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IN THE ALBERT A Journey into “Bieitoland”: Introducing the Unconventional World of Director Calixto Bieito By Tanya Palmer Fluent in five languages, Bieito has juggled a career in his native Spain—where he was the artistic director of Barcelona’s Teatre Romea from 1999 to 2011—with an international career directing primarily opera around the globe. His work has taken him to Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France, Italy, Switzerland, South America and Mexico, but his upcoming collaboration with the Goodman will mark only the second time his work will have been seen in the United States, and his first collaboration with American actors and designers on the work of an American playwright. Over the past 15 years, Spanish director Calixto Bieito has earned a reputation as a “bad boy” of European theater, simultaneously admired and reviled for his radical revisionist productions of classic operas and dramatic texts. His harshest critics have condemned his work as “sickening,” “puerile” and “tasteless,” while his advocates describe him as a “director of vision and courage, an Almodóvar of the opera stage.” His most famous (or infamous) productions include a version of Verdi’s A Masked Ball at the English National Opera (in a co-production with the Liceu in Barcelona and the Royal Danish Opera) which relocated the mise-en-scene from eighteenth century Sweden to 1970s Spain and began with a controversial image of a vast public urinal; a staging of Macbeth (first produced in German for the Salzburg Festival and then restaged in Catalan at Teatre Romea) in which the characters were cast as mafia dons and molls, monarchs of what one reviewer called a “hedonistic, drug and drinkfuelled culture with no bounds” on a set of garish white leather sofas, cluttered drink trolleys and porcelain tigers growling ominously at passersby; and a production of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Golden Age classic Life is a Dream, which Bieito staged on a gray sandy set dominated by a giant suspended mirror which functioned as a “metaphorical tool, providing both a dazzling image of an elusive world that can never be entirely controlled and a commentary on a play that continuously questions what we mean by ‘reality’ and ‘fiction.’” While some critics accuse Bieito of desecrating classic texts with needlessly shocking images of violence and sexuality, his work is the result of a conscious approach to create a visceral connection between contemporary audiences and classic works. Theater scholar Maria Delgado suggests that Bieito’s work consistently asks radical questions about how and what texts mean to different generations. In a profile of Bieito in Fifty Key Theatre Directors, a book that explores the work of directors from around the world who “have shaped and pushed back the boundaries of theater and performance,” Delgado writes, “With the classics especially, he has demonstrated the ability to reinvent texts, stripping them of the legacy of past productions and reimagining them for contemporary audiences.” This method of “reinventing texts” often involves working closely with a translator and/or adaptor to cut and rearrange canonical works—deleting characters and interpolating contemporary musical or cinematic references into the performance texts, such as a 2004 production of King Lear which contained depictions of violence that were a direct homage to the final sequences of Kill Bill and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For Bieito, this process of connecting the dramatic text or opera to the contemporary moment—and locating himself and his collaborators within the work—all begins with an effort to interpret what the writer was trying to communicate. Rather than simply laying on a concept, Bieito’s goal is to create a visual and auditory universe that releases the text from the confines of history—thus unlocking its meaning and connecting it 8
Rather than simply laying on a concept, Bieito’s goal is to create a visual and auditory universe that releases the text from the confines of history—thus unlocking its meaning and connecting it more directly to the present moment. more directly to the present moment. In a recent conversation with the Goodman’s Associate Dramaturg, Neena Arndt, Bieito explained his process this way: I have a way of approaching the text, I have to prepare…reading a lot about the context, the period, about the writer. In this case, with Tennessee Williams, there are his Memoirs. After that, you think—what was the writer trying to do? And what does it mean for the audience, today, or what does it mean to me today? And what can I express of myself with this? Bieito first came to prominence internationally in 1997, when his production of Tómas Bretón’s 1894 zarzuela (or popular operetta) La verbena de la paloma (The Festival of the Dove) was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. Setting the piece in an urban wasteland, Bieito’s production undermined the “celebratory tone” in which the piece was generally read, presenting it instead through the “prism of an overt social criticism of bourgeois complacency and corruption.” The production marked Bieito as an important and original young voice, but by that time he was already well known in his native Spain, where he’d built a reputation tackling a wide variety of texts—everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. Born in 1963 in a small Spanish town called Miranda de Ebro, Bieito moved to Barcelona at the age of 14. He came of age in the final days of the Franco regime and was educated by Jesuits. Bieito grew up in a musical household— his mother was an amateur singer and his brother teaches in the Barcelona Conservatoire—and went on to study art history at the University of Barcelona. As a young man he traveled around Europe, studying and working alongside some of the continent’s most visionary directors, including Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Giorgio Strehler and Ingmar Bergman. He made his professional debut in the mid-1980s at Barcelona’s Adrià Gual theater with a production of Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance. His directorial approach—marked by rigorous textual readings of complex dramatic works that evolved on sparse stage environments where décor is reduced to its bare essentials—was in many ways at odds with the Spanish, and in particular Catalan, theater scene at the time, which was defined in large part by the acrobatic ingenuity of non-text based performance companies like Els Joglars, Comediants and La Fura dels Baus. From the beginning of his career, Bieito has sought to balance his identity as a Catalan director with his interest in working across linguistic and cultural boundaries. “Bieito is one of the few Catalanbased directors who has consciously sought to work both in Catalan and Castilian,” explains Maria Delgado in her article “Calixto Bieito: A Catalan Director on the International Stage.” “He has OPPOSITE: Director Calixto Bieito at Teatre Romea. Photo by David Ruano. RIGHT (left to right): Don Carlos, by Friedich Schiller. 2009. Production: Teatre Romea & Nationaltheater Mannheim. Tirant lo Blanc, 2007. Production: Teatre Romea, Institut Ramon Llull, Hebbel am Ufer, Schauspielfrankfurt & Ajuntament de Viladecans. 9
Page 1 and 2: March - May 2012 TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Page 3 and 4: IN THE ALBERT FROM THE ARTISTIC DIR
Page 5 and 6: Tennessee Williams: Playwright, Poe
Page 7 and 8: OPPOSITE: Vivien Leigh and Marlon B
Page 9: LEFT: Peg Murray and Scott Jaeck in
Page 13 and 14: major American playwright: Tennesse
Page 15 and 16: OPPOSITE: Cándido Tirado. RIGHT: S
Page 17 and 18: For Love or Money: The World of Che
Page 19 and 20: IN THE WINGS Imparting Culture and
Page 21 and 22: SCENE AT THE GOODMAN Race Opening N
Page 23 and 24: CENTER STAGE Subscriber and annual

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