"Bad Blood" faculty show leaves its mark

Griselda Gambaro’s “La Malasangre [Bad Blood],” the faculty show that appeared in the Steeler Studio Theater in the Mahaney Center for the Arts (MCFA) last week, is one that will not soon be forgotten — it will continue to haunt those who were fortunate enough to have seen it — and I mean that in a very good way.

From the first high-pitched cackle that erupted from Ben Orbison’s ’12.5 (who played the role of the father) mouth down to the final, eerie, scream-sodden scene, the cast and crew of the play led the audience on a tumultuous roller coaster that constantly fluctuated between laughter and horror.

The cast lineup boasted a number of Middlebury theater veterans not the least of whom was Cassidy Boyd ’10, whose acting in the play will count as her Senior 700 work. Boyd played the lead role of Dolores, the daughter of a malicious man of fortune in Buenos Aires circa 1840.

When we meet Dolores, she is only just beginning to comprehend her father’s tyranny over his family and her own lack of agency within his household. It is a household haunted by passing carts and horses on the cobblestone outside, a stand-in for the father’s atrocious deeds that remain unspoken throughout the play.

The sound of these vehicles incites terror in Dolores, her mother, and her new tutor. Rafael (Willy McKay ’11) is the unfortunate hunchback whom Dolores’ father has selected to be her tutor, in hopes that his deformation will ensure that his daughter will remain pure so that he can marry her off to a wealthy gentleman caller. But Rafael, with his refreshing moral sense and quick wit, is more than a hunchback, as the audience discovers along with Dolores.

The first act of the play was wrought with charming, Mr. Darcy-and-Elizabeth-type scenes of Boyd and McKay exchanging rather charged words with one another, and Boyd attempting to exert her power as the daughter of fortune over a lowly tutor — she means, as she says, to “make [his] hair turn gray.” The charm becomes tainted, however, when Dolores plays the bratty “daddy” card and things take a rather nasty turn. What follows is a highly comical scene in which Dolores’ father both comforts her with baby talk, promising things like new dresses and parties, and at the same time, shouts threats over to Rafael.

The hilarity quickly dissipates, however, when Fermin (Brian Clow ’13) grabs Rafael and drags him away to be beaten. Though difficult to pull off, the rapid switch in tone was flawlessly executed by Orbison, Boyd and McKay, with help from equally flawless sound and light crews.

Indeed, much of the performance came across as flawless — not a line was dropped, nor a gesture misplaced — and, perhaps most impressively, each of the actors adopted highly convincing and emotive facial expressions.

Dolores’ guilt is palpable in her pained expression after Rafael returns to teach her the next day, and is unable to sit due to the injuries that he has sustained. But it was Martina Bonolis ’10, with her masked winces and woeful smiles, who won the most sympathy from the audience as the suppressed and abused mother. At one point, Bonolis sank, clutching at her hair with her hands with all torment of one who has suffered more than we can possibly know, slowly and posed like a gothic sculpture. The power that Bonolis brought to the small scene was masterful and made it more moving than any other in the play.

Act Two brought a change in set (a grand piano was placed beneath the glowing chandelier, and a sofa now graced the imitation parquet flooring), as well as a change in scene. No longer was the audience privy to the gradually growing romance between Rafael and Dolores; instead, we were invited to view the inner-workings of an arranged marriage. Now awkward laughter was added to the mix of cackling and the shouting from Act One, as the terribly oblivious yet sleazy John Peter Paradise (Nathaniel Rothrock ’13) was forced (and forced himself) upon the enlightened, no-longer-bratty Dolores, who has eyes only for “her hunchback.”

Elements of the grotesque, such as the red light that served as a reminder of the blood that was being spilled off-stage, and the dead birds that Fermin carried in, helped wind the play down to its final, shrill scene. “La Malasangre” came to a close amid the incessant sobbing, shrieking, shouting and screaming that one would expect from a play written to allegorically reflect the right-wing repression led by the military junta in Argentina during the ’70s and ’80s, a time full of violence and unspoken terror.

With the help of Professor of Theatre and the play’s director, Claudio Medeiros, and the rest of the cast and crew, Bonolis, Orbison, McKay and Boyd managed to draw their Middlebury audience into the horrors that Gambaro captured so intensely in her socio-political piece.