'The Wedding Dress' marries guilt and desire

Author: Sara Jameson

Whirling into the surrealist world of dreams and memory, Middlebury's production of Nelson Rodrigues's "The Wedding Dress" or"Vestido de Noiva", which opens today and runs through Saturday, strives to create a theatrical journey that will take the audience on a suspenseful ride into the mind of mortally injured young woman.

The play is about a middle-class young wife who has just been mortally wounded in a car accident. As she hovers at the brink of life in a coma, her mind snatches at memories, both real and imagined, to try to piece together the events that led to her accident. Influenced by Freud, as well as by Expressionism and Surrealism, Rodrigues's play "follows the logic of dreams," explains the director, Assistant Professor of Theatre and Middlebury College alumnus Claudio Medeiros '90. "[The woman's] consciousness is split between memory, reality and hallucination," said Medeiros, and it is through this "unusual journey" and "fragmented narrative" that "the plot builds to unravel the mystery around her death."

The play was written by Nelson Rodrigues in 1943. Rodrigues, who spent most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, was born into a family of journalists, whose influence, as well as his own experience as a journalistic writer, permeates his dramatic works both in style and in subject.

The production of his second play, "The Wedding Dress," launched his career as a playwright and propelled Brazilian theater into modernity. However, at the time he was writing, Rodrigues's fascination with the conflict between sexual desire and bourgeois taboos earned him the reputation of a pervert, especially as many of his characters were morally culpable. It was not until the 1980s, when the political climate of Brazil began to diverge from the severe repression of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that his then-believed impudent works began to garner more respect and gradually earned him the title of one of the most important Brazilian playwrights.

The play was originally directed by Polish émigré Zbigniew Ziembinski, whose exposure to early 20th-century avant garde aesthetics was a perfect match for Rodrigues's content. The work's divisive and episodic structure, nonlinear plot and cinematic quality took audiences by storm and forever revolutionized Brazilian theater.

Being the director of only the second production of this play in the United Sates, Medeiros intends to enforce the expressionist sensibility that permeates the work. "My artistic goal as the director," said Medeiros, "is mainly a question of styles. I want to draw on the ideas of expressionism, melodrama and film-noir to solve the issues of the play, all the while, not allowing the audience to become lost in the fragmentation of the piece...That was the main challenge - solving the play, both visually and theatrically, in this dream-scape while trying to give the audience clear narrative hooks so they will not get lost."

The cast was also challenged in trying to reach an understanding with each of their characters. Medeiros described that each character, aside from the woman, is a part of her fragmented imagination and so it was difficult for the actors to negotiate between the fictional basis of their characters and interpreting them with their own perspectives. "Usually characters exist in their own life," Medeiros said, "And so the actors were forced to be creative in dissecting their characters." One of the actors, Katherine Peters '06, commented, "One of the most interesting parts of the whole process has been working through the complexities of this play. It's been a challenging and exciting experience."

And so, having come through an extraordinarily creative and imaginative process, "The Wedding Dress" opens this weekend and, no doubt, will surprise and excite all those who are present.

"The show is a very stylistic piece that pushes boundaries," said Peters. "It doesn't have any overarching moral message - it is about guilt and desire, and what happens when people follow urges that are so often repressed before we are even conscious of them. It's no cautionary tale either though, instead it challenges sexual mores and social expectations."

With a surrealist blend of "reality, memory and hallucination," the play will reveal what so many have called radical and revolutionary. "The play will be an unusual experience for the audience," said Medeiros. But it will be a valuable experience, because of the radical ideas of the playwright and the importance of the work for Brazilian theater.