Digital Playbill

The Public by Frederico García Lorca, translated by Caridad Svich 

Directed by Logan Ridenour-Starnes

 *Content Notice: sexual assault, murder, death, violence, fascist imagery

 Enjoy the music in the show? Check out our Spotify Playlist!

 

Cast, in order of appearance

Prologue: The Theatre

The Magician: Madison Bible

Frame One: The Director’s Room

Servant: Nick Hailer

Director (Enrique): Alexa Bayliff

Horse Chorus: Ivy Chacon, Claire Rigsby, Whitney Botsford, Nick Hailer

First Man (Gonzalo): Hannah Kelly

Third Man: Amanda DeRego 

Second Man: Sydney Gannon

Helen: Olivia Sloss

Frame Two: A Roman Ruin

Figure with Bells (Enrique): Alexa Bayliff

Figure with Vine Leaves (Gonzalo): Hannah Kelly

Centurion: Madeline Botsford

Roman Emperor: Sydney Gannon

Frame Three: An In-between Place

First Man (Gonzalo): Hannah Kelly

Second Man: Sydney Gannon

Director (Enrique): Alexa Bayliff

Third Man: Amanda DeRego

                  The sepulcher of Juliet in Verona

Juliet: Madison Bible

First White Horse: Ivy Chacon

Black Horse: Narayan S. Bal

Second White Horse: Nick Hailer

Third White Horse: Whitney Botsford

First Man (Gonzalo): Hannah Kelly

Director (Enrique): Alexa Bayliff

Harlequin Costume: Madeline Botsford

Ballerina Costume: Olivia Sloss

Pajamas Costume: Nick Hailer

Second Man: Sydney Gannon

Third Man: Amanda DeRego

The Song of the Silly Shepherd: The Void

The Silly Shepherd: Madison Bible

The Mask Chorus: Whitney Botsford, Ivy Chacon, Emmy Christopherson, Sydney Gannon, Madeline Botsford, Narayan Bal, Olivia Sloss, Alexa Bayliff

Frame Five: Inside a Theatre

Male Nude (Gonzalo): Hannah Kelly

Male Nurse: Amanda DeRego

First Student: Ivy Chacon

Second Student: Emmy Christopherson

Third Student: Madison Bible

Fourth Student: Whitney Botsford

Fifth Student: Narayan S. Bal

First Lady: Olivia Sloss

Second Lady: Sydney Gannon

Third Lady: Madeline Botsford

Boy: Nick Hailer

Prompter: Alexa Bayliff

First Man (Gonzalo): Hannah Kelly

Frame Six: The Director’s Room

Director (Enrique): Alexa Bayliff

The Magician: Madison Bible

Harlequin Costume: Madeline Botsford

Lady in Black: Olivia Sloss

Servant: Nick Hailer

 

Creative Team

Director: Logan Ridenour-Starnes

Costume Design: Gregory Pulver

Assistant Costume Design: Sue Bonde

Makeup Design: Kat Yo

Visual Design: Larry Larsen

Videographer: Alan Cline^

Sound Design and Operation: Maddie Southard

Prop Design: Mikelle Kelly

Production Stage Manager: Carol Ann Wohlmut^

Stage Managers: Megan Thorpe^

Dramaturg: Waylon Lenk^

Dressers: Sarah Larson, Shae McCarty, Lilly Grey Rudge

Scene Shop Technician: Madison Bible

Costume Shop Manager: Sue Bonde 

Costume Technicians: Katja La Flamme, Sarah Larson, Isaiah Saluta, Kat Yo

 

^Guest Artist 

 

Theater Faculty and Staff

Sue Bonde, Costume Shop Manager

Prior to moving to Portland, Sue worked in Chicago as a freelance costume designer and technician for the Goodman Theater and Light Opera Works. She has designed for A.R.T., New Rose Theatre, and Portland Repertory Theatre, and the Wee Sing children’s videos before joining Michael Curry Design and working on The Lion King on Broadway. Bonde has designed costumes for Portland Opera’s The Return of Ulysses, Albert Herring, La Calisto, Il Ballo delle Ingrate/Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda/Trouble in Tahiti , Galileo, Postcards from Morocco, L’heure Espanogle / L’enfant et les Sortileges and most recently, La Cenerentola. She is the recipient of two Willamette Week Excellence in Theater Awards and two Portland Drammy Awards. Past designs for UP include Tartuffe and Pippin. Mock’s Crest Opera costume design credits include Iolanthe, Ruddigore, The Pirates of Penzance, Light in the Piazza and Yeoman of the Guard.

 

Lezlie C. Cross, PhD, Assistant Professor, Theatre History and Dramaturgy

Dr. Cross’s directing credits at UP include As You Like It and Where is Home: a Digital Living Newspaper. She is also a professional dramaturg who has worked at regional theatres across America including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Nevada Conservatory Theatre, Cincinnati Shakespeare, Classic Stage Company, and Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, her M.A. from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and her B.A. from Whitman College.

