La vida es sueño, de Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Versión de Virtudes Serrano

Although audience reaction was mixed at the Spanish premiere of the production, Teatro Círculo’s La vida es sueño has just won three awards from Premios ATI (Artistas Teatro Independientes/Independent Theater Artists Awards for Hispanic Actors) in “Categoría Mejor producción teatro clásico,” “Categoría Mejor dirección teatro clásico” (Mariano de Paco Serrano), and “Categoría Mejores actores teatro clásico” (Jerry Soto, Daniel Alonso, Eva Cristina Vásquez, Fernando Gazzaniga, María Fontanals, Catherine Núñez, Juan Luis Acevedo). The last, given to the entire ensemble, could not have been given to an individual actor or only a portion of the cast, as the minimalist production removes all identifying markers and the actors interchange roles continuously. To say that one actor stood out among the others would be a practical impossibility. The production is a minimalist expression of the interchangability of the roles we play, alluding to Calderón’s auto sacramental El gran teatro del mundo, while maintaining a relatively faithful adherence to the text of his most famous comedia.Teatro Círculo is a “dynamic, community-based theatre company serving Latinx neighborhoods throughout New York City and the surrounding tri-state area” with a mission to bring Spanish and Latin American “theatrical history, heritage, and cultures full circle” (www.teatrocirculo.org), led by Founding Artistic Director José Cheo Olivera. For this production, Resident Production Designer Israel Franco-Müller has chosen to minimize the visual details, which allows the actors and the dialogue to take centerstage. The company normally works in a black box space and recreated this effect by having audience members surrounding them on three sides on stage in the Antigua Universidad Renacentisa, to varying degrees of success. Although the staging is clearly meant to be seen from all sides, there was a disparity between the production as viewed from the house versus on stage.The play opens with an already dead Clarín stating that he would like to tell the story from his perspective. This initial setup grants the gracioso a new protagonism, as he narrates to the audience about an afterlife where he constantly relives the events leading up to his death. This was quite possibly the weakest point of the play. Although early on Clarín’s role as narrator helps guide the audience along, as he explains certain scenes or certain characters, this eventually drops off and the play text runs in linear fashion without much adaptation. While the opening promises an interesting conceptual take on the play, the production ultimately does not make much of this initial shift in perspective.Once Clarín’s prologue is done, we go back in time five days and are presented with the original opening to the play. It is in Segismundo’s cave that the role duplicating begins and three Rosauras confront three Segismundos. With all the actors—except the one who plays Clarín, who dons a fur vest—dressed in black in a cross between modern tactical gear and traditional shinobi shozoku (aka ninja) outfits, heads covered in hoods, gender and class are erased, allowing men to play Rosauras and women to play Segismundos, Basilios, Clotaldos, etc. The only marker of status seems to be the number of actors who play a given part at any one time: In these opening scenes, we have three Rosauras and three Segismundos, four Clotaldos, and five Basilios, clearly demarcating the importance of the three roles in ascending order. While this facilitated the fluidity of character shifting, it did sometimes make the plot hard to follow, especially in regards to moments where actors had no props to clearly mark which character they were meant to be portraying; this happened in particular with scenes between Rosaura and Basilio, as well as Astolfo and Estrella.Minimalism ruled not only the wardrobes but the staging and props as well. Occasionally, extra pieces such as a crown or fur cloaks are introduced to underscore the importance of a character or scene, but these are used sparingly. The stage itself has a long, rectangular platform set in the middle of it, with curtain weights set along the edge. The actors sit on benches and use hammers to hit the curtain weights, making a rhythmic clanging that marks time between the acts, while also creating sparks that contrast sharply with the dark costumes and platform. A gong set to the back of the stage is also used to mark important moments and transitions.Speaking of dark, the lighting is often quite dim, seemingly on purpose to again highlight the lack of differentiation between the actors and the parts they play. During the balcony scene, for example, the lights were so low that it was almost impossible to make out the action on stage. The lighting does aid in adding to the dreamlike quality of the production, especially in the way the characters shift, multiply, disappear and reappear, although the success of these effects varies over the course of the performance. In one standout moment, for example, the use of the dark lighting occurs in a fight scene where the actors use laser sights, the red of the lasers creating a dynamic environment that includes the audience in the action.In perhaps the most impactful scene, five Segismundos (bumped up from three, now that he is crown prince and therefore has gained in status) surround Rosaura in such a way that the true danger she is in is made abundantly clear as he tells her “cosa es llana / que arrojaré tu honor por la ventana” (2.659–60). The positioning of the five Segismundos around a single Rosaura makes it undeniable that there is no escape for her, and a brutal rape is imminent. Given that Bruce Burningham had argued one day before at the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater’s sympoisum that American audiences often want to see a “happily ever after” version of this play in which Rosaura and Segismundo end up together (“American Sueño”), the portrayal of this scene as unequivocally violent goes completely against that fairytale idealization.There is an interesting idea here in performing La vida es sueño as an iterative text, almost mythological in the way that the same story about humanity plays out on a fixed path while still accommodating any number of options or nuances in character interactions from start to finish. In this way, it is reminiscent of the CNTC’s 2020 digital piece “Martin Arnold sueña la vida” created by Íñigo Rodríguez, which similarly played with the idea of presenting several iterations of the play’s most famous monologue alongside each other. In Teatro Círculo’s production, this technique is taken to new heights in this monologue, shared by all the actors and ending in a full choral performance of “y los sueños, sueños son,” which draws the audience into the action once more. If they are all Segismundos, regardless of status or gender, then theatrical identification will draw the audience into the uncertainty of our collective understanding of the world.When the storytelling techniques work, they work beautifully, a performance that refracts the multiplicity of possible interpretations all at once, as when Segismundo confronts Basilio and we see both the version of Segismundo enraged by his lifelong imprisonment and the one broken by his father’s abandonment. The staging also opened up the space for monologues to become dialogues, as multiple actors allow the self-reflection of a monologue like Rosaura’s in Act 3 to become a conversation with the self, a bargaining and negotiation about the character’s wants versus her needs. These moments stood out, certainly, but the overall experience was a rollercoaster of highs and lows, with points of lucidity that broke through a production sometimes muddled by lighting and the sameness of the costuming.

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