DESCRIPTION:

GALA proudly opens its 35th Anniversary Season with El caballero de Olmedo/The Knight from Olmedo by Lope de Vega, the master of Spanish Golden Age theater. Adapted by Mar Zubieta and Francisco Rojas, El caballero de Olmedo is directed by José Luis Arellano García from Madrid, and runs September 16 to October 17, 2010 at GALA Theatre, 3333 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20010. Parking is available at a discount in the Giant parking garage on Park Road, NW. Additional parking is available at the Target garage also on Park Road, between 14th and 16th Streets.

El caballero de Olmedo was the first Lope de Vega play produced by GALA and directed by co-founder and Producing Artistic Director Hugo Medrano in 1985. In celebration of its 35th season, GALA presents a new adaptation of the play with an innovative perspective by one of Spain’s most exciting directors and a creative team of artists from Spain and the Americas.

“We wanted to stage El caballero de Olmedo,” states the director Arellano, “because the issues addressed by Lope ---love, desire, passion, violence and death---are excellent examples of the relevance, immediacy, originality and universality of Spanish classics.” “The great works and epic plays of Spanish literature” added Spanish producer David R. Peralto, “have endured because of their ability to move, stimulate, and make us reflect with the same profundity for the last 500 years. It is fitting that GALA has included El caballero de Olmedo, a spectacular work of great theater, in its 35th anniversary celebration.”

El caballero de Olmedo was written around 1620 and is based on a popular folk tale about a young knight who is slain as he travels from Medina to Olmedo after a bullfight. In what has become a classic love story in Hispanic dramaturgy and a celebrated piece of the Spanish Golden Age, Lope explores themes of love, violence, honor and jealousy. Lope deviated from traditional tragicomedy where tragedy is averted to result in a happy ending, and created a masterpiece that evolves in a comedic manner, with dark undertones, and then moves to a tragic end. Driven by passion, the characters also discover the potential for violence that lurks within that intense emotion, and that ultimately destroys them.