THE PRAYING MANTIS
But their own self-portraits are a different story. One of Spain’s great dramatic exports, Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, conjures up a hothouse of repressed sexuality that seethes and finally explodes with its carnal contradictions. Likewise in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude: the pious wife’s vow of chastity wreaks endless misery. And in Chilean playwright Alejandro Sieveking’s dark comedy The Praying Mantis, virtue creates its own vicious reward when a family’s false purity turns rancid.
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But with its earthy humor and fairy-tale inevitability, Mantis needn’t be savored only as political allegory. The story is gripping enough. Sieveking introduces Juan, a stranger in a natty white suit, into a large Victorian house located in Talcahuano in southern Chile. This young bank clerk believes he has entered a house of mourning; in fact it’s a respectable cesspool presided over by three sisters, Llalla, Lina, and Adela, Juan’s fiancee. Llalla and Lina are now subjects of scandal because each has supposedly murdered her suitor, supposedly in self-defense. Betrothed to and formally in love with the one sister not in mourning, Juan unwittingly falls in with the family’s worst homicidal traditions.
Still fresh from the outside world,
Though not as sinister as the script suggests, Mantis in this production is cleanly interpreted by the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, an Equity company connected with the College of DuPage that’s making its Chicago debut. Director’ Craig Berger’s staging nicely manages to balance Mantis’s self-conscious, campy humor, a la A Arsenic and Old Lace, against its occasional naturalistic impulse to play the moment. Jon Gantt’s elegant drawing-room set–settee complete with antimacassars, fully functioning grandfather clock, and burnished walnut portals–is both all there and, with its black velvet backdrop, mysteriously open-ended.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jennifer Girard.
