2008 Woodie Awards
La Fiesta del Chivo: A Tyrant's Tale
Elsie Denton
Issue date: 11/29/07 Section: Arts & Features
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For over thirty years, from February 1930 to May 1961, the people of the Dominican Republic lived under the iron fist of General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. While bringing stability and economic reforms to the country, Trujillo's reign was soaked in terror. Political freedom was minimal or non-existent and dissidents died in nasty, unsavory ways.
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel La fiesta del chivo, or The Feast of the Goat, shines light upon the darker aspects of the Trujillo era that the Dominican public has spent most of the intervening century trying to forget.
On Saturday, November 17, Spanish Club organized a trip to New York City to view a theater adaptation of Vargas Llosa's novel performed by El Repertorio Español and directed by Jorge Alí Triana. The piece was performed in Spanish, but El Repertorio provided simultaneous English translations via headphones to make the work available to non-Spanish speakers.
Gramercy Theater, where the play was held, is in a small nook on East 27th Street way off the beaten Broadway track. Which, in addition to providing a cozy and intimate atmosphere for the show, also meant that any hassle from the concurrent stagehand strike was avoided.
The theater, capable of holding barely forty people, butted directly against a spacious and puritan stage. The stage formed an inverse triangle away from the audience and housed at one time no more that two tables and a collection of chairs. In the background, was a tall, wood frame, lattice-like cage. The entirety of the scene was brown and leeched of color.
If the set seemed uninspirational, this fault was entirely redeemed by the excellence of the acting and brilliant use of stage lights.
Vargas Llosa's story contains two intertwining plots. The first is the story of Urania Cabral. A successful Dominican women who has been in self-imposed exile since she was a teenager, Cabral has returned to the Dominican Republic to confront her father, recently reduced to covalence by a stroke and an old crony of Trujillo, and also to face her own past.
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, in his novel La fiesta del chivo, or The Feast of the Goat, shines light upon the darker aspects of the Trujillo era that the Dominican public has spent most of the intervening century trying to forget.
On Saturday, November 17, Spanish Club organized a trip to New York City to view a theater adaptation of Vargas Llosa's novel performed by El Repertorio Español and directed by Jorge Alí Triana. The piece was performed in Spanish, but El Repertorio provided simultaneous English translations via headphones to make the work available to non-Spanish speakers.
Gramercy Theater, where the play was held, is in a small nook on East 27th Street way off the beaten Broadway track. Which, in addition to providing a cozy and intimate atmosphere for the show, also meant that any hassle from the concurrent stagehand strike was avoided.
The theater, capable of holding barely forty people, butted directly against a spacious and puritan stage. The stage formed an inverse triangle away from the audience and housed at one time no more that two tables and a collection of chairs. In the background, was a tall, wood frame, lattice-like cage. The entirety of the scene was brown and leeched of color.
If the set seemed uninspirational, this fault was entirely redeemed by the excellence of the acting and brilliant use of stage lights.
Vargas Llosa's story contains two intertwining plots. The first is the story of Urania Cabral. A successful Dominican women who has been in self-imposed exile since she was a teenager, Cabral has returned to the Dominican Republic to confront her father, recently reduced to covalence by a stroke and an old crony of Trujillo, and also to face her own past.
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