Don Perlimplin


With book: Don Formaneck, Perlimplin; in shower: Kree Fieldsa, Belisa. Below: Mark Frankos, Josh Nathan; above: Sarah Goldblatt, Beth Froelich, The Duendes.		Karen Kalensky - Marcolfa, Don Formaneck - Perlimplin

For David's first professional production in the United States he returned to the theatre of Federico Garcia Lorca, with a production of Don Perlimplin and His Love for Belisa in His Garden. Cal Rep is the professional theatre company run by the Dept. of Theatre Arts at Cal State University Long Beach in the city of Long Beach, under the Artistic Direction of Joanne Gordon.


	Debbie McCleod - the Mother, Kree Fieldsa - Belisa		Beth Froehlich, Sarah Goldblatt, Mark Frankos - the Duendes, with Perlimplin

Called by one critic "…a seductive enigma, a dangerous mystery, to be revealed, unmasked, discovered," Don Perlimplin was subtitled by the playwright himself, somewhat deviously, as "an erotic alleluia in four scenes." It was Lorca's great genius that enabled him to cram into this short, deceptively simple story a breathtaking range of styles: folk tale, farce, fantasy, surrealism and, ultimately, a grotesque tragedy. Fueled by the complexities of his own life as a homosexual in a devoutly Catholic country, Lorca uses the story of the unlikely marriage of an impotent fifty-year old recluse to an oversexed young woman, to examine the nature of masculinity and femininity, age and youth, reality and fantasy, theatre and the imagination, and the characteristically Spanish intertwining of love, honor, and death, while invoking the seminal concept of Duende - a complex Spanish notion of the deep and dark side of the creative spirit that fascinated Lorca. In effect, in this play, Lorca is inviting us into his very private world, but, as he wrote in one of the stage directions in the play, it is a world in which "all the perspectives are deliciously distorted."

A major aspect of David's adaptation of the play involved the expansion of the brief one-act text into a full length format through extensive use of Lorca's poetry and quotations from his other plays. As part of this amplification, David also multiplied the two mysterious Duendes ("imps" in the English translation who, in the original text appear only once in the middle of the play) into four, turning them into "spirits of the theatre" (one critic called them "classical jesters with a cosmic view of life") who intervene and "manage" the performance – almost disinterestedly – through poetic interventions, comments, and appearances as extras and stage hands. True to his theatrical inclinations, David also moved the play into a total theatre space which utilized a proscenium arch as well as a huge thrust stage and the audience space itself as integral parts of the production. A multi-functional set (based on an idea by Danila Korogodsky), booths for the Duendes in the audience, puppets, masks and fantasy dance sequences, completed this overhaul of Lorca's spare text into a rich, aching, multi-layered theatrical fantasy.


	The Duendes and Belisa before her meeting with the Young Man in the Red Cape

The ensemble - Don Formaneck - Perlimplin, Kree Fieldsa - Belisa, Karen Kalensky - Marcolfa, Debbie McCleod - the Mother, Josh Nathan, Beth Froehlich, Sarah Goldblatt and Mark Frankos - the Duendes - created a tightly - knit ensemble who were equal to the difficulties presented by Lorca's dense poetry and the complex challenges of David's "poetry of the theatre". All of this was aided greatly by David Martin Jacques' lighting design, which one critic rightly characterized as having "masterful density."

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