House Arrest
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Regular playgoers have come to recognize the Pearl as bright metal on the sullen ground of New York theater. Now in its 21st season, it has dedicated itself to the attentive maintenance of the classics and the development of an honest-to-goodness resident acting company: a vital service in our theatrically troubled times. With its workmanlike revival of “The House of Bernarda Alba,” however, the company falls into many of the traps that make people cautious about classics in the first place.
Federico Garcia Lorca’s play – completed in 1936, with the drumbeat of civil war growing ever louder – is a masterpiece of juxtaposition in which the prosaic and poetic intertwine. Upon her husband’s death, the autocratic matriarch Bernarda Alba decrees that she and her daughters will lock themselves away for eight years of mourning. Her repressive demands strip the girls’ lives of joy and men, leaving their desires to build and feed off each other. The result is a modern tragedy in the full sense, a naturalistic world that slips into the primal and horrifying before you’re sure how it took you there.
The Pearl’s set uses an agreeably simple backdrop of three walls full of sealed windows, denying the outside world any entry into this grieving home. But the scenes that transpire within seldom rise above a nattering domesticity. The young, admirably diverse cast rarely gets past what the characters are saying to mine the world of sexuality and blood that simmers beneath the sisters’ conversation. Though they jab at each other, they lack the hidden daggers with which Lorca has armed them. It gets warm in director Shepard Sobel’s Spain, but it never swelters: When anyone wipes a brow, it looks suspiciously like an actress touching her forehead in a theater on St. Mark’s Place.
The production gets little help from the translation by Caridad Svich. I sympathized with actresses trying to summon up wellsprings of rage and impotent lust with lines whose mannered awkwardness seems difficult to overcome. Allison Nichols brings glamour and fire to the rebellious Adela, while Robin Leslie Brown mines both humor and pathos to create an enormously sympathetic portrait of Angustias, the eldest sister. Only Carmen de Lavallade, as the deranged grandmother, fares well: Ms. Svich has found poetry in the old woman’s ramblings that the gifted actress can make her own.
In the title role, Carol Schultz is not yet in command of the imperious fearsomeness upon which much of the play depends. Her Bernarda comes across, with momentary exceptions, as a delusional victim, rather than a delusional tyrant victimizing everyone within spitting distance (including herself).
This production has found more of Lorca’s traps than his possibilities; let us look forward to greater success with the season’s two remaining efforts.
Until February 13 (80 St. Marks Place, between First and Second Avenues, 212-352-3101).