STAGE REVIEW : No Passion Pulses Through Old Globe’s ‘Blood Wedding’

Blood, fire, earth: all elements that we associate with the plays of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936). All lacking in the Old Globe Theatre’s production of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding.”

Actually, this is a visiting production, from the Great Lakes Theater Festival outside of Cleveland. The reader may wonder why a theater in a city where Spanish is the unofficial second language would bring in a Lorca production from up north.

Presumably because it’s an exciting show. But Gerald Freedman and Graciela Daniele’s production of “Blood Wedding” is as flat as the stage floor. And it’s about as Spanish as the Acting Company’s recent “Kabuki Macbeth” was Japanese.

Once again we seem to be watching some kind of a studio demonstration in cross-cultural performance training rather than a play. Would you believe that six months ago these actors didn’t know a step of flamenco?

We have no trouble believing it. The first village scene says that they’re not that sharp now. The footwork may be right, but the fierceness isn’t there. Flamenco is about pride, not just about profile.

But let’s give this “Blood Wedding” credit for establishing a certain fake folkloric atmosphere. At what cost? The players have spent so much time on their footwork and head-tossing that they’ve neglected their character work.

As a result, this “Blood Wedding” is neither idiomatic nor involving. Better the directors had concentrated on the emotional flow of the play--on showing us what’s going on between Lorca’s characters.

It is a great play. Lorca may come closer than any other 20th-Century dramatist to finding the heartbeat of Greek drama, where tragedy isn’t merely a fact of life but the fact of life. The gods need victims. Be careful, proud man, not to become one.

In Lorca, “the gods” become the land. Blood must be spilled or things won’t grow. The story centers on a village wedding. The bride (Josie de Guzman) loves her young man (Aurelio Padron) enough to marry him, but her passion belongs to her former fiance (Gregory Mitchell). When he shows up at the wedding, they run off together. The groom rides after them, knives flash, and the land is watered again.

Lorca’s lines are as bare as a blade (the translation here is by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata). Live them, and the audience will feel the bride’s despair at the strength of a love that she knows will end in a catastrophe. We will see the former fiancee’s utter determination to have her. We will watch the easygoing groom turn into an avenger.

And we will feel the apprehension of the groom’s mother, who at the start of the play has already lost two men to the process: her husband and the groom’s older brother. She knows that the land isn’t through with her yet: She only hopes there’ll be grandchildren first.

Actress Jane White comes closer to inhabiting this character than the other players do, but she comes at it from the outside. Her poise countermands the sense that this is an abandoned woman--at the end, a woman gone beyond grief.

But she does cast a shadow. The other actors don’t. They fill in the general outline of their characters, attend to their singing and dancing duties and dress the stage (a boring, muddied set by John Ezell). “Blood Wedding” ought to be a tragic ballad come to life. This is a tame operetta.

Plays Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Dec. 4. Tickets $18-$25. Simon Edison Center for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego. (619) 239-2255.