PRESS

The dark of art of Arrabal

Spanish playwright's newest work, Red Madonna, delves into alchemy

_______________
By Peter Wynne
Drama Critic
__________________

Two plays by Fernando Arrabal, one of Europe's rope's leading avantgardists, are playing in New York right now his new "The Red Madonna" in its world première at INTAR Hispanic American Theatre and his 1966 "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria" in a revival at the celebrated La Mama Experimental Theatre Company.
If one wanted to offer proof of the esteem in which the Moroccanborn Arrabal is held among theater experimentalists in America, one need only mention that both plays were chosen to mark significant anniversaries of the companies producing them.
La Mama decided to recreate its 1976 Tom O'Horgan production of "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria" to mark the company's 25th anniversary, INTAR, celebrating 20 years of existence, commissioned a play from Arrabal and "The Red Madonna, or a Damsel for a Gorilla," to give its full title, was the result.
Nevertheless, Arrabal's plays are mysterious, sometimes quite incomprehensible. and if there's one man who's a bit surprised by his popularity he's the most widely produced playwright writing in French today it's the playwright himself, a plump, bespectacled, bearded man with a puckish sense of humor.
"The mystery is that my plays are produced as much as they are, that there's interest in them at all," the often controversial playwright said in a chat a few days ago at the New York studio of his friend, the French abstract painter Miotte. Arrabal, who has lived in Paris the past 30 years, spoke mostly in Spanish that afternoon, his comments interpreted by Daliah Lugo, a theater student at Oberlin College who's interning at INTAR this season.
"My plays are difficult, not only for American audiences, but for Japanese and Indonesian or whomever you want," he said. "I don't do anything to facilitate access to my theater, which is urgent, nocturnal, and solitary.
"I write for myself, and I write theater to create the adventures I don't have In my own life. It's assumed that Arrabal is trying to provoke with his theater, but the basis of my work is feelings, always feelings, I do not look to provoke anyone or anything."
Whether Arrabal looks to provoke and whether he does provoke are, of course, two different Issues. His almost dreamlike plays are antiauthoritarian, sometimes violent, scatological, even blasphemous if you choose to interpret his ritualistic action as a parody of religion.
"The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria" puts two men on an otherwise deserted island. The "primitive" aboriginal Architect, who can control the elements, submits to the will of the selfstyled Emperor of Assyria to learn the ways of "civilized" men from this sole survivor of an airplane crash.
In "The Red Madonna," a drama based partly on historical fact, a young Spanish woman decides to have a child out of wedlock, something nearly unheard of in Spain early In this century. The child proves a prodigy and attracts international attention but ultimately, is slain, at her own request, by her mother.
At least part of Arrabal's imagery in both plays can be traced to ancient Myths which have survived down to this century in various folk beliefs, including those surrounding witchcraft.
"Paganism is very important In Spanish culture," Arrabal said. "That is why, when I was involved with the surrealists (in Paris during the Fifties and Sixties), I wanted to establish what I called the 'theatre panique,' named partly for the god Pan, who could make people laugh and dance one minute and plunge them Into terror in the next."
Witches are present as midwives at the birth of the prodigious child, Hildegart, for example, and as she grows up she pursues the study of alchemy. In the struggle between the Architect and the Emperor one can hear echoes of the mythic combat between the king of the waning year, representing the forces of nature, and the sacred king of the waxing year, representing human civilization.
But the traditions that inform Arrabal's work are many, and one is grateful that he's willing to discuss them. His plays are rather like palimpsests those parchment scrolls of centuries past that were used, whited over, and used again, so that now they hold text upon text.
In the course of the conversation, Arrabal acknowledged that his work has been influenced by pagan and Christian traditions, events during his growing up in fascist Spain, the paintings, even the plays he saw as a child.
"The word 'pan' means 'all' In Greek," Arrabal said, enlarging on his "panic theater" Idea. We were incorporating into our art elements that were not considered artistic. The name. was a multiple play on words. It also was 'pan' for the Spanish word 'pandilla,' meaning a group of people getting together to do something. It was also 'pan' meaning 'bread' in Spanish, the nourishment that comes from the Earth."
His plays can similarly evoke many meanings at once. Arrabal has his Emperor urging the Architect to kill and devour him, and one can see this as recalling the pagan ritual slaughter of the sacred king, who represented the nature god who died and revived with the seasons.

* * *

Arrabal discusses his ,Red Madonna'

Alchemy and the playwright's art

Some, however, have seen this as a blasphemous parody of the Roman Catholic mass, while others have interpreted the characters as representing two sides of human nature and this ritual cannibalism as man's attempt at self integration. Any and all could be correct.
Surely, there's no question that Arrabal is well steeped in Spanish Catholic traditions and uses its imagery in his plays.
"The Christian elements in my work stem from my education.'' Arrabal said. "but it's a very special kind of Christianity because it was Christianity that lived in a state of terror for many centuries because of the Inquisition.

