How many ways do men mistreat women?
In "Bernada Alba," Michael John LaChiusa's elegiac musical that opened Saturday in director Crystal Manich's stately, if dour, production for Theater Latté Da, you can count the ways.
Husbands ignore, cheat on and ultimately abandon their wives, leaving the word "whore!" hanging in the air like rotten fruit. Suitors communicate in the gruff language of merchants buying farm animals. And male overlords force themselves onto female underlings, making it understandable that there's not just relief, but celebration when one of these cads dies.
The best any of these women can hope for is a partner who is not too terrible.
Like Federico Garcia Lorca's 1936 play on which it is based, LaChiusa's 2006 musical has no men onstage. Women play the roles in pantomime. Still, men hold strange sway over the Spanish village where the show is set, both as potential romantic partners and, paradoxically, as ways out of the women's confined worlds.
That confinement is presided over by the title character, who deals with the world as it is, not as she wishes it to be.
We hear the footfalls of Bernada Alba (Regina Marie Williams, in a performance that's a walking monument to strength) before she even appears to mourn her second husband, who has died, leaving her with property and five unmarried daughters under her domineering hand.
She keeps her offspring, from 20-year-old Adela (Stephanie Bertumen) to 39-year-old Angustias (Kate Beahen), cloistered from the world for their own protection. But she's trying to corral forces — desire, passion, freedom —she cannot control. Angustias, who inherited money from her father, is being courted, which awakens rash desires in Adela and in Martirio (Meghan Kreidler), considered too ugly to ever marry. It all ends badly.
