Teatro Paraguas delves into the passion of one revolutionary

Feb. 16—Teatro Paraguas co-founder and artistic director Argos MacCallum is presenting Federico García Lorca's rarely seen play Mariana Pineda partly because it contains a plea against tyranny and autocratic rule.

The play's run nine months before presidential candidate Donald Trump is set to be on the ballot for the third time is no coincidence. It's not the first time this season that a director has chosen a play with political resonance in 2024; New Mexico Actors Lab founder Robert "Beny" Benedetti directed and acted in JQA and sees vulnerability parallels between John Quincy Adams and President Joe Biden. It's also not the last, as MacCallum plans to stage Augusto Federico Amador's Atacama, which delves into the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet's bloody reign in Chile.

"This story takes place in 1831 under the dictatorship — well, the oppressive regime — of King Ferdinand VII, and Lorca wrote it in 1925 during the dictatorship of [Spanish Prime Minister Miguel Primo de Rivera]," he says of Mariana Pineda. "Ooh, it just seemed a perfect fit for our world, which is lurching to the right, to autocratic regimes."

Anna Dempf stars as the title character — full name Mariana de Pineda y Muñoz — whose opposition to Ferdinand VII had a tragic ending in 1831. A holiday marks her memory every May 26 in her home city, Grenada, in autonomous Andalusia, Spain. The play is performed in English, using a translation from Spanish by Gwynne Edwards.

Pineda is infatuated with the ringleader of anti-Ferdinand conspirators, Don Pedro, played by Steven Gonzales. She loathes Pedrosa, the chief of the secret police, portrayed by Noah G. Simpson. She's distracted from recognizing the feelings of Fernando, who truly loves her and plays a key role in the story's ending; he's played by Riley Samuel Merritt.

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"This character is so passionate, and she's able to actually transform in the end," MacCallum says. "She finds out that all the men have run off to England to save their skins and left her to take the rap, and she's able to transform her huge passion for this one man, Don Pedro, into a love for freedom. One of her lines in the end is, 'I give myself so that freedom's flame may never fade.'

"In the end, Lorca has her in a white dress with white roses in orange light. That is, to me, the epitome of freedom, of the life force going in the right direction."

The play isn't just a lesson for audience members; both Dempf and Gonzales say they were unfamiliar with the history before taking on the challenge of embodying it. MacCallum brings a new tidbit about Pineda's life to each rehearsal, Dempf says.

"The play is extremely emotional," she says. "The stakes are high, and I have come close to crying [at rehearsals]. I hope I can maintain that feeling when I perform it. There's a monologue at the end where she's looking out at the audience and telling them, 'I bleed for all of you, and I bleed for humanity, and I bleed for freedom.' I think that's very inspiring."

Gonzales says he learns about new facets of his character every time he views the script. He also learns about fellow cast members, as neither he nor Dempf has worked with Teatro Paraguas or any of the other actors in the play before. Only four of the 11 cast members have been involved in previous Paraguas productions, MacCallum says.

"It's been very fun getting to make new friends," Dempf says. "It's an intimate way to make friendships, because you have to be vulnerable early on with people you don't necessarily know yet."

Coincidentally, both Dempf and Gonzales have ample experience in Shakespeare productions. Gonzales has acted with Upstart Crows of Santa Fe and Dempf with Santa Fe Classic Theater, two troupes dedicated to Shakespeare's works. Gonzales' son Ian, 17, is set to present his culminating Blackfriars Production for Upstart Crows this year. Both Gonzaleses were in Upstart Crows' production of King Lear, which ran over two weekends last June. Mariana Pineda runs three weekends, and Steven Gonzales welcomes the bigger workload.

"I think two weekends isn't enough to give the role what you want to do it," he says. "At the end of the first weekend, you learn things that you didn't realize before, and it shows. Over two weeks, you don't have an opportunity to use what you've learned quite as much."

MacCallum calls it a privilege to work with new-to-him actors and praises their grasp on the material.

"I'm really happy with the cast, that they're all very young actors who are really interested in theater and drama," he says. "Everywhere I go, I hear people bemoaning the fact that the acting pool and the audience are all over 60 or 65."

Santa Fe Opera's 2005 production of Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar included the opening ballad featured in Mariana Pineda, says Santa Fe Opera spokeswoman Emily Doyle Moore. MacCallum thinks that's the only time the story has been presented in any form in Northern New Mexico, adding that it hasn't been performed much outside of Spain.

Dempf says her role is the largest she has had in a play, and she expects the experience to resonate.

"Whenever I am working on a project, it's like performing therapy on myself," she says. "Like, how do I connect to this person's motivations? I learn something about myself by learning about how a character thinks."

MacCallum hopes to stage In the Time of the Butterflies, which has some thematic similarities to Mariana Pineda, in the coming year. It's based on the Julia Alvarez book (of the same title) about the Mirabal sisters, who fought a dictatorial regime in the Dominican Republic. UNESCO now observes the date of their assassination, November 25, as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

"They were part of the resistance against Rafael Trujillo," MacCallum says, "who was a real son of a bitch."