LISA PORTES

Photo credit: Joe Mazza/BraveLux

KATE SEMMENS: I would love to first talk about the progressive nature of this “Blood Wedding” production. The play’s three acts are presented as three distinct progressive parts. It starts as an audio play, then transitions to audio play with select illustrated visuals, and the final act is done with video and audio elements. It is in that last act that we first see the actors faces with added creative design elements. How did the idea first come about to do “Blood Wedding” in that structure and with those three different modes of storytelling?

LISA PORTES: It was really an iterative process because this was supposed to be a live production. I wasn't the original director on the production — the original director had to withdraw for health reasons, so I came in late in the game. But at that point, we were still going to be presenting it live and in-person. About three design meetings in we found out we were going to have to have a virtual process. At that point, the bulk of that original design team decided to change directions and do an installation but the actors wanted to continue to move forward with Blood Wedding because they very much wanted to perform this text. So then I didn't really know what we were going to make. 

I mean one of the things about the virtual world is that it’s like the Wild West. When I’m directing, I kind of know what I'm aiming for and I know what kind of theater I like. In the virtual world, I don't know what I like and I don't know what will work necessarily. I don't have any tricks up my sleeve. So I thought, “What are the cards in my deck?” A fantastic text, twelve actors who really want to perform this text, our media designer Parker Molacek, our sound designer Mikhail Fiksel, and this very small period of time. We had decided as a school that we could rehearse no more than two and a half hours on Zoom at a time on any given day and no more than five days in a week. And we had 10 days in December and 10 days in January. So we have this limited amount of time. I knew that would mean I needed to get a professional sound designer on it. I knew the play and I knew the progression of the play. I knew that the piece had to move from a deep repression through what is supposed to be a party and into a kind of otherworld explosion and then back to a silence. I knew that's how the play worked so I was thinking, “How do we do that on Zoom?” Our dramaturgs kept talking about “duende,” and I think our leading idea and question was - can we create “duende” in the virtual world? “Duende” is Lorca’s idea of the life force and the dark, death, life, and sex force. 

production still from “Blood Wedding”

I also asked the actors what they wanted to make and they said, “Well, we don't know but we know we want to perform this text as written, we want to perform the songs that are built into Lorca’s work and we want to be seen at some point.” Because my first instinct was to just make it only audio, but they wanted to be seen, so that’s another given. I had also been thinking a lot about horror movies of the 1920s and Harry Clarke's illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe. That was where the original design team had been coming from. The actors also brought in research materials that were in the land of Edgar Allan Poe and Harry Clarke. So it was clear that that was our aesthetic. So then I decided that Act I should be an audio play and that for Act III we would use Jared Mezzocchi’s work with controlling Zoom through Isadora. Then I didn’t know what to do about Act II. There are a lot of people in Act II. And that particular scene at the wedding has a lot of entrances and exits that are crucial to understand. I knew we weren't going to be able to get it only from listening to it. So I realized that we needed a visual element and I also learned very quickly that you can't have more than five people on Zencastr, which was the audio software we were using. It was clear then that it couldn’t be captured just as an audio play. I also didn’t think it would fit as a strictly Zoom play because we're just coming out of only listening. It was actually the sound designer Mikhail who brought up the idea of it maybe being like a graphic novel or an illustrated audiobook. That brought us back to the Harry Clarke illustrations. So then that seemed to be the appropriate shift from very repressed and audio-only into something that has more dynamic visuals that is actually able to tell the story visually. That transitions into a kind of full-on world in Act III, and we switch to that at the exact moment when they run off to the forest so we see a deliberate dramaturgical shift. So that's the long version of how all of that happened.

KS: When I was listening to the audio sections of “Blood Wedding,” I could picture all the spaces where the story was taking place - the storytelling was really clear. What is especially unique about only directing actors' voices? What was that process of figuring out how to effectively collaborate and create clear storytelling through a partly audio-only format?

