"Don Perlimplin and His Love for Belissa in the Garden," California Repertory Theatre, Long Beach, CA
Spectral, lovely, and well-done, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Don Perlimplin and His Love for Belissa in the Garden, adapted and directed by David Zinder for Cal Rep and performed in the Studio Theatre, proves that getting a handle on love is like trying to catch a trout bare-handed.
You can’t.
Zinder does here what I didn’t think could be done. He took Garcia Lorca’s honeysuckled words and incorporated them into staged movement, conflict, and setting.
Though abstract, though whimsical – though positively, scrumptiously lovely – the words, especially those spoken by the quatro Duendes, establish mood in a way that sets never could. Just as well because, at the last second, a seismic malfunction caused the play to transplant to the campus theatre.
The story’s a fable, which means it accommodates the phantasmagorical with ease. Which means it’s improbable and dreamy. These it is.
An improbable, dreamy discourse on the vagaries of love.
Don Perlimplin (Donald Formaneck), prosperous, is a confirmed bachelor. No young cock, he’s fifty-ish, which is not the new thirty-ish. He doesn’t want for anything except, as Marcolfa (Karen Kalensky) his housekeeper keeps reminding him, a wife.
But once he feasts his eyes on his neighbor, Belissa (Kree Fieldsa), comely, bathing full monty nude, an embryonic nymph – think James Mason’s Lolita – he reconsiders his decision.
They marry, though not for the same reasons. Who does? She, in conspiracy with her Mother (Debbie McLeod), connives for a comfortable roost from which to launch her trysts. Beyond randy, rutting possibilities, I’m not sure why he married her.
But the story’s not as important as the way the then-prevalent notion of love morphs throughout the story. At the beginning, Belissa has the upper hand. Love is raw, detached, a driving force. It occasions jealousy and envy. Then, as things turn Perlimpin’s way, love becomes devious, subject to machinations, something to dissect.
The play ends the only way it could.
For the play to work, a political balance had to be struck between the sheets.
Belissa had to be brazen, had to ooze sensuality. Fieldsa was, she did. From those beginning scenes when she’s upstairs bathing nude, through her disregard of her marriage vow, she’s consumed with a catch-and-release compulsion to copulate.
Moreover, she moves with balletic grace. You could easily get sucked into her vortex of desire as she cuckolds the poor senor.
But she also has to be capable of having the tables turned on her. She was.
When I first saw Formaneck’s Perlimplin, I thought Donald Trump. Talk about a nice May-December marriage. At the beginning it looked like he was sleepwalking. He was, really, through unexplored passion. Eventually he gets his bearings, he plans his comeuppance.
But was this comeuppance worth his while? You decide.
Performances are Tue & Wed, 6:30 PM, Thu, Dec.14, 6:30 PM & 8:30, Sat, Dec. 16, 8 PM. The play runs until Dec. 16. Tickets are $15-20. The Theatre is located in the Theatre Arts Building on the CSULB campus. For more information, call 985-5526 or visit www.calrep.org.
