By: Alfredo Aparicio/Staff Writer
The wild, unsettling journey of Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits” is coming to the stage on Nov. 11. Based on the adaption by Caridad Svich, the play will captivate students with its tale of the Trueda family, who find themselves enveloped in a tale of magic, mystery and violence.
“I always felt it was a fascinating, turbulent, beautiful, sensual and compelling novel,” said Svich. “Allende, working very much in the grand narrative tradition, weaves such a multi-layered, expansive epic family saga, and creates such distinct characters.”
The play, which premiered its English version on September 2009 at the Main Street Theatre in Houston, has since received the American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize.
“The play is a response to the novel, my response as a writer, but it is also a homage to the novel. For me, it’s a living dialogue between my play and Allende’s vision,” Svich said. “I hope that fans of the novel come to this new version with an open heart and mind, and see it as a poetic distillation of an epic novel.”
Michael Yawney, an assistant professor at the Department of Theatre who directed “The Birds,” “Blithe Spirit” and “The Ruby Sunrise,” was chosen because of his previous experience with ambitious, large-scale productions. “On the surface it seems impossible to adapt, but Svich identified something buried deep in the structure of the story; she saw that the book is built on the power of imagination and storytelling to make sense out of life’s chaos.”
The production’s spectacular nature and use of magic realism will take the audience on a voyage to a world where time and space have no boundaries so that a woman in prison can talk to her grandmother and a dog that lived in the 1920s.
“Characters return from the dead, others travel across time. There are scenes in which three different times and places coexist at once,” Yawney said. “We spent a long time in design meetings, working out how to create the world of the play in which joyously magical events happen right alongside horrific ones.”
Jair Bula, a senior and theater major, who will bring to life Esteban Trueba, anticipates that students who come to see the show will get a night of good theater, and leave reflecting on their own lives and on the events happening presently. “In this play, there is military and police violence against civilians who are fighting for what they believe in. Right now, we see that all over the world; we see it in our own backyard with Occupy Wall Street.”
Bula, who played Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” last spring, read the play and instantly fell in love with its rich and complex characters. “I couldn’t explain why I related to [Esteban] more than the other characters at the time of the audition—now I can. In my own life, I’ve known characters like Esteban; I understand his pain and his demons as well. The mistakes that he makes when he is younger lead to the ugly consequences he and his loved ones suffer later on.”
For Bula, the stage is always a back-and-forth feeling of fright and excitement, but he hopes to do justice to the story and his character. “What makes him different from the other characters I have played is that he is impulsive. Even as an old man, he’s made of steel, however, he is vulnerable and breakable at the same time.”
Caroline Spitzer, a senior theatre major with a focus in costume design, is one of the many students who immersed themselves in research to accurately represent the timeline of the play which spans four generations in an unspecified Latin American country.
“For me, the historical context, style and feel of the play dictate the research I do. As a designer, I need to have a strong understanding of the characters and their world,” said Spitzer.
Spitzer, along with Amanda Sparhawk, Ileana Mateo and Dung Truong, was also in charge of designing and building a puppet of the dog, Barabbas. “It was a trial-and-error process but extremely fun. Prior to this, my only experience was with Muppet-style foam puppets. However, from day one, the dog in this play would not be accepted as real if it looked like a Muppet, so we needed to take a completely different approach.”
The final design is inspired by the Handspring Puppet Company, which is based in Africa, specifically their design War Horse. Spitzer then researched everything from the mechanics of the puppets to how the puppeteers breathe life into them on stage.
The play will also feature original music by Mariette Gallor to accompany the lyrics written by Svich and a sound design based on the use of 20th century Chilean music. Javier Figueredo, a junior and theater major, who is in charge of sound design, has tried to reinforce the play’s themes of loss, family and suffering. “I’m trying to stick mostly to women’s voices, because the play is mostly from the perspective of women and their struggles.”
The production will run from Nov. 11 to Nov. 20 in the Herbert and Nicole Wertheim Performing Arts Center at the Modesto Maidique Campus Main Stage Theater. Tickets are $10 for students and alumni, $12 for faculty and seniors, and $15 for the general public.
“I hope the audience sees how some people are trapped by their history and [how] others escape [it]. I hope that they understand their own inner violence and see ways to move beyond it. I also hope that they appreciate their families,” said Yawney. “This is the sort of play that you hope younger people see with older people so that grandchildren, parents and grandparents can talk about how the play reflects the world of the past and the present—and what it says about the future.”
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