Two theatre friends dive beneath the surface in ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’

For years now, Soheil Parsa has known that he would direct “The House of Bernarda Alba,” by Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. And he knew that when he directed it, Beatriz Pizano would be at the centre of the show: “I cannot do it without Bea,” he said.

The two, veterans of the Toronto theatre scene, have been working together since 1999. Both are immigrants — Parsa from Iran, Pizano from Colombia — who set up their own theatre companies because, as Pizano put it, “there were no opportunities for us” when they were starting out.

It’s these two companies, Parsa’s Modern Times Stage Company and Pizano’s Aluna Theatre, which are co-producing “The House of Bernarda Alba,” playing at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre through April 24.

Pizano plays the title role: a domineering matriarch who essentially puts her five adult daughters under house arrest after the death of her husband. Tensions build as the daughters hunger for a life outside those four walls.

Parsa says that the script, translated by David Johnston, is deceptively simple. “The surface doesn’t take you anywhere. It means nothing. People sitting and talking and complaining,” he said. The key is in the subtext: “There is something happening underneath that we need to discover.”

This is the second time Parsa, Pizano and their companies have collaborated on a play by Lorca, and the previous results were electric. “Blood Wedding” was a big hit in 2015, winning six Dora Mavor Moore Awards in the independent theatre division including Best Production, Best Director (Parsa) and Best Female Performance (Pizano). They revived the production in 2017, also at Buddies in Bad Times.

“He’s not afraid of big passions,” said Pizano of Lorca. “You don’t have to apologize for your emotions.” For Pizano and Parsa, working on Lorca’s plays is a process of finding those passions lying underneath the text.

Parsa researches for at least a year before a production, reading extensively about the play, the writer and the setting. But when he gets into the rehearsal room, he puts that to one side to work closely with the actors. “There’s a constant exchange of ideas and digging and digging, trying to find what is the subtext,” he said.

“The challenge with Lorca is that it sounds like naturalistic language, but it isn’t,” said Pizano. “You need to go really big. You need to go up there with him.”

While Parsa is open to discussing choices with actors at length, by this point he and Pizano have a shorthand. “As soon as she goes and tries something and then says, ‘Parsa, I’m not going to do this,’ I say, ‘OK yeah, don’t do it.’ It’s a mutual trust,” he said.

Parsa calls Pizano’s character “a prisoner of a tradition. She hasn’t managed to get away from the patriarchy,” he said. “When you are looking at the play, she talks a lot about ‘my father’s house’ … She hasn’t managed to release herself from that deadly dated tradition.” Lorca completed the play in 1936, two months before he was killed on the orders of general Francisco Franco because he had socialist views and was a homosexual.

Parsa’s understanding of the play is informed by his experience of having to leave Iran during the 1979 revolution due to religious repression: “I personally witnessed a bloody revolution and I experienced an ideological regime. The whole concept of tradition and modernity, it’s really important to me,” he said.

Pizano agreed that Bernarda’s behaviour is in response to “the world that she lives in and the role that she has to play in society … she really has to protect herself and her daughters,” she said. This is a familiar theme in Lorca’s work: “Women living in a world that men create, destroy and leave, leaving us to deal with it,” said Pizano. “That’s what attracts me so much to Lorca. He has incredible respect for women.”

This production was delayed due to the pandemic, and the rise of a new variant during rehearsals has not made things easy. Pizano is rolling with the punches: “You just take it day to day because we don’t know if we’re going to be on tomorrow,” she said. “You give it all, but it’s like I have no control over what happens.”

There is a resonance for her with the theme of societal evolution in the play: “It’s so hard to change. We still are trying to do a play in the same way that we’ve been doing it, because the whole system has not changed.”

Parsa stepped down as Modern Times’ artistic director last year and this is his first show for the company as a freelance director. Not having to worry about fundraising and administration “is a joy,” he said. “I get paid just to come and direct this show.”

While she’s not thinking of leaving Aluna anytime soon, Pizano said it will be important for whoever takes over, as it is for Modern Times’ new artistic director, Rouvan Silogix, to make the company their own. “The new people that come in are going to have a different dream completely,” she said.

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