Hispanic festival opener a winner BY MARTA BARBER The International Hispanic Theatre Festival opened its 17th season Friday with companies from nine countries participating. And with presentations scheduled in five South Florida cities, from Homestead to Fort Lauderdale, the two-week festival has become a regional celebration of cultural diversity.

If the opening night show -- Buñuel, Lorca y Dalí, from Spain's Teatro del Temple -- is any indication, this year's program promises to be a winner. The play is based around the friendship forged by three of the 20th Century's greatest artists -- filmmaker Luis Buñuel, poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and painter Salvador Dalí. The well-constructed play by Alfonso Plou (based on texts by Agustín Sánchez Vidal) uses historical meetings to create an allegory as magical as Alice in Wonderland and as engaging as a mystery.

It centers mostly on Buñuel and Dalí, who in their creative youth and in their separate artistic disciplines, defined the Surrealist movement. The story starts as the two men, near death and caught in another dimension, turn back time to the beginning of their friendship with García Lorca.

In dream-like sequences they relive their pasts, moving through events and places that meant something to them and their creativity while ridiculing anything and anyone too close to traditions. Political and religious figures, other poets and writers, the women in their lives and even their art become targets of the ridicule. And while you laugh, you wonder if Dalí and Buñuel are poking fun at their contemporaries or if it's just the playwright poking fun at Surrealism.

Directed by Carlos Martín, the creative production combines projected images with movable props and evocative costumes to evoke a Surrealist aura. One of those projections includes images of the real Dalí and Buñuel while the actors play out the encounter on the stage.

Balbino Lacosta, with his excessive mannerisms, is the vivid image of Dalí, whose u-shaped mustache was as well-known as his paintings. Santiago Meléndez is Buñuel, the most pensive, darkest and probably the most manipulative of the three. And Francisco Fraguas plays García Lorca as you'd imagine the poet was: fragile but not too effeminate. (Lorca was gay.) Helping bring the characters closer to life, each actor speaks with the accent of the region where his character came from: Dalí was Catalán, Lorca Andalusian and Buñuel Aragonés.

Dalí and Buñuel continued to create art till a ripe old age in the middle of the 20th Century but Lorca's life was cut short when he was gunned down by Franco's troops in 1936. Yet the friendship of these three was truly unique and the play, with its many obscure scenes, makes you want to revisit their art.

It'll be a tough act for the rest of the Hispanic Theatre Festival to follow.
Posted on Mon, Jun. 03, 2002