Review in (not so) Brief: De Monstruos y Prodigios: La Historia de los Castrati

If you’ve ever gone to the theater (I’m including here plays, opera, dance and musical concerts–any that occur within a theaterical space) and felt like a tamed beast, trained to be civilized, knowing that your main task is to appreciate, not respond…it would have done you well to see Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes’ Monsters and Prodigies at the Lincoln Center Festival.

Here’s what a Times stringer had to say. Feel free to go there for the particulars. CC also previewed the entire Spanish-language series.

The story is told through a cast of monsters; a centaur, a pair of Siamese twins, a eunuch, a castrato, a music teacher and Napoleon Bonaparte. They place the idea of beauty in the era of Baroque extravagance.

The Times review is positive, but waaaay safe. The play wasn’t just a bunch of “tomfoolery”, or a simple “spoof” or “lampoon of 18th-century opera,” as Wilborn Hampton wrote. To stop at the method of the theater strips the production of its greater value.

The piece asks the audience to consider a few things.

First, the idea of beauty situated within a decadent era. Considering we live in a decadent era, plastic surgery is that natural analogy. When asked in an email interview with Counter Critic whether or not there were parallels between the culture of the castrati and our modern day obsession with plastic surgery in the quest for beauty, the play’s director, Claudio Valdez Kuri replied, “There is a relationship between castration and plastic surgery. Both contain an abuse to achieve the unachievable.” He went on to admit that the play intends to raise this issue but was quick to say that the play also gave no answers.

I will say that it frustrates me when a critic fails to draw any connection between a work of art and the status quo, as Hamptonite does in his review, and Isherwood did in his review of another of the Spanish-language plays, Gemelos, which was about life struggles during a time of war. Umm, HELLO?!?!?!?

The second thing to consider is how rationalism has a tendency to annihilate human notions of beauty, which can often be irrational and even aberrant. This is told narratively through the historical encroachment of French rationalism upon the raucous excesses of 18th and 19th century Italian culture, culminating in the on-stage invasion of Italy by a very short Napoleon Bonaparte.

Of important note: During the ten or so minutes before this happens (this meaning, Napoleon Bonaparte appears on horseback and proceeds to chase all the other characters (or monsters) around the stage, then wheels out a cannon and blows everybody up), the play itself reaches a point of theatrical anarchy that I can’t recall having ever seen on stage before–at least, not this well done. All of the characters seemed to be delving deeper and deeper into the excesses of the operatic golden age, all participating in a social dance (including the horse), indulging the castrato’s slovenly appetite. At one point, as the eunuch, who has been dressed like an aboriginal Mexican and who was frequently referred to as “slave”, and who had wandered out into the audience with a platter of rolls that he was offering people, began shouting the French national motto as the piece tipped further toward the French way of thinking, a man in the audience stood up and threatened the actor, who gave in a little and stopped playing. The man was shouting “You think we can’t understand what you’re saying? Say it in English! Come on!” This drew actual boos from the audience and one man even stood up to try to restrain the heckler. When suddenly the castrato let out a whopping high note, the eunuch began launching the rolls at the audience, and the play commenced. Obviously the heckler was a theatrical plant, and it was all fun and games, and the audience even started throwing rolls back at the actors!

I could only imagine that the director had this in mind when creating this piece: People! Why are we stuck in our seats and afraid to raise our voices in the theater? If we have to attack you to get you to respond to us, we will. Because there was an age when you used to be able to throw food at us!

After the firing of the cannon, the tone of the theater changes. The conjoined twins have been blown apart and wander around filthy and despondent. The centaur has had the lower half of his body blown away, and he drags himself around the stage by his hands, an image we’ve so often seen in war movies. The castrato cannot sing, and therefore, loses his stature among the other players. They all wander around lost and half-mad, throwing sand into the air (oh yeah, the whole play takes place in a giant sand box), scratching out a meands. The only player who is in charge now is the eunuch, who has donned a pair of slacks, tamed himself, and now commands the show.

The piece ends by piping in an old vinyl recording of the last well-known castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922 and was the only castrato to make a recording. The voice enters the theater, strange, at times beautiful, but generally ugly. One can’t entirely tell whether it was the recording the made the voice sound so bizarre, or if was the specific nature of Moreschi’s voice who seems not to have been very highly regarded in his own time, or if it was the true aesthetic of the castrati.

What makes this play especially wonderful is its stress on the fickle foothold contemporary tastes always have on our collective conscience. As our rationale changes, so do those indulgences humans invent to entertain themselves.

July 24, 2007
Categories: Critics, NY Times, Review, Theater, Uptown . . Author: countercritic

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