Director's Note:

Happy Black History Month!!! Let us always center and celebrate Black voices every month of the year.

“What happens when you follow your own path, outside the rigid rules of a society; that operates on dominance upon others to thrive and function?” This is the question that formed as the central starting point when reading and developing the concept of Blood Wedding.

Class, race, and gender dynamics are solidly intertwined in the world of Blood Wedding. As we began to develop of the universe of this production, our production team and I landed on a timeless, alternate, surrealist universe of multiple eras of authoritarianism in the U.S.

Federico Garcia Lorca and Langston Hughes both were living under oppressive circumstances in their respective countries. And yet, Hughes was so inspired by Lorca’s work that he wrote his own translation of Blood Wedding that could be shared and legible to U.S. audiences. Lorca was an openly queer man with progressive views in a Spain that was getting ready to enter a very bloody civil war, a civil war that led to the fascist regime of Francisco Franco for the next few decades. Around the official start of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was assassinated by the state. Langston Hughes was a Black man in the U.S. He lived through the eras of The Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow and The Great Depression. To fully understand the context of Langston Hughes' perspective and lived experience I recommend reading “Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protests” by Langston Hughes. The book is full of works published after his death (the book explains why he never felt comfortable publishing them while he was alive). Understanding who Langston Hughes was and what he thought of his lived experience helped me flesh out and understand why the people of Blood Wedding go through what they do and why there are "destined" to always live that way. 

This play doesn’t end on a happy note. But it reminds us of the power we hold when we reclaim the narrative of our lived experiences. In a society that forces a business-as-usual approach when terrible injustices and atrocities are happening everywhere in the world, it becomes imperative to slow down and allow ourselves to grieve loudly and unapologetically. We can't meaningfully change our circumstances if we don’t properly give grieve for what we have lost as human beings and for what the world could be, instead of this.

Eternal gratitude to this cast, whose joy, wit, humor, and energy remind me of the good things this world is made of.