Dear Friends and Colleagues,
On the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day I had the pleasure of attending the opening night of our Black Hole Theatre production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. It struck me as particularly apt that this production strongly evoked potential female power and the ruthless restriction of it that was both particular to the period of the piece and, unfortunately, that is still resonant today. What is particularly admirable about Director Brenda Maclean’s production is that it finds the necessary and delicate balance between the heavily tragic and poetic tone and the too recognizable everyday lives of the individual women in the Bernarda Alba household. The audience is, therefore, able to both concretely identify with the plights of the characters and abstractly consider the overall oppression that makes the tragedy inevitable, indeed that makes it a tragedy of this repression itself.
Our performance of The House of Bernarda Alba on Tuesday, March 15th at 7:00 PM will be in honour of Irene Anderson and Vic Cowie with a portion of the box office receipts going to support the scholarships in their respective names. We invite you to join us for this performance, one of which I am sure both Vic and Irene would have approved.
Sincerely,
Dr. Bill Kerr
Theatre Program Coordinator
Department of English, Film, and Theatre
The Black Hole Theatre Company Presents
The House of Bernarda Alba
By: Federico Garcia Lorca
March 8th-12th, 15th-19th* at the Black Hole Theatre
The Black Hole Theatre Company is wrapping up its 2010/2011 season with a Spanish based drama, The House of Bernarda Alba written by Federico Garcia Lorca.
The House of Bernarda Alba is the story of a tyrannical, self righteous, and passionless mother, who rules her unmarried daughters with an iron rod, imposing on them an eight-year period of mourning after the death of their father. In an all female cast, Lorca’s characters are fuelled by an explosive desire to be free of their constraints, to experience their natural sexual energy, and the joy of living. The character of Adela, written to be a projection of Lorca himself, tries desperately to separate herself from the restraints of her life by secretly having an affair with a man; her words so powerfully illustrate this:
“Leave me alone! Awake or asleep, it’s no affair of yours. I’ll do whatever I want with my body.”
(Adela, The House of Bernarda Alba)
The House of Bernarda Alba is a powerful and prophetic story of intolerance and its consequences.
Federico Garcia Lorca’s (1898-1936) The House of Bernarda Alba is his last play. It was written the year he was killed, just two months before his execution. Lorca lived and wrote through the most troubling times of modern Spain; he is considered by the English-speaking world as the best-known and most frequently performed Spanish Dramatist of the Twentieth Century.
Brenda McLean is very please to be directing The House of Bernarda Alba and directing at the Black Hole Theatre for the first time. She has had the opportunity to costume design numerous times including Headspace and Romance. She also teaches Introduction to Theatre for the program. Outside of the University, Brenda is Co-Artistic Leader of Theatre Incarnate (www.theatreincarnate.ca).
Performances at the Black Hole Theatre, lower level of University College.
*7:00 pm March 8th and 15th
8:00pm March 9th-12th, 16th-19th
Tickets: $15 Adults, $12 Students and Seniors
Tickets can either be purchased at the door or in advance.
For reservations and group discounts contact the 24hr Box Office at 474-6880.
For interview requests please contact Erika Mann and Dana Smith, Publicists, at 474-7655
or by email: publicity(a)bhtc.ca
www.bhtc.ca