Sunday, July 6, 2008

More to love about America...and Spain!

Lest we seem unpatriotic on this most patriotic of weekends, I thought I'd remind you of one of the truly great things about our culture:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080616/ap_on_bi_ge/being_big_bird

Also, in my best effort to be the first to post something inappropriate on your blog, I thought I'd mention this little tidbit: on Thursday I went to see a production of Garcia Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba. Do you know this one? A classic of 20th-century Spanish drama, it's concerned with five ghastly sisters who are kept locked in their Andalusian home by their man-fearing/man-hating mother (si, Bernarda). The sisters, as is only natural, are so starved for male...er...attention that they alternate between depressed lethargy and violent hysteria. (Remember hysteria? That's what all those unmarried Victorian women suffered from.) There is one male sniffing around the fridges of the house--how could there not be, with all that overheated estrogen wafting from the windows? Much discussed, but never seen on stage, Pepe proposes marriage to one sister, seduces another, and unwittingly captures the affections of a third. Cat fights abound. No one is left unscathed by the misery and waste of those five deprived females. In a moment of subtlety unlike anything I have seen before, Lorca puts into the mouth of one of his characters the exact step that would bring peace, light, and no doubt the happy twitter of birds and the contented buzz of bees. That line, to quote this brand new translation: "Will you loose the stallion upon the mares?"

Oh, Marie, it was an hour and a half well spent. Check it out, if you get a chance. I imagine there are lots of productions of it in Afghanistan.

1 comment:

Mia said...

Just what I needed, Jen! Very few things in this world make me quite as nostalgic and melty as Sesame Street.

As for the sisters Bernardina, thank you for being inappropriate. I knew I could count on you to get the blog rating up to PG-13, while still sticking with the "Mundane, everyday details" rule. I'm thinking of staging a production in Kabul, where, I'm sure, women relegated to kitchens & headscarves might relate very well to a certain degree of hysteria.

Keep it coming!