 

Larry Larsen, M.F.A., Professor, Academic Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Larsen has been involved in theater since the fifth grade when he played Schroder in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and has had a life long association with the theater ever since that time. He is in his 27th year at the University, and besides teaching the scenic and lighting design coursework for the Theater Program, he is an Academic Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences. His most recent design work at UP, which includes over a hundred productions, includes Pippen, Dr. Faustus, Eurydice, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Mad Forest. Larry has worked as a professional designer in Portland for the last 30 years and recent work includes Nunsense and Company at Broadway Rose Theatre, Haddon Hall Revels for Portland Revels where he is the resident set designer, All My Sons and This Random World for Portland Actors Conservatory, and Mr. Kolpert for Third Rail Repertory Theater. This past summer he designed the set and lights for The Yeomen of the Guard for Mocks Crest’s Productions for which he has been the resident designer and artistic director. Other theaters designed for include Artists Repertory Theatre, Oregon Children’s Theatre, Northwest Children’s Theater, Portland Repertory Theatre, Tygres Heart Shakespeare Co., Portland Civic Theatre and Summer Repertory Theatre in Santa Rosa. Prior to his employment at the University, Larry worked as the Design Associate for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, both in Ashland and Portland. He has his MFA in Theatre Design from the University of Washington.

 

Mindi Logan, M.F.A., Associate Professor, Acting Instructor

Mindi is beginning her 20th year teaching for the University of Portland. Her artistic work at the University includes acting and dialect coaching for productions. Mindi received her MFA from the Professional Actors Training Program at Rutgers University and then worked professionally as an actor in New York and Los Angeles, appearing off-Broadway, in soap operas, sitcoms, and film. Continuing her professional acting career, Mindi has appeared locally with Artists Repertory Theatre, Theater Vertigo, Willamette Shakespeare, Quintessence Theater, Stark Raving Theatre, in commercials, industrials, and voiceovers. Mindi was awarded the Kennedy Center Gold Medallion for her service as the Regional Chair of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival. Mindi’s husband Hal is a professional musician and composer who also works locally and teaches at the University of Portland.    

 

Gregory Pulver, M.F.A., Associate Professor, Costume and Makeup Design

Before becoming Associate Professor and Program Director for the UP Theater Program, Gregory was an Associate Professor of Costume Design at Western Washington University for 12 years and Chair of the WWU Theater Department for three and a half of those years. Gregory holds an MFA in costume design and choreography from Humboldt State University, CA. He is the 1993 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) National Costume Design Winner for his work on Three Penny Opera at Humboldt State. Gregory is currently a Resident Artist at Artist Repertory Theatre in Portland, where his favorite of many designs include The Skin of Our Teeth, Broomstick, Cuba Libre and Foxfinder. He has been a member of the international board of advisors for The Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, AK for 13 years and participates yearly as a featured artist mentoring new American playwrights by participating on response panels, providing workshops in design and writing, and by individual mentorship during each festival. In Portland Gregory has designed both sets and costumes for Bag and Baggage Theatre in Hillsboro, and costumes for Broadway Rose Theatre in Portland. Gregory has designed for several short films and TV spots in Washington including a dance for the camera film titled Egg Skin.

 

Director’s Note by Logan Ridenour-Starnes

“The “poet” does indeed condemn white urban American civilization, but that civilization is merely the most immediate, clearest possible image of the spiritual poverty of twentieth-century man...the vigil of modern man in quest of the cosmic meaning of so much suffering… He looks beyond circumstance to the edge of the unknown, in order to understand the pain around him; and much of that suffering does not seem to have any “social” or “moral” explanation.” ("Introduction", A Poet in New York, Christopher Maurer)

This production of The Public turns a mirror on the audience, questioning the daily masks we wear around others. Though the metaphor of the masks in The Public is not limited to one type of code-switching, we focused specifically on the queer experience of code-switching.

What does queerness mean now versus when the play was originally written? I discovered that not much has fundamentally changed. Federico García Lorca wrote The Public amidst a rising tide of fascism and violence in Spain, and we are staging this during a similar time of cultural reckoning. Queerness, for our purposes, is anything deemed “other” by fascist standards. This production is not a museum piece but instead has been created in the spirit of García Lorca’s radicalization, honoring his queer identity, and experimenting with his idea of “theater of the future.” What I hope to share with you is a message of queer resistance and celebration through a metatheatrical (metaZoom?) frame.