"'The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria' was inspired by Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights.' I was very impressed by this painting when I was 11 or 12. It gave me headaches. I studied Bosch's paintings intently; they have 25 or 30 of them in the Prado, and it was like I was under a spell."
Another painter who fascinated Arrabal was Goya y Lucientes, who was also well represented at the Prado.
"Goya and I have lived the same context." the playwright said. "He was also an emigrant who died in France. He also used to 90 to all we Spanish processions and carnivals that are so present in my works and his."
The more dubious interpretations of Arrabal's work would seem to he those that invoke modern literary and social movements.
"There have been publications and flyers circulating saying that ,The Red Madonna' is a feminist feminist play." Arrabal said. "This play has nothing to do with feminism, and I have asked that these fliers be burnt, but they're still around. Neither Aurora Rodriguez, the girl's mother, nor Hildegart ever thought about this issue.
"Alchemy is the most important issue in this play (Ö) desire to create a being (Ö) expert in alchemy, which required encyclopedic knowledge of mathematics, philosophy and physics and also languages like Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew. and Latin. That's why this girl knew everything and had these languages. To be an initiate in alchemy is to have this knowledge.
"In this case. alchemy is not necessarily a metaphor, although it could be associated with the desire today to achieve knowledge in scientific fields. In today's world, in computer science, we find this desire to know and young people with their computers who are cut off from society, like people who lived in the world of alchemy, like poets who cut themselves off from the world Rimbaud, for example. One of the cornerstones of alchemy is secrecy."
Although alchemy has pagan origins, Arrabal's fascination with the subject stems from an experience he had growing up in Spain during the Nazi era. His family had moved to Spain from Morocco when Arrabal was only a few years old.
"I grew very interested in the real story of Aurora Rodriguez because the issue of wanting to create a different being was present in my childhood in fascist education. In Spain, we had contests testing intelligence, following Hitlerian models. In 1943, there was such a contest in which children 11 or 12 my age at the time had to participate.
"I won first place in this contest, but happily the Nazis were losing the war by then and nothing came of all this. The plan, which fell through, was to take the children who had won and make some kind of Institution of them. Of the 10 winners, however, three have since gone crazy.
"Another issue in the play is that of people disappearing. My father was condemned to death by Franco and disappeared from prison. It's Possible that he, like Aurora Rodriguez, could turn up at some time."
Aurora Rodriguez and her daughter, Hildegart, were known throughout Spain. Arrabal says, so well known, in fact, that more a people attended the girl's funeral than lived in Madrid at the time. Spanish newspapers of the day nicknamed Hildegart the "Red Madonna" for her dabbling in alchemy, he added.
"In alchemy," Arrabal said, "there is a moment right before the creation of the philosopher's stone when the white mercury it's still virgin explodes and the red sulfur comes out. This is called the 'red madonna', and getting to this point in the alchemical process is called 'achieving the red madonna.'
"As the term was applied to Hildegart, it was somewhat pejorative, almost ridicule. And this is why it was interesting to give the play the title I did. This reconciled the more popular, almost vulgar meaning of the term 'the red madonna' it's almost the title of a bad movie with the sublime meaning the term has in alchemy."
Soon after he left Spain in 1955 to live in Paris, Arrabal became associated with the surrealist Andre Breton and his circle, but the playwright does not feel that their work had any impact on his own.
"My contact with literary schools in Paris had no influence on me. I don't think there's any trace of surrealism in my plays. Nor do I think my contact with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and so on left any trace on my work. No, the influences on my work stem from things much earlier in my life, from my growing up in Spain."
Even the white makeup and costumes of the actors in "The Red Madonna" hearken back to Spain. even though those fashions have Italian antecedents.
"White costumes and makeup were what the actors wore in the plays I saw as a child in Ciudad Rodrigo, although now I see that the theater there had a lot to do with the commedia dell'arte of Italy."
To get some idea of the complexities of dealing with Arrabals work, just consider the opening minutes of "The Red Madonna." which begins with an actor inside the towering figure of a bull. bowing and pacing back and forth to the accompaniment of a continuous roar.
Just sticking to things Spanish, the interpretive possibilities are myriad : This is the bull of the bull,.
fight arena, the sacrificial victim of pagan ritual, the Minotaur of Pablo Picasso, the bull of Goya's "Tauromaquia," the incarnate devil of the witches' sabbath, and an actor playing a bull. That figure is meant to be all those things at once, Arrabal acknowledges.