TORONTO - Maybe they should have gone for opera, which is, amongst other things, a medium that embraces the cross pollination of cultures to create a world where French courtesans sing in fluent Italian and Greek gods emote en francais.
But, no matter how free-wheeling the adaptation (and this one is admittedly pretty free) it appears in the end to prove only that, dramatically speaking at least, you couldn't impose Lorca on Newfoundland with either a shoehorn or a shotgun.
It's a play called Rocking the Cradle, and it's the handiwork of playwright Des Walsh, who "freely adapted" its story from Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma -- a work that, like much of the playwright's oeuvre, explores the weight of Spanish cultural tradition and the Catholic Church on a young peasant woman whose husband will not give her a child.
Rocking the Cradle opened in the Tarragon mainspace Tuesday, a production of Newfoundland's RCA Theatre Company.
From the get-go, this is a work of often self-conscious meta-theatricality as designer Graeme Thomson and director Richard Rose set the scene, evoking an outport village clinging tenuously in the distance to the craggy Rock, as a gentle snowfall carpets the land around them.
From there, we are quickly moved to the interior of one of those houses perched on the cliff, where celebrations are underway marking the second anniversary of the couple living there.
They are Joan (played by Ruth Lawrence) and Vince (Daryl Avalon Hopkins) and despite the kitchen party that is rollicking around them, they are still so besotted with each other that they are all over each other like a t'ick fog.
It quickly develops, however, that their happiness is not complete, for Joan, it seems, pines for a child which will, by her lights, not only complete their union but make her one with a community where every other woman has clearly demonstrated her fecundity, in most cases, more than once.
Vince, for his part, is not only not bothered by their childlessness, he actually seems to embrace it in a passive aggressive taciturn sort of way that he is either unwilling to or incapable of explaining.
That leaves Joan to either get used to her childless state or get one on their neighbour Tom (Greg King) who appears shyly available to stand at stud.
But then Tom packs up and leaves for Toronto, just as Joan's best friend Mary (Didi Gillard-Rowlings) gets knocked up yet again.
Joan is slowly driven mad -- a voyage made no easier by advice from her mother (Jane Dingle) and the other two women who comprise her small community, played by Monica Walsh and Kate Corbett.
It's a compelling story in its way, for all that it sits on the Newfoundland landscape like moorish arches on a fish house, but under Rose's direction, it never really comes completely to life, embracing theatricality over theatrical truth at every turn, showcasing Thomson's gift for elegant simplicity in design more than the heart of the tale.
And frankly, Rose gets scant help from playwright Ross whose determination to turn outport life into poetry rather than mining the poetry that is already there births dialogue that ranges from the sententious to the just plain silly.
It comes to life only in the traditional music that Rose and the playwright have woven throughout the tale as metaphor for the wind that sweeps over the Rock and, over the half decade that is compressed into the 75 minutes of the show, wears a hole in the spirit of a loving wife and would-be mother.
Too often, however, it is overwhelmed by the script's bull-headed literary aspirations and Rocking the Cradle gets lost in the waves, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, an ill-built vessel a little too freely adapted and dropped somewhere between Spain and Newfoundland.
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