Poet in New York (Stage Review)

Federico Garcia Lorca is best known to the English-speaking world as a playwright (The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding). He also was a poet, and his book, Poet in New York, a collection of the poems he wrote about the nine unhappy months he spent in New York in 1929, gives Pig Iron Theatre's "one-man biographical fantasia" its title.

This show, like Lorca's poetry, offers a fair helping of surreal symbolism. But, like any evocative poem, the dance-theater piece requires emotional engagement rather than exact analysis. Poet in New York is not intended as an accurate biography, but a suggestive one, full of movement as well as language. Flamenco segues into prayer that segues into bullfighting images that fly out of the poems, making a poem on the stage.

Dito van Reigersberg, trained as a dancer as well as an actor, plays all the characters - male and female, old and young, Spanish and American. Of the 11 scheduled performances, three will be in Spanish.

You can find the review here