LP: Artistically we all have to work as a team, and that is what's great about the virtual world. The actors and the tech have to work together so it's much more like creating plays in Europe where it's not like the design is done and the actors come in later. Everybody is together from the start, which I love. As a result of the virtual world, actors are becoming really great technicians because they all have to download the software, they all have to be able to click in, use the ring lights, and use certain microphones.

 Zoom has also become second nature for me. Mikhail, our sound designer, was very, very patient and is a lovely teacher. He was able to walk the actors through the process, but you know, you also have to drop things that don't work and you're always dealing with glitches. Somebody’s microphone doesn't work well, etc., so that's its own process. In terms of directing audio, I was very lucky to have Phil Timberlake, who’s the head of voice and speech at The Theatre School at DePaul, as the text coach on this show. So we were often working two rooms on Zoom. It was like rehearsing a musical. He would be in one room working right before I recorded so that not only do the actors have the action and the sense of what's going on in the scene, but very specific rhetorical and poetic coaching. We wanted to make sure there was really specific text coaching on this heightened language, so that by the time they came into the room, the actors had a very strong sense of the text. As a director, you're not watching anything and you're just listening and trying to hear if the story’s being told, and particularly with actors like Danielle Chmielewski who doubled as Mother and Death, you’re listening to how she is differentiating the two characters, or listening to how the Moon and Father, who doubled, are differentiated. You’re listening for the dynamics of the singing and voice, and finding how the Groom is light and optimistic. while the Mother carries weight. And then the rest is Mikhail adding footsteps and sounds of doors opening and closing. 

The other big challenge is music. Music on Zoom, as we know, is difficult. Each of those songs that Mikhail taught the actors were recorded separately. The actors recorded the vocal tracks separately and then sent them to him and then he would put them together along with the guitars that were also recorded separately because you can't do anything together on Zoom. So it's a wonder that we have music.

KS: Could you speak more to that process of working with Mikhail Fiksel on the composing of the music? As a director, what was that collaboration like?

LP: The music is already in the text. I mean there's a number of songs in the text, although there's no music for them. Anybody who's going to work on the show is going to have to be a sound designer and composer. In terms of finding the music, Mikhail and I have worked together for over a decade, and so I trust him implicitly and I also knew he loved Blood Wedding and that he understood what territory we were in. The gift of a long collaboration is that he didn't need to send me stuff for me to listen to. I just basically said, “These are the four songs we have to have.” So sometimes I didn't hear the songs until the actors were singing them already. That made the process really easy. It would have been much more difficult to work on the songs with a sound designer with whom I hadn't worked with before within the amount of time that we had.

production still from “Blood Wedding”

KS: In the audio-only scenes of the first act you use stage descriptions from the play like “the room painted yellow” or “the white wall with a pink cross” to set the scene. Why did you decide to include these select visual descriptions and images in Act I of the play and what role do you think color plays in “Blood Wedding?”

LP: Well, I knew that if we were going to go into an illustrated audio world in Act II and full visual in Act III, so I didn't want to start without any visuals. I wanted there to be something. Plus, I really love those stage directions and I love how they've been translated by Fornés. I love how simple they are, and I know that in Lorca’s world, color is super important, and there have been many theses written on his use of pink or his use of yellow. He's a poet. So for me, a room painted yellow was important, and I then worked with our media designer to figure out what that meant in a visual sense. We had a lot of conversations about those slides. More than we did about any of the music actually. Trying to just find what “painted” looks like was a full conversation because it felt important. So that's why I kept them because I liked the stage directions, I liked the idea of including a visual element and I knew the idea of color was important in Lorca’s work. Our dramaturgs were also really emphatic about color’s importance.

KS: I loved the development and color progression in the show. The play went from using these bright colors to black and white in the second act and then even darker shades in Act III where the light made it quite creepy.

LP: Yeah, because for example, at the top of the play, the Groom is yellow, and it represents Lorca’s poetic sense of virility and hope. At the top of any play, I always want to try to get as far away from the end of the play as possible, so I think that you're right that going from yellow to where we end up at the end is quite a journey.

