Audiences entering the small theater find the players, all women, already onstage, seated, motionless, barefoot, encapsulated in a sort of glass box.
The stunning set design by Sam Fehr beautifully represents the prison in which the characters in Oakland Theater Project’s dazzling “The House of Bernarda Alba,” Federico Garcia Lorca’s drama adapted by playwright Chay Yew and choreographed by Bear Graham, are trapped.
Among the figures, one young woman dances, with a rose in her hand. She is Adela (Antonella Scogna), the youngest, the most beautiful and the most defiant of matriarch Bernarda Alba’s five daughters, all of whom are in black to mourn the recent death of their father.
They must mourn for the next eight years.
As director Michael Socrates Moran explains in the program, Lorca wrote the play in 1936 as fascism was taking over Spain. Two months later, the Spanish Civil War began, and Lorca was assassinated by the rising government. His body was never found.
Like the people of Spain, the five daughters are essentially imprisoned by a rigid force. Stone-faced, merciless Bernarda (the brilliant Lisa Ramirez) wields her cane like a lethal weapon. Cold and authoritarian, she ultimately will turn out defeated.
The set is so entrancing that it takes a while to sort out the characters.
There’s a crazy old granny (a funny, scary Angelina Fiordellisi) in a wedding dress; Poncia (the terrific Jacinta Kaumbulu), the tough, fearless servant who’s the only one to stand up to Bernarda; the timid oldest daughter (Sarah Jiang), betrothed to the handsome Pepe (Jaden Ramsey, who dances silently, seductively around the periphery of the glass house), drawn to Adela like a magnet; another daughter, the bitter Martirio (Essa Vilanue), and more.
A chorus of villagers takes on various roles, including beggars. All of the principals create vibrant, distinctive characters.
Wealth and poverty, social standing, desire: all are in conflict as the sisters fight with each other, sometimes physically, under Bernarda’s iron-fisted rule. Desperate villagers almost storm the gates, and the suppressed romance between the besotted Adela and silent Pepe threatens to implode.
Everything plays out in the tight confines of the glass house. The action —often projected, with other images in a sort of dreamscape on an upstage panel—intensifies the sense of claustrophobia.
Every detail feels carefully observed in this production, enhanced by Michael Kelly’s score, Yew’s slightly modernized text (“The men of this town are for sh–,” sneers Bernarda) and Isadora Duskin Feinberg’s costumes.
Still, though, Lorca’s drama is melodramatic, repetitive, and overlong, even though it’s only slightly more than an hour and a half. Yet as servant Poncia prophesies, “A storm is brewing and when it erupts it will sweep us all away.” It pretty much does.
Oakland Theater Project’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” continues through June 7 at Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. Tickets are $10-$70 at oaklandtheaterproject.org.