OFF OFF LOOP THEATER FESTIVAL
LA PETENERA
Playwrights’ Center
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But it’s hard not to be a little disappointed with the offerings in the 1991 Off Off Loop Theater Festival. For one thing, many of Chicago’s most creative and daring non-Equity theater companies–Theater Oobleck, the Curious Theatre Branch, the Big Game Theater, the Prop Theatre, Cardiff Giant–are entirely unrepresented. And too many of the entries lack the passion and edgy energy that typify great non-Equity shows–as if the companies had to sacrifice what made their work interesting to satisfy both the technical requirements of the festival (entries must be less than an hour in length and involve minimal use of props and lighting cues) and the limitations of the Theatre Building’s high-school-auditorium-ish south theater.
La Barraca ’90’s incredibly dramatic production of La Petenera makes an interesting complement to Years Ago. This bilingual retelling of the Sephardic tale of La Petenera, the beautiful Jewish woman (played by flamenco dancer Poli) who converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition and was murdered by a jealous lover, communicates none of the major plot points of the folktale. Nevertheless, the fusing of flamenco, traditional Spanish folk songs, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry (spoken both in Spanish and in Tomas de Utrera and Chet Long’s English translation) manages to be so utterly riveting, so full of unspoken yearning, that the emotional subtext of the story comes across loud and clear. Who cares if we learn almost nothing about the traditional story? De Utrera’s guitar and Poli’s passionate flamenco dancing communicate the most when they literally say nothing at all.
I’m told this play was intended to evoke the various schools of modern art, but none of that comes through. The awful dialogue is reminiscent of nothing so much as language-lab tapes–Woman: “I’m a typist for a writer. He’s very famous.” Man: “I’m an astronomer actually. I often work nights.” The play ends with a whimper as the lonely man finally gets up enough nerve to ask the woman, “So, do you think you want to go out with me?” and the woman answers, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I really don’t know you well enough, do I?” To which the man replies, “I suppose you’re right.” Kind of hard to care about characters who don’t seem to care much about themselves.
