The Spanish Shakespeare is coming to Syracuse University.

The Madrid-based theater company Fundación Siglo de Oro will perform “Entre Marta y Lope,” at 8 p.m. on Tuesday in Grant Auditorium. The show will be free and open to the public, and although the play will be performed in Spanish, English subtitles will be provided.

The play follows the final days of a historical Spanish playwright, Lope de Vega, said Alejandro Garcia-Reidy, an assistant professor of Spanish who helped organize the event. He said as soon as the opportunity arose to bring the company to Syracuse, he immediately jumped on board.

“I knew the quality of their work and that it would be an incredible experience for SU students and the community to be able to see one of their plays here on campus,” Garcia-Reidy said.

Fundación Siglo de Oro has been on tour in the United States for about a month. Alejandro Librero, one of the play’s producers, said the company is working on establishing a network called the Golden Age University Theater Network with many American universities.

Librero said the company wanted to bring its brand of performance to an American audience, and the ability to tour throughout the U.S. has been an amazing experience for the troupe.

“We believe what we do back at home, which is mostly classical theater — although this is a contemporary text — it’s worth seeing. And it’s worth the effort of traveling and arranging this kind of tour to show it to American audiences,” Librero said.

Although the play will be performed in Spanish and many audience members may not be familiar with the work of Lope de Vega, Garcia-Reidy believes anyone will be able to enjoy the performance.

While the play is about Lope de Vega, it is not focused on his work. Rather, it focuses on the man himself and his complicated love affair with a woman named Marta de Nevares.

“It was a very passionate relationship, but also very dramatic because she went blind — she even went crazy for a period of time,” Garcia-Reidy said. “So here you have a love relationship between a playwright and a younger woman who suffers these physical and mental problems and how the love between them is stronger than all these difficulties that they have to go through in the final years of their lives.”

The play is driven by passion, and people won’t need to understand Spanish to relate to the human emotions portrayed by the show’s two actors, Garcia-Reidy added.

César Sánchez, who plays the lead Lope de Vega, said through a translator that he was worried about how American audiences would respond to the play, but that he has been pleasantly surprised with how well people have understood and appreciated it so far.

Eva Higueras, who plays Marta de Nevares, said touring the United States has been an enriching experience and although she had never performed for a foreign crowd before, she could still feel a connection during the performance.

“The subtitles help a lot in the understanding, but at times we manage to emit certain emotions going beyond mere words, with this universal language that everyone can understand,” said Higueras through a translator.

Ultimately that is the goal of Fundación Siglo de Oro — to connect with its audience through the raw emotion, drama and passion that the play requires, Librero said.

“It is ultimately about this great love, this relationship and what one has to go through when one is in such a relationship, involved in such a thing,” Librero said. “At the end of the play they say, ‘We live, we love, we fight,’ but that’s what everybody does, so that’s what makes the play great and makes the audience love it.”

Published on November 11, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Brendan: bskrisel@syr.edu