Students and professionals team for a ‘Blood Wedding’ at Drexel

Drexel University’s Mandell Theater is inviting audiences onto the stage for the run of Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, but (don’t worry) not to participate in the action — just to sit really, really close to it.

This incarnation of the show, which premiered in Madrid in 1933, promises a lot to take in. There’s not only the dark melodrama of the story (murder, a wedding, warring families, illicit passion, prodigious rages, a disappearing bride), but also an immersive sensory experience.

Prolific Philly sound designer and composer Christopher Colucci provides original music with lyrics inspired by Lorca’s work. Percussionist Adam Bailey, guitarist Guy West, and cellist Mari Ma will perform the score, and even the sound effects will be created live. And early arrivals to the theater can catch a pre-show flamenco dance in the lobby, choreographed by Pasion y Arte Flamenco founder and director Elba Hevia y Vaca.

The performance is also notable for its collaborators, under the university’s Mandell Professionals In Residence Project. This time, Drexel’s Co-Op Theatre Company (of the school’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design) teams with the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective (PAC), cofounded in 2008 by Blood Wedding director Damon Bonetti, to mount the show. Drexel students will perform alongside nine professional actors, including Judith Lightfoot Clarke and Eric Scotolati, and also provide much of the backstage manpower.

“The PAC are guests of Drexel,” Bonetti says, according to the university. The students involved “are not incidental to this production but an integral part of the ensemble.”

The director compares the play to Romeo and Juliet: “the impulsiveness of youth, the inability of the older characters to reconcile and understand the younger generation,” and of course, the whole unfortunate tragic wedding thing.

Clocking in at about two and a half hours, a light evening it ain’t — but it may be a worthwhile look at a 20th-century classic that’s rarely staged in Philadelphia.

Blood Wedding is running at Drexel’s Mandell Theater, 3201 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, through November 23. Tickets are $25 ($15 for non-Drexel students; $5 for Drexel students, faculty, and staff). For tickets, call 215-895-ARTS or click here.