To dream a show into being

STEPHEN SONDHEIM’S song apparently has it right: “Art isn’t easy. Every minor detail is a major decision.”

At least there’s no argument coming from behind the scenes at South Coast Repertory, where Nilo Cruz, the first Latino playwright to win a Pulitzer Prize, and Kate Whoriskey, a young director known for revving the classics with visual flair and bold allusions to present-day eruptions, are having a go at a nearly 400-year-old play that’s one of the Spanish language’s greatest hits.

The putting-it-together of “Life Is a Dream,” scheduled to open this weekend at the Costa Mesa theater in a new translation by Cruz, has been about as compressed as it gets for a large production at a major regional company: barely nine months from broaching the idea to staging the show.

It’s Whoriskey’s baby. The dark romance by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, published in 1636, deals with fate, cruelty, revenge, love, ambition, redemption and the mysterious overlap of reality and dream. It also calls for staging a revolution. As anyone who saw the choreographed tumult in Whoriskey’s SCR mountings of Sophocles’ “Antigone” and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” knows, if you say you want to theatricalize a revolution, you know that you can count her in.

“Life Is a Dream” revolves around Basilio, an astrologer-king who thinks he can read the future, and Segismundo, the son he imprisons from infancy because the stars and planets warn that he is destined to be “the cruelest of all men.” Basilio softens and gives the kid a chance at the crown, only to have his worst fears confirmed. Back to his remote mountain gulag goes Segismundo -- but by play’s end he’s given an opportunity to change, allowing Calderon to put a hopeful spin on the Shakespearean dictum that “the fault ... is not in our stars, but in our selves.”

Whoriskey was jazzed by the story’s theme of redemption, and in Basilio, a self-styled “man of wisdom” who believes he can control the fate of his nation, she saw a theatrical embodiment of the mind-set behind America’s misadventures in Iraq.

David Emmes, South Coast’s producing artistic director, liked the idea and suggested trying to reel in Cruz, whose lyrical prose helped him win the 2003 Pulitzer for “Anna in the Tropics.” It was an easy sell: Before the Cuban-born, Miami-raised Cruz ever dreamed of a career in theater, he’d fallen for “Life Is a Dream” in a traditional student production he saw at Miami Dade College. Translating it had long been on his to-do list.

The best-known of Calderon’s 100 or so plays (not counting nearly as many devotional pieces), “Life Is a Dream” may not be oft-revived in the United States, but it has become something of a because-it’s-there Everest for prominent Latino playwrights to climb. Obie Award winners Maria Irene Fornes and Jose Rivera have taken their shots with fairly faithful adaptations (although Rivera’s 1998 “Sueno” tinkered with Calderon’s ending, yielding something more neatly romantic). Octavio Solis, whose “La Posada Magica” is a Christmas season staple at SCR, set a 1997 version, “Dreamlandia,” among drug lords on the Tex-Mex border.

Cruz knew he had to get this one right, so he called in the heavy artillery: He consulted Teresa Maria Rojas, his first acting teacher at Miami Dade, who had directed the play, and his godmother, Ada Cardenas, who embraced “La Vida Es Sueno” as a literature student at the University of Havana. No sooner did aficionados hear what he was up to, Cruz says, than they’d spontaneously break into Segismundo’s woebegone first monologue, which is something of a “Hamlet’s soliloquy”-type chestnut of the classic Spanish stage. One advisor, Rene Buch, the artistic director of Repertorio Espanol (Spanish Repertory Theatre) in New York, urged him to preserve the rhymed couplets of the original.

“It would have taken me forever,” says Cruz, and rhyme just isn’t his thing. He had two other projects to complete in the same time frame -- translating his play “Lorca in a Green Dress” into Spanish for Buch’s company, and finishing a new drama, “Bolero,” in time for a public reading last November at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. When fall came and he was able to plunge into “Life Is a Dream,” Cruz adopted some basic rules: be spare, be rhythmic, be ruthless enough to jettison images that could baffle modern playgoers, but be as faithful as possible to the language, themes and story lines of Calderon. Any accentuating of parallels between “Life Is a Dream” and the situation in Iraq would be left to Whoriskey’s staging.

Cruz says he began confidently because of his experience translating two of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays. But Calderon’s verse proved much harder to wrangle into fluid, contemporary English than Lorca’s modern Spanish.

Whoriskey had her own mountains to climb. The play hinges on long monologues -- probably the very sweetmeats of the experience for long-ago Spaniards, but potential snooze-makers for moderns used to quick-cut editing. How to make these stretches absorbing?

At an in-house workshop

IT’S mid-November, and Whoriskey is almost through with a four-day, in-house workshop at SCR. Cruz’s translation is only about half-finished (not till New Year’s Eve, 11 days before the start of rehearsals, will he hand-write the last scenes in his notebook). Hearing the play read by some high-powered temp workers (the workshop cast includes L.A. stage eminence Dakin Matthews as Basilio), the director decides that the way to make some of the monologues fly is to make them musical. Chicago-based composers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, initially hired to write mainly incidental music, are given new marching orders: Turn soliloquies into songs.

