“Love is the Greater Labyrinth” with Anna Rebek
By Sage Tanguay
Mirabelle Metcalfe 00:00
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. The UVA Drama Department is putting on the English premiere of “Love is the Greater Labyrinth”, originally written in Spanish. For Arts This Week, we chatted with Director Anna Rebek about the production, which is based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Anna Rebek 00:18
My name is Anna Rebek, and I am a theater and opera director visiting the University of Virginia.
Mirabelle Metcalfe 00:24
Could you tell us about “Love is the Greater Labyrinth” coming up at UVA in November? But even after the monster is defeated, the challenges are just beginning.
Anna Rebek 00:29
You know, if somebody said Macbeth, you’d have an idea of the characters. You kind of know what happens. You know, Lady Macbeth goes little bonkers. So a lot of things happen in this show like that, but nobody has heard of it yet. I think this play is a masterpiece just waiting to happen. It’s based on Greek myths. So the hero, Theseus, in our case, Teseo has offered his life to the Minotaur. So the reason it’s called Love is the greater Labyrinth is because it’s actually easier for Theseus to kill the Minotaur in the labyrinth than it is for people to end up with the right partner in the show. So ‘Love is the Greater Labyrinth’ because it’s so many mistaken identities, and masks, and ‘oh, you’re flirting with my sister!’ So love is the greater labyrinth.
Mirabelle Metcalfe 01:28
What attracted you to this play?
Anna Rebek 01:30
Dave Dalton, who’s the guy who picks all of the season shows, is a big fan of plays that were written in the Siglo De Oro or the Spanish Golden Age. And what’s cool about these plays is that they’re like 100 years after Shakespeare wrote. So they’re super advanced in terms of, there are plot lines for the servant class, there’s plot lines for the nobility, there’s plot lines for the royalty. It’s very involved. And they’re also not specifically comedies or tragedies. They’re both, they’re advanced and they’re funny. Okay, so he reached out and sent me this script, which is newly translated by Diversifying The Classics, which is a program at UCLA that is reviving these masterpieces and translating them into English so that we can do them, so people can know about these plays. So I read it, and I thought it was, like, fantastic, and also nearly impossible, which I love. I love hard things, you know, like, why do it if we’re not gonna, you know, climb the mountain together.
The author is a woman named Sor Juana, and that means, like, Sister Joanna would be the translation, and she was a nun in the late 1600s and she decided to be a nun because she wanted to continue her education. And once women got married, they weren’t supposed to be reading or learning anything anymore. And I immediately felt a kinship with this woman, because I was like, I would have “nunned” so hard back then in order to continue my education. I’d never heard of this woman. She’d never been included in any list of like ‘these are the great plays.’ But in Mexico, she is famous-famous. She’s like a national treasure. She’s been on their actual currency for years. So Sor Juana is a big deal, and I’m half-Mexican, so my mom knew about Sor Juana. She only wrote three plays, but she wrote a million poems. She was a beautiful writer, and she wrote for the Court, what was called the Viceroy of New Spain, which was before Mexico was Mexico. I’ve been doing a lot of research about her, and I found out that she grew up in a hacienda, which is sort of like a large home with lots of grounds around, and she actually had a garden labyrinth in her backyard. So I bet she played Minotaur games growing up, running around that labyrinth, and you can actually still go visit it today.
This is the last play that she wrote, and no one knows about it, and it’s just recently been put into English. And there’s some things that are really hard in translation, like jokes are hard, right? Or, like rhyming is hard when you translate into a new language. So we’ve really wrestled a little bit with the text to make sure that a modern audience will enjoy it. That’s what hooked me. I wanted to help resurrect this woman’s legacy. I think it’s important that we become more inclusive with what’s considered ‘Classics’. And this is a big step to introduce this piece to a new generation of theater makers, and it’s great to be Mexican, and honoring my Mexican heritage by bringing this play to life for the first time, it’s being staged.
Mirabelle Metcalfe 04:36
“Love is the Greater Labyrinth” Opens on November 8th at the Ruth Caplin Theatre. Information about tickets and showtimes can be found at the Drama Department’s website.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