Staging an “impossible play” is tricky at the best of times. When I pitched The Public I remember saying, “Let’s do an impossible play!” García Lorca’s “impossible plays” were the two surrealist plays that he wrote following an eye-opening trip to the United States and Cuba. I thought that it would be significantly easier to stage this surreal play now than when it was originally written. Though they didn’t have all the technology that modern theatre has, they weren’t grappling with a pandemic at the same time.

Through this process I’ve come to define what theatre is for me and the ways in which I hope to engage the audience as participants.  For me, theater is an embodied art form with the intention of extending empathy internally and externally in order to communicate with an audience. I am particularly interested in the ways theater can be used as a tool for healing, empowerment, and the co-creation of a future. Though each iteration and application of the process will vary based on access to resources, the tool box of a theater and the skills of a theater-maker have a greater potential to aid in creating sustainable change and active resistance to ongoing violence within our society.

The Public uses a metatheatrical framework of masks and costumes to pull forth a conversation about the performances of self we shift through on a daily basis. The metaphor of masks is particularly present, sometimes meaning the mask of an individual and other times the mask of society.

This year has been saturated in fear—of things we can control and things we can’t. Fear of vulnerability in a harsh world is not unfounded. However, when the reaction of fear manifests in violence against others or ourselves it becomes harder to create relationships and community. We can’t control a lot of things but the way we navigate the world is something we have a say over. If the masks we place on ourselves aren’t for our benefit, but for the benefit of a violent Public, are they worth it?

 

Dramaturgical Note by Waylon Lenk

Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, Spain, near Granada. During his lifetime he was a prolific playwright and poet, and was one of the few artists to bring Surrealism into the theatre. However, only two of his plays – Blood Wedding and Mariana Pineda were published during his lifetime. He died at the hands of Franco’s Fascist government in 1936. He had been a part of the government during Spain’s Second Republic managing the state-funded student theatre company La Barraca.

His friend Rafael Martínez Nadal related after Lorca’s murder that in the days prior, Lorca had been planning on leaving Madrid out of concern for his life. A spate of retributive assassinations were being carried out in Spain by the extreme Right and Left, and due to his association with the Second Republic, Lorca was concerned that he may have been a target. In case he found himself arrested, he gave Nadal a packet of his papers with the instructions that, should he be arrested, Nadal should burn them. Lorca took the train to his hometown of Granada. It was there, on August 18, 1936, that Lorca was arrested by Fascists. The next day he was shot and buried in an unmarked grave that has yet to be found. After his death, Nadal unpacked Lorca’s papers to destroy them. Amongst them was a manuscript for an unfinished play called El Público. He decided that Lorca’s last request did not extend to this play. He published El Público in 1972 against the vociferous objections of Lorca’s family, who were concerned about outing their deceased kinsman as homosexual. Two years later Nadal published a book length study of El Público which he then translated into English in 1976.

This book has proved invaluable to me in understanding the dramaturgy of The Public. Nadal writes that its structure can best be described as a spiral At first glance, true, it looks like a circular plot: we arrive back in the Director’s room at the end. However, this room is different: instead of a huge handprint on the wall and X-ray negatives for windows, we arrive in a room with a giant eye, trees, and a horse head. These are the marks of the journey upon which the Director has gone. The Director, and we, have spiraled down into the theatre under the sand (which is also Juliet’s tomb).

Part of the significance of this play is that it is about illicit love, and The Public seems to be one of the first plays to talk openly and celebratory about homosexuality. The other Shakespeare play on which Lorca leans heavily helps illuminate his point of view on what it meant to be gay. His reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be that the magic flower is simply a plot devise to show that “love is pure chance” – one cannot choose who one loves (Nadal 31). We – and the Director – arrive in the same place as Juliet, but we take a different route than in Shakespeare’s play.

What that route is, is not entirely clear, and not just because of the surrealism. The Public is an unfinished play, of which we have only six cuadros, or scenes. It was meant to be a five-act play. It is as if we are listening to a radio program or watching a TV show that keeps cutting to snow. In this case, the snow was Lorca’s murder at the hands of Spanish fascists. This is particularly relevant given Starnes’s definition of “queer” as “anything considered ‘other’ by violent/fascist/capitalist/imperial/colonial/etc. standards”. As unforgivable as Lorca’s killing was, it is now a part of the fabric of The Public.

Sources I’ve found to be helpful in my reading of this play are:

De Witte, Ben. “Dramatizing Queer Visibility in El Público: Federico García Lorca in Search of a Modern Theatre.” Modern Drama, vol. 60, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 25–45, doi:10.3138/MD.0831.

Nadal, Rafael Martínez. Federico García Lorca and The Public: A Study of an Unfinished Play and of Love and Death in Lorca’s Work. Schocken Books, 1974.

 

Special Thanks

Jack Ridenour-Starnes; the members of the Mt.Hood Cherokees community; the '20/'21 ICP cohort and instructors; Mark Forrest