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