If you want some­thing done right, you have to do it your­self. Which is why asso­ciate pro­fessor of the­atre Antonio Ocampo-​​Guzman didn’t think twice about doing his own trans­la­tion of Fed­erico Garcia Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba, which opens Tuesday night at the Studio The­atre in the Curry Stu­dent Center.

Ocampo-​​Guzman, who is directing the North­eastern pro­duc­tion, has had a life­long love of Lorca’s work. When he directed his first Lorca play, Blood Wed­ding, at North­eastern in 2010, none of the Eng­lish trans­la­tions of the Spanish playwright’s work really spoke to him.

“The thing about trans­la­tion is if you trans­late this text lit­er­ally to make the anec­dote under­stand­able you lose some of the rough­ness of the Spanish lan­guage or the idiomatic uses of the lan­guage,” Ocampo-​​Guzman explained. “Most trans­la­tions are done in order to read a play, not to per­form it.”

Punc­tu­a­tion makes the text live in the land of should, which is the worst land for an actor to live in. We need to live in the land of would or the land of will.
— Antonio Ocampo-​​Guzman

So in a first for him, Ocampo-​​Guzman did his own trans­la­tion of Blood Wed­ding in 2010 and trans­lated The House of Bernarda Alba this past summer. “It was a really deep expe­ri­ence per­son­ally as a bilin­gual artist, he said. “It brought my two worlds, my two lan­guages, my two cul­tures together.”

One very notice­able omis­sion from Ocampo-Guzman’s trans­la­tion is punc­tu­a­tion. In none of the scripts will you find a period, excla­ma­tion point, ques­tion mark, or comma.

“Punc­tu­a­tion makes the text live in the land of should, which is the worst land for an actor to live in,” Ocampo-​​Guzman noted. “We need to live in the land of would or the land of will. Get­ting rid of punc­tu­a­tion frees the actors up, not just in terms of inter­pre­ta­tion but more impor­tantly in terms of the inven­tion of the lan­guage they are speaking.”

Stage man­ager Pablo Her­nandez Basulto, AMD’18, says Ocampo-Guzman’s trans­la­tion gives the per­formers more space for discovery.

“It allows for the voice of each actor to come into the room, and not exactly por­tray Lorca’s ideas but rather make them their own,” Her­nandez Basulto said.

The House of Bernarda Alba is a story about a widow who exerts strict con­trol over her five daugh­ters after her second hus­band dies. The play was first per­formed in 1945, and was the last play Lorca wrote before his assas­si­na­tion in 1936.

“Fem­i­nism is a huge part of this play, and for me with the recent focus on how fem­i­nism is evolving and trying to take the taboo off the word, that is inter­esting for me,” said Bar­bara Edmonds, AMD’18, who plays Bernarda Alba.

Some­thing else audi­ences will notice about The House of Bernarda Alba is there are no male roles. “I like that it is all women for this play specif­i­cally because it is about, in a modern way, fem­i­nism set in the time of the play,” added Edmonds. “It is about the repres­sion of women and dif­ferent soci­etal norms between the genders.”

The House of Bernarda Alba opens Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 7:30 p.m. at the Studio The­atre in the Curry Stu­dent Center. The show will run through Oct. 31. Tickets are avail­able through the North­eastern Uni­ver­sity ticket office, myNEU, or at the Studio The­atre box office.

Read the original story at new@Northeastern →