At the outset, “everyone here at the theater described this as ‘a small Kate show,’ ” compared to the scale of “Antigone” and “Chalk Circle,” recalls Milburn, who with Bodeen has been a frequent Whoriskey collaborator.

By the time the workshop is done, the director and her creative team are conspiring to flavor the final production with a shadow play, descending heavenly orbs, a carnival-like extravaganza with dancers in ‘60s-style go-go outfits, and four rotating, reddish mountains, up to 24 feet high and spiked like armored dinosaurs, that can double as Segismundo’s prison and the walls of Basilio’s royal court. To kick off the revolution, Whoriskey will require what she calls an “explodium” -- an exploding podium. And, oh yes -- she’ll need to expand the cast from 11 to 15, large by today’s cost-conscious regional theater standards. After all, a revolution takes bodies.

Emmes won’t reveal the production budget, but he says it went up 20% after the workshop. “It was clear they had come up with something exciting,” he says.

Ready to begin rehearsals

WHEN rehearsals start Jan. 10, Whoriskey has an unanticipated gift: Her Juilliard-trained actor boyfriend of three years, Daniel Breaker, has had an unexpected opening in his schedule and is free to play Segismundo.

“We wanted somebody with a good singing voice, and he’s got a beautiful voice,” Whoriskey says. John de Lancie, whom fans of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” relish as Capt. Picard’s nemesis, Q, plays Basilio. He’ll speak -- not sing -- the six-minute, 171-line monologue in the first act.

On Day 3 of rehearsals, it’s clear why Whoriskey devoted some of her prep time to researching the current state-of-the-art in prisoner restraint. Breaker, as the immured Segismundo, stands strapped to a chair by long, black, belt-like tethers, with keys attached to the straps so they’ll clink like tap shoes in rhythm to his choreographed barefoot movements.

Later, he is hauled through the rehearsal studio on a large, metal dolly, slung over an actor’s shoulder, and dragged along the floor -- trial-and-error experiments in stage choreography. When they’re through rehearsing the bondage sequence, Whoriskey kneels at Breaker’s feet and tenderly undoes his restraints.

Finding the right eyewear proves tricky too. One scene calls for a blindfold to be removed, allowing the audience to see Segismundo’s wonder-filled gaze. A cloth rag proves too floppy. A blue bandana snatched from the backpack of ensemble member Ary Katz is cumbersome. A production assistant tries putting a hood over Breaker’s head. Whoriskey and Cruz, sitting side by side at a long table, both flash instantly on the infamous photos of American prison guards abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.

“Take it off, please,” the director says. They want the play to resonate with the Iraq war, but this would be artlessly blatant.

On they go.

Repeated run-throughs during the next two weeks convince director and playwright that the first nine lines of the show need to be ditched. They’re spoken by a lost traveler crossing mountainous barrens, whom we meet poetically cursing the steed that’s just thrown her. Whoriskey sees this as an awkward digression, and, lacking a horse to illustrate the action, she isn’t sure the audience will even be able to understand what’s going on. Cruz agrees, knowing he may have to explain the loss to connoisseurs like his godmother.

Calderon’s ending is also an issue. Sundered relationships are repaired but in ways that might strike modern audiences as odd. How do you make it play sensibly? An edict a few lines from the curtain, sentencing an ally of Segismundo to life in prison -- won’t that break the dreamlike spell Whoriskey hopes to weave in the final moments? And will Americans accept a hero who displays a Machiavellian streak as soon as he comes to power?

Another detail, another decision -- another small deletion. Art isn’t easy, even when life is a dream.

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‘Life Is a Dream’

Where: South Coast Repertory, Segerstrom Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 11

Price: $28 to $60

Contact: (714) 708-5555, www.scr.org

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The sounds of ‘Life’

Three translations from Segismundo’s confession of enchantment to Rosaura in Act 1 of “Life Is a Dream” by Pedro Calderon de la Barca.

Nilo Cruz (2007)

The more I look at you,

the more I like to admire

and contemplate your beauty.

For I feel a thirst in my eyes

that not even death will be able to quench;

because if drinking is death

my eyes will long to drink all the more.

And if seeing is dying

then I’m dying to see.

Edwin Honig (1970)

Each time I look at you

The vision overwhelms me

so that I yearn to look again.

My eyes must have the dropsy,

to go on drinking more and more

of what is fatal to their sight.

And yet, seeing that the vision

must be fatal, I’m dying to see more.

Roy Campbell (1959)

The more I see of you, the more I long

To go on seeing more of you. I think

My eyes are dropsical, to go on drinking

What it is death for them to drink, because

They go on drinking that which I am dying

To see and that which, seen, will deal me death.