premiere of a new translation by Chay Yew, the award-winning playwright/director/producer/dramaturge, who also heads up the Taper’s Asian Theatre Workshop. The play, which premiered in New York in December 2000 at the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), opens anew with a major multicultural cast, including Chita Rivera as Bernarda, Tsai Chin (The Joy Luck Club, The Woman Warrior, Golden Child) as her mother, Maria Josefa, and Sandra Oh (HBO’s Arli$$, Stop Kiss and Dogeaters) as the youngest daughter, Adela. Lisa Peterson, Yew’s longtime collaborator, directs the play.

“Because the cast is so multicultural,” says Yew, “every one of the actors is bringing something different from their backgrounds to their roles.” The result is a more encompassing, more inclusive production. “Rather than a story about the family of Bernarda Alba, it’s now more a story about a family of women. The issues are magnified — the question of social morals, the expectations and the oppression. It’s set in Andalusian Spain, where the predominant religion is Islam. Given our recent knowledge of the Taliban’s treatment of women, this particular production has become more poignant and more urgent.”

Tsai Chin plays Bernarda’s mother in The House of Berarda Alba.

Yew immediately saw the parallels in his own life — being gay and Asian Pacific American. “Like Tennessee Williams, Lorca expresses through female characters the oppression gay men experience trapped in a homophobic society,” he says. “I’ve always had the wonderful opportunity of being in an environment that’s hostile and oppressive to my well-being,” he says ruefully. “That’s why Bernarda was a perfect play to adapt.”

The play opens with a funeral for Alba’s second husband. Two longtime servants are preparing the house for the grieving family’s return and the villagers who will appear — Greek chorus-like — to mourn. Alba is in rigid control of her girls, ranging in age from 20 to 39, believing no one is good enough for them.

“It was too easy to treat Bernarda Alba as a domineering bitch, like most adaptations did,” says Yew. “And, as cliché as it may sound, I found the answer in my own relationship with my parents: unflinching parental love.”

Chita Rivera (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Chicago, West Side Story), the legendary Tony Award-winning actor who plays Alba, echoes Yew: “I understand many things about Bernarda and her ferocious need for protection of her family. [I’m] like Bernarda in her love of family, of tradition.”

Enter the suggestion of a male presence in the all-women household — and although never seen, he becomes their symbol of freedom. The eldest daughter, Bernarda’s only child by her first marriage and the sole heir to her father’s fortune made greater by her now-deceased stepfather, is betrothed to a handsome young man. The youngest daughter, Adela, will pay the greatest price for her desire for him, for the freedom he represents.

“It’s not that it’s not about daughters rebelling against mothers, but it gets bigger,” says Oh. “It’s about women rebelling against society … about Adela rebelling against the world, her society, her village, her sisters, her mother and herself for freedom. This play for me is about longing for freedom, a nameless, shapeless, humid and hungry freedom.”

The venerable Chin, who plays Alba’s delusional mother, Maria Josefa, adds, “How Lorca’s women suffer is universal. Look at Afghanistan recently and Asian women in the past.”

Indeed, oppression and the struggle for freedom is an all too familiar human experience. And that’s exactly what Yew wants you to remember when the house lights come back up: “I have further articulated what Lorca has written in his original about the dire consequences of religious, gender, moral and sexual oppression — it’s my life story,” Yew says. “Hopefully, the audience will come away with a stronger appreciation of the freedom they enjoy.”

“That,” he characteristically adds with a chuckle, “and the fact that wearing black is slimming, given that the entire cast is dripping in black outfits by Joyce Kim Lee throughout the play.”

The House of Bernarda Alba runs July 14-Sept. 1 at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. For performance times, tickets and other information, call 213-628-2772 or go to www.taperahmanson.com.