"Yerma" at Shotgun Players

 

Shotgun Players production photo by Ben Krantz

OK, back from our vacation jaunts, with plenty of local theater to catch up on. Lots of things closing in the next couple of weeks, so we'll sneak them in when we can!

First up in Yerma at Shotgun Players. I thought we were going to miss this entirely, but they added a Wednesday evening show that we could squeeze in between a couple of little trips, so we literally made the one performance we could before they closed.

The Play

I actually had a chance to read the script while it was under consideration for the Shotgun season, and frankly, I was not that impressed. It's an adaptation and translation by Melinda Lopez of a play by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca about a young woman, Yerma, who desperately wants to have a child with her husband, Juan. But she never conceives. The play is about her efforts to have a child, and what she will and won't do to achieve that.

For whatever reason, the story doesn't appeal to me. Perhaps I've never been in a position of wanting something terribly that I could not have. But whatever it is, the play just doesn't do it for me. But clearly it has a strong appeal for many others, so I was hoping to find something in the performance that eluded me when reading. 

The Production

The play is indeed better in the flesh than it was on paper, but I still don't think it's all that. In the hands of director Katja Rivera (a long-time member of the Shotgun artistic company, making her mainstage directorial debut) and a good crew of designers (Nina Ball designed the set, lighted by Sara Saavedra, with costumes by Valera Coble), the story comes to life. But there still isn't that much story. I find myself siding with the majority of the characters who can't fathom why Yerma seems unwilling to take any of the alternative options presented to her (e.g., sleep with someone who looks like your husband, or adopt one of your many nieces and nephews) when endlessly repeating the same scheme continues to produce no results.

Regina Morones as Yerma, Caleb Cabrera as Juan, and Samuel Prince as Victor all give fine performances, but the material they have to work with just doesn't give them much room to shine. And some of Yerma's friends and relations (such as they are--she's pretty distant from everyone) manage to give more life to the characters than I detected in the script. Notably, Linda Maria Giron as Marta and Linda Amayo-Hassan as Incarnacion manage to make me care about them.

The Bottom Line

This just seems to be one of those plays that has great appeal to some audience, but not to me, personally. (Another example would be last season's Man of God at Shotgun.) Well done, but with a script that doesn't do much for me. But that's fine. Theater isn't just for me, and I can appreciate that there is value in hearing other voices and seeing other faces on stage.

So I applaud theaters for taking steps to highlight other stories, especially when they do it well. Expanding the scope of the works and the audience are both important goals. With so many theaters struggling to draw audiences after the pandemic, it's good to see so many of them at least trying to reach out to broader swaths of the community.