La Dama Duende

Live theater is cool.

Last night I went with some Madrid friends to see the Teatro de la Comedia's production of Calderón de la Barca's comedy, La dama duende.  (Generally translated as "The Phantom Lady.") 

Gathering outside the newly renovated Teatro de la Comedia before the performance

The Teatro de la Comedia in on the Calle Príncipe, near Sol, and it's a beautiful old 19th C theater, with a proscenium arch, and boxes with red plush seats (we had a box) and it's also newly renovated, so all the gilt friezes and the fresco on the ceiling are all bright and shiny and the chandeliers are glittery, and most excellently it has super-titles (in Spanish) like the old City Opera above the stage for the hearing impaired, or those of us who have trouble listening to 17th century Spanish verse recited quickly by people who are trying to make it sound like natural speech and therefore slur their words.

I love minimalist and experimental theater, and places where (like Langston Hughes and Dorothy Peterson's "Harlem Suitcase Theatre") all the props and costumes fit in one suitcase.  But sometimes it's fun to see a play mounted with elaborate costumes and sets and production values too, and when it's in a gilt and plush theater the experience is complete.

The season for the teatro de la comedia (announced outside the theater) looks like the reading list for the course I took long ago in Siglo de Oro theater...plus a few happily unfamiliar things.  I may have to go back.

All in all, the experience was really more like opera (complete with super-titles) partly because the set made use of a translucent screen that reminded me of recent productions I've seen at the Met.  This particular screen frequently had an old map of Madrid projected onto it, which it moved through to show that the setting was changing.  I thought it was charming, but it also made me realize afresh exactly how much Madrid really was a world capital in the seventeenth century.

In the imagined world of the director the main location is a large aristocratic home near the Plaza Mayor.  When one of the characters sees a pile of clothes in disorder he exclaims that it looks like a "mercadillo" (flea market) in the Plaza de la Cebada, a few hundred meters away.  The action is set in the first lines of the play (written before authors had cool screens with projections on them available) when the main character complains about arriving too late to see the fiestas of Madrid, which are presumably those described a couple of centuries later by Goya.  All in all, La dama duende a charmingly local play.  But that's true of a lot of Siglo de Oro stuff, I realize.  Characters talk about crossing the Manzanares and entering via the Puerta de Toledo, or stopping on their way to the city at Illescas.  They go to the Plaza Mayor, and to attend the king at El Escorial.  (One important scene in La dama duende turns on someone coming back from El Escorial because he's forgotten to bring important papers and is annoyed at the delay.)  Sometimes you have a newcomer to the capital (like Don Manuel in La dama duende) who's from the sticks (somewhere like Burgos) but mostly these are Madrid plays.  And while they were written in Madrid (mostly within a radius of about two miles of the theater), and meant to be performed there, they were also performed elsewhere by traveling companies.  So that means someone could talk about the Plaza Mayor, or the distance between Madrid and El Escorial the way screen and script writers now can talk about Broadway or Times Square, and assume that they are sufficiently meaningful cultural referents that a general audience will have at least an imagined idea of them.  Contrast that with Shakespeare (who was writing in a backwater) who may make a couple of sly London references, but for the most part (except for the histories, obviously) sets his plays in fashionable and exciting (or imaginary) places: Venice, Verona, Messina, France, Denmark.  Similarly, Hamlet (both play and character) assume that everyone in northern Europe knows that miching malicho is mucho malhecho (much evil).  But there's not a stray word of English or French in Calderón.

That said, I really like Calderón's plays.  La vida es sueño is probably close to the perfect tragicomedy.  (If it were Shakespeare it would be called a "problem play" and I think it tilts toward tragedy myself, though of a very subtle nature.)  La dama duende, which I had not seen before (nor do I think I've read it, although I did remember a vague summary) is close to a perfect comedy.  The costuming for this production was mid to late 19th C, which worked perfectly in terms of striking a balance between opulence and familiarity, and also worked fairly well since in fact the situations could have been extended that late more or less.  (The premise is ridiculous, but it was ridiculous in the 17th C also, so if you can do a willing suspension of disbelief for one century there's no much more required for another.) 

