GALA brings García Márquez novella to life
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At the GALA Hispanic Theatre production of “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” which premiered last week, knives hang from the ceiling, gleaming in the stage lights above a bloody cockfighting ring at the center of a small village. An animal carcass hangs in a butcher shop window. Inside another window across the stage, a household servant hacks at raw meat with a kitchen knife.
Amid those bloody motifs, the play unfolds just as Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez began the novella from which it was adapted.
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on,” an unseen narrator intones.
Nicolás Carrá plays Santiago Nasar. Photo courtesy of GALA.
Santiago Nasar (Nicolás Carrá) is murdered by the Vicario brothers (José González and Edwin R. Bernal) to defend the honor of their sister, the just married Angela Vicario (Inés Domínguez), whose husband, Bayardo San Román (Erick Sotomayor), returns her to her parents’ home after discovering she’s not a virgin. Angela claims Santiago took her honor, sending her twin brothers off in a blood rage. They announce to everyone they meet that they intend to kill Santiago, though Santiago doesn’t hear about it until a few minutes before his tragic end.
The play, which runs through May 8, is directed by José Zayas, who has directed “House of Spirits”, adapted from the Isabel Allende novel, and the Jordi Galcerán play “Cancún”, at GALA in the past.
Though adapting the work of a renown novelist is a risky business, (Zayas says “it begins with a failure”), the play, which opened April 7, is able to capture the complex narrative and collective guilt of this small town. With multiple actors playing different characters, the audience has to shift their focus to keep up with different reasons people give for collectively allowing the murder to take place. The play invites the audience to work through the mystery through the fragmented narrative and moments of flashbacks. There are multiple characters and voices navigating the mental space of the small, yet complex community. Just like the town, the stage is small and remains unchanged. However, there are clues that the audience has to decipher and perspectives they must see through.
Zayas integrates singing and dancing, choreographed by Katie Bucher, into the story to capture the rituals and behaviors of a town trying to make sense of its culpability and the emotions that arise in the wake of Santiago’s death. Distraction, incredulity, indifference, and assumptions, among other things, lead to the death of Santiago. As they try to wash their hands off it, the townsfolk, together, come up with its story of how a death so announced could take place. The center of the cockfighting ring serves as a stage where people see the death occur regularly. Their little houses surrounding the ring serve mainly as the place where people observe that act and interpret their roles.
This adaptation of the play departs successfully from the novel’s one-person narration. The diverse voices represent the collective psychology of culpability that town folks must learn to live with as a consequence of their negligence. Given the evident challenges to adapting a complex novel for the stage, it is great to see what seems like an impossibility come to life, allowing us to re-live the novel in a different—but positive—way.
“Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, in Spanish with English surtitles, runs through May 8. For more information and tickets, visit the GALA’s website.
—Estefani Flores
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