News That Stays the News

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

FUENTE OVEJUNA by Lope de Vega

At the climax of 17th century Spain's greatest tragedy, as oppressed villagers hack to shreds their tyrannical overlord, trashing his palace and slaughtering his bullyboy guards, the playgoer's mind leaps to Nicolae Ceausescu's Bucharest, to Samuel Doe's Monrovia and to far too many other gruesome places arraigned in current headlines. Although Lope de Vega's play was written around 1612 and was based on an actual occurrence in 1476, the abuses of power it depicts remain painfully close to our times.

To be sure, the text has been nudged into modernity in the new translation and adaptation by Adrian Mitchell. His version took London by storm last season, winning an Olivier Award, and makes its U.S. debut at California's Berkeley Repertory Theater. The language is vernacular, sometimes vulgar, and even titled characters are stripped of grandeur and persiflage. The multiracial casting reflects contemporary America more than feudal Spain. Stylistically, the 20th century influence of Bertolt Brecht is evident throughout in the Marxist class analysis, didactic political sloganeering and use of song and dance to preach.

Yet the call to collective action and the lesson that in unity there is strength are not modernist interpolations. They are inherent in the original and in the actual events it portrays. The villagers of Fuente Ovejuna took collective responsibility for the murder. When royal investigators sought the name of the culprit, villagers swore that the whole town did it. Moreover, politics never obscures the melodrama, a thoroughly satisfying tale of robberies, rapes and other cruelties ferociously avenged. If Lope de Vega cannot rival his contemporary Shakespeare for depth and subtlety of character, he is surely the Bard's equal for rumbustious plot. (And vastly his superior for productivity: whereas Shakespeare wrote 37 or so plays -- authorship of some is disputed -- Lope de Vega is credited with about 1,800, of which 470 survive. For years, he turned them out at a rate of almost one a week.)

Berkeley Rep's production benefits from fluid, cinematic staging by the company's artistic director, Sharon Ott, and a highly adaptable village-square setting by Kate Edmunds. The production is so good that even a predictable climax -- the villain's armed intrusion at the wedding of a shepherd he despises and a maiden he means to rape -- achieves the abrupt power of surprise. Among a solid ensemble cast, Jack Heller is a wonderfully hissable overlord, full of chill arrogance and hot rage, and Domenique Lozano and Stephen Burks are the most affecting of his victims. The chief asset, however, is the play itself, which is both a singular masterwork and a reminder to every U.S. nonprofit theater that there remains a rich array of unproduced European stage classics from before the 19th century and beyond the English language.