And although the premise is ridiculous, it's ridiculous in the manner of a 1930s screwball comedy: a young widow has been left deeply indebted by her improvident husband who went adventuring in the West Indies, and as a result has what a completely modern Spanish sitcom recently referred to as "un pequeño malentendido con la Hacienda" (a little misunderstanding with the Spanish equivalent of the IRS).  Her older brothers decide to protect her from her creditors (including the king) by hiding her away so that she never goes out, and lives secluded in a walled off section of her oldest brother's home.  I looked up some criticism after seeing the play, and not too surprisingly some 19th C English critics apparently misinterpreted the premise and assumed she was locked up to protect her honor and keep her away from men, because they apparently thought the debt thing was unbelievable.  It is unbelievable, but so is any other reason why poor doña Angela is locked up by her brothers.  The point is, she's locked up and her existence is a secret Because Reasons.  (If you don't want spoilers, skip the next couple of paragraphs.  Be warned now.)

This sets up the drama, where she (a)sneaks out of the house, and then (b)accidentally encounters her eldest brother's oldest friend (Don Manuel) while fleeing from her second brother and asks him to help her flee and then (c)falls in love with him because he helps her.  Of course Don Manuel has come to Madrid to stay with his old friend Don Juan, and of course Don Juan puts him in a room which just happens to be the one adjacent to the walled off wing where Angela is hiding.  Of course there's a secret door between the two rooms, so of course Angela decides to sneak into Don Manuel's room and try to find out more about him.  She then starts moving objects around when he's out, and eventually starts leaving little love letters for him (also gifts, and freshly ironed clothes, and similar).  He's a bit puzzled because his host has assured him (very emphatically) that there are no other doors to his rooms, so he's not sure whether he's attracted the attention of a spirit (a duende) or a human lady who lives in the household and somehow has a key.  After a while, he decides he doesn't care.  There is a lot of physical comedy about revolving secret cupboards and people sneaking around in the dark and hiding in various places, and mistaking each other for ghosts (and Angela does one bravura performance as a "ghost" when she gets caught), which I can completely see in a Fred Astaire movie.  Or possibly a Marx Brothers movie.  Something of that sort.

There are a lot of complications, and in the end everyone lives happily ever after, although I felt kind of bad for Don Manuel having to assume all of Doña Angela's debts which she doesn't even tell him about before he's sort of forced into proposing marriage to her because her brothers have found out about her sneaking into his room in the dark, which looks kind of compromising even though it isn't, and basically if he doesn't marry her they're going to kill her.  (Calderón's fascinating view of honor killings, also advanced in El alcalde de Zalamea, is more or less that just because you can kill your sister or daughter doesn't mean you should.  If at all possible, you should find the guy who put her in whatever the compromising situation is and kill him.  This is not very enlightened from one point of view, but from another, assuming that killing somebody is mandatory, he sort of feels like you should pick on someone your own size.  This passes for feminist in 17th C Spain.)  However, the script specifies that Don Manuel is rich, and is in the king's service and being well rewarded, so presumably he pays of Angela's debts and then they live happily ever after.  (I suspect Calderón didn't settle the thing about the debts because he just put it in to give Angela a reason to have the door to the connecting suite and to be living secretly in the house, and then forgot about the plot device he'd invented at the end.)

All of this is totally and happily ridiculous, and yet you end up caring very much about all the characters.  It helped that the acting was superb, and that in a couple of places where people seemed to be acting very irrationally the director wisely added the props and stage business to show that they were extremely drunk as well as out of their mind with worry, fear, jealousy, or other strong emotions, and therefore were dumber than usual.

When the cast was taking their bows one of my friends leaned over and whispered to me that she was almost sure that she knew the actor playing Don Juan, and that she thought they had worked together, and taken their final civil service exams as teachers in the same year.  After checking the program, she confirmed that this was in fact the case.  Obviously he did not stay a high school teacher but left to have a successful career in theater.  But it was funny and very much of a piece with this very local play that one of the actors turned out to be an old acquaintance of my friend.

After the theater we did the appropriate thing and went out for tapas, ending up at the very castizo Casa Labra, the bar around the corner from the Puerta del Sol famous for being the birthplace of the PSOE (the Spanish Socialist party).  There's a plaque on the wall commemorating it, which is ironic since at the time it was founded it was done very clandestinely because it was illegal.  But the bar is landmarked, and is very cool, and I highly recommend the bacalao and cerveza sin alcohol.

I will leave you with a video clip of the production of La dama duende: