‘El Maleficio de la Mariposa’ (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell) @ Hip Pocket Theatre

—Jan Farrington

Alas, poor Sylvia Beetle (Amanda Reyes): “El amor” has hit her hard.

Does Boy Beetle (Ron Fernandez Jr.) return her passion?

Well…nope. Or we wouldn’t have much of a story.

Girl loves boy. Boy writes poems and yearns for a perilous, impossible love he may never have. And though the mothers and villagers and shamans of this little bug burg wish them well, a happy ending will be hard to arrange.

Add one Butterfly, a damsel (hey, that’s a bug too) in distress, who literally falls into the center of their world—half-dead, mysterious and apart, a creature whose thoughts and words follow threads we don’t quite understand—and the hometown romance goes out the window. Boy is smitten. Sylvia is sad: “My sadness goes Deeeeeep,” she wails to Boy Beetle’s sympathetic mom.

The characters of Hip Pocket Theatre’s El Maleficio de la Mariposa (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell) may be fitted out in colorful, fun, shaggy and shiny insect costumes (beetles, fireflies, scorpion, butterfly) from the imaginative mind of designer Susan Austin, but their emotions are real to us—human and honest.

Young Spanish playwright and poet Federico García Lorca wrote Butterfly (his only play in verse) in the 1920s, and HPT has done the play at least once before. This second production, engagingly adapted and directed by Yvonne Duque-Guerrero, is performed mostly in English, but with lovely short insertions of García Lorca’s original Spanish text—wonderful to hear.

Music (as it was in HPT’s first run of the play some years ago) is by guitar master Darrin Kobetich, whose Spanish/Mexican/Andean inflected picking style provides a compelling but never intrusive background—and some sound effects. The Butterly gets the only formal song, an odd and interestingly atonal (almost chanted) piece giving us clues about who she is. She is dazed and hurting, but announces herself with dignity. “I am Death,” she says, and Beauty too, a “Child of the Magic Chrysalis” who doesn’t know what Love is. She flies on a thread of silver, and knows “life’s mysteries” as we do not—”why the bee is angrily humming” and so much more.

All of this could so easily fall over into parody, but it never does—though we’re allowed some laughs at the insects’ quirky ways. But we feel García Lorca’s pain, and how fiercely he invests in his allegorical world. In conservative and authoritarian Spain, he was an artist and homosexual, both dangerous, even potentially fatal. The love forbidden between Boy and Butterfly is his too, and he would die by assassination, shot by Nationalist forces as Franco came to power—for his political views, but very probably for his personal lifestyle too.

As the Boy, Fernandez is over-the-top poetical, but not dreamy: he knows what he’s after, and makes it clear to Sylvia where they stand. His brief recitations of Lorca’s poetry are well done and evocative. Reyes as Silvia wears her heart on her wing: she’s happy, she’s sad, she’s “in the moment” emotional—and we feel for her. Kirsten Wagner is Dona Beetle, Boy’s mother, practical and loving. Sylvia’s family is rich, and simple Dona will try her best to “make my son” fall in love.

Dona Witchbeetle (Kristi Ramos Toler) is her confidante, a seer of omens with a bad feeling about the near future. A spiky-headed, predatory Scorpion (Sara Rashelle) reels around on the greenery-draped stage (set design by Lizeth Garcia) hunting for the next meal, clad in black leather, with scary moves and a stinger, we assume, somewhere in back. Scorpy’s opposite is Thad Isbell as the kindly Saint Beetle, who approves of love wherever we can find it. Grim guards, field beetles (country folk, in Spanish terms) and flitting fireflies fill out the cast with their intriguingly different presences.

The overall performances were quite good, but it’s the strange and vivid Butterfly (Aaron Knowles Dias) I’m likely to remember longest.

She begins as a silent presence, first balletically poised and airborne on the balcony, then carried wounded into the village and placed in a protective circle of the Witchbeetle’s making. She is confused and defensive once she begins to wake, struggling to fly with her damaged wings. Dias gives her an otherwordly demeanor—cool and commanding even in her vulnerability. She is uninterested in the hovering Boy until she notes his touch giving her strength—and then in minutes, makes use of all that he is. It’s a remarkable performance.

Needless to say, Boy and Butterfly are unlikely to settle down by the hearth to raise cute butter-beetle babies. But I won’t give away García Lorca’s briefly passionate—and lingeringly unsettling—ending.

WHEN: June 23-July 16, 2023

WHERE: 1950 Silver Creek Road, Fort Worth

WEB: hippocket.org

Photos by Shannon Atkinson Cahoone