KS: You already talked a little bit about the rehearsal process, but what was it like on the day-to-day of working on all the different pieces of this project, especially working with student actors?

LP: I mean it is really complex to work with actors because they're being asked to do so much more than they'd be asked to do in a regular process. For me, it was important that we not record in pieces. We recorded a scene in a full take and then we would record it again in another full take. That was really so the actors are able to actually get the full arc of the scene. Act III was shot in Zoom and also all in one piece. But anyway, the actors, they are trying to act and remember all their text coaching, remember the songs and remember their roles, and you know, generally kick ass as actors. We sent them a couple of costume pieces, but for the most part, they're digging out of their closets. They are doing their own makeup based on images we send them from 1920s horror movies. The rehearsal process was in two and a half hour chunks. The good news is those chunks really served us because the actors were not over-exhausted, which means that everyone was really game. We also have guaranteed casting at the theatre school, but because of the pandemic we just allowed actors to opt-in or opt-out of shows this year. This had the added benefit that anybody who opted-in really wanted to be there. And they were super game, so I think the process was both challenging and exhilarating.

KS: How did you come to the decision to make it a pre-recorded piece and have audience members view the show on their own time during a 24-hour time period? 

LP: I mean it was mainly just logistics because there's no way to do what we did live. The sound has to be pre-recorded in order to add the kind of layering that allowed the audience to hear the world the way they heard it. Each of those actor tracks is recorded separately and mixed, and then the sound design is added underneath it right along with music. So just the logistics of creating an audio play is such that, doing it live is just not going to be good. It’s not going to have the same power. So, yeah there's not a way right now to do that live. We did Act III live but Act I and II also had a lot of work in post.

KS: For you, was there anything in particular about “Blood Wedding,” Lorca’s work or translator María Irene Fornés’ work that you learned or discovered as a result of the virtual medium and the unique process?

LP: When I first found out that we were going virtual I had no idea how we were going to take such an embodied text and translate it into the virtual world. My biggest challenge was trying to create a kind of sensual and physical experience. What I learned is that I think you can do it. I was thinking about Lorca this last December and January around the transition of power in our government. On January 6th we just had to stop rehearsal because there was a coup happening. The play is about deep-seated factionalism on some level. It's about many things, and one of the things is the repression of homosexuality. It’s about the factionalism that's deep-seated in Spain and that ultimately led to the Spanish Civil War in which Lorca was shot. Lorca’s body has never been recovered. In the play, the Mother, who's carrying with her the deaths of her husband and her son, at the end of Act II announces two divided sides. That was speaking loudly to me in terms of resonance at the time. What happens when we are as fractured as we are and binary in terms of our thinking as a nation? And what is the ultimate cost? I think we see it in the play. The women are left alone at the end. So I was thinking a lot about that in terms of its resonance. That has nothing to do with the Zoom world but just has to do with what I was thinking about in 2020. That’s what I was thinking about while we were working on Blood Wedding, and we felt it was important to continue working on it.

KS: Did you learn anything in particular that you're going to take back into making theater in the physical space in the future?

LP: You know there’s a great thing about losing all of your tools. The main thing is just listening.  I think that the thing I'm going to be taking away from this entire pandemic is the way I listened. I've always liked heightened texts, and the writers that I work with are all language forward. But I like to kind of dance alongside them. I think what I've really learned is just to listen for longer. Sometimes you can get distracted as a director, with everything else that's going on and the movement and then lights and then story and the words are not actually landing the way they need to land. They may look like they're landing but they're actually not landing. So it's the emphasis on the audio component that you started with that I think I will take into live theater. It’s all about how you listen.

”Blood Wedding” was presented virtually in February 2021 through The Theatre School at DePaul University. For more information about this production and a complete list of the cast and production team, please see The Theatre School at DePaul’s website here.