Challenging audiences with relevant issues, the Great Works Theatre Festival features two plays presented in collaboration through Puente Theatre and Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre that will be performed at the Belfry Theatre. The plays on offer are a modern retelling of Blood Wedding, originally by Federico Garcia Lorca, and a classic rendition of David Hirson’s La Bête.
Directed and written by Mercedes Bátiz-Benét of Puente Theatre, the updated adaptation of Blood Wedding alters the theme of the play from something more conventional to reflect modern struggles.
“The original is about forbidden love and generational violence, and mine is about fear of the others, the fear of the ones who own land and inherit that land, and are from a particular place, and the fear of people who are transient,” she says. “What happens in a world where that’s all we inherit to our children: fear and hatred and violence?”
Bátiz-Benét calls attention to the current issues regarding US immigration policies and how they reflect behaviour seen less than a century ago in Europe.
“If you just look down south of the border, what’s happening right now, with all the rounding up of Latin Americans in the United States, not caring if they’re US citizens or not, putting their children in jail, sending lawful individuals direct to jail who are just trying to look for a better job—it’s just insane,” says Bátiz-Benét. “If you see all the countries in Europe where fascism is rising and the far right is gaining power in the state, it’s a long list of very specific situations that are happening and echoing the political structure that Lorca was responding to.”
Bátiz-Benét says that racism is a way to incite one group of people to hate another group for senseless reasons, and the only function of this is to create blame where none exists, which we perpetuate unknowingly.
“There’s always a scapegoat,” she says, “and it’s that fear and that hatred that gets passed down generation after generation that I’m trying to speak about in the play.”
Bátiz-Benét suggests that the solution to this kind of ingrained hatred is to teach our children tolerance and love for other people; she says this starts from the very beginning.
“It starts by what we teach our children, the kind of world we want to create. If we just keep feeding them the same garbage, like be scared of the others, be fearful, be violent, then the world will never change,” she says. “Instead we offer them tolerance, love for the other human beings, understanding, acceptance, curiosity, the fact that we’re all the same, we’re just trying to survive and be good people, we just keep reinforcing that and things will change, I think.”
La Bête, directed by Brian Richmond of Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre, likewise features a strong political message. It’s a classic retelling, but delves into similar themes of manipulation and populism.
“This is just so dead-on, this kind of insistence on vulgarity and populism at all costs,” says Richmond. “Of course, I’m referring to the orange-faced man south of the border. It’s just such a current issue.”
The theme of La Bête is about adherence to the truth as a philosophical ideal.
“The seriousness of the theme is about where truth resides in language; it’s about whether truth in language is important to a culture, or not,” says Richmond. “What every artist is attempting to do is tell the truth, which is a very broad-reaching concept, but they attempt to do that by utilizing the rigour of their skill, of their craft, and their approach to the world around them.”
Bátiz-Benét’s take on Blood Wedding underscores this. Although difficult, it’s not impossible to break free of systemic racism, she says.
“It really takes a lot of individual and collective effort to really change things, but I do think it’s possible if we all realize that this is not the way,” she says. “At what point do we say enough is enough? It’s about breaking the cycles of violence, and teaching different values, like let’s not be scared of each other.”
Bátiz-Benét wants her play to be an eye-opener for viewers, to show how they can take individual action for the collective good, and make a real change.
“Our differences make us better, so I think it’s about that, about just being curious with one another, and kind,” she says. “That’s what this play is about. If we just keep handing fear to our children, this cycle of violence will not end, and it will just keep being the same thing over and over again.”
Bátiz-Benét says that she intends to update a classic every year to increase cultural relevance and accessibility to new audiences.
“We’re choosing great plays from around the world and reawakening them with a bold new vision, for audiences of today,” she says. “We’re trying to show audiences plays that they would never really know about or have the chance to see, because that’s not the kind of theatre that you can see anywhere near here, and we’re trying to offer that to them.”
The two plays will feature the same actors and be performed on alternating days at the Belfry. According to Richmond, La Bête and Blood Wedding balance each other well because they’re two sides of the same coin; they find opposing ways of commenting on the same themes.
“If you look at comedy and tragedy as the foundation of theatre, these are prime examples of that,” he says. “One is very beautifully dark and mysterious and dramatic, and the other is very bright and frivolous with a serious theme at the centre of it all.”
Great Works Theatre Festival
Tuesday, July 29 to Sunday, August 10
Belfry Theatre
belfry.bc.ca