A Review of Suhaani Gala’s The House of Bernarda Alba: Inside the Aisle of Control

From the moment that I was let into the Black Box, it was clear that this Bernarda Alba was built on subtraction. The stripped-down corridor, limited seating and the single wooden fence were accompanied by a pamphlet with monochrome silhouettes announcing how five actors would stand in for nine characters. As the play began, Bernarda – the widow-mother of five girls – sat immobile at one short end of this rectangle (as she would continue to throughout the play) – intoning the Latin requiem at her second husband’s funeral. It is a moment of formal gravity before the house seals itself shut again, and a shift from her walking portrayals in other major productions. Opposite her, a wooden fence filled with hay served as an all-purpose site: the inner room to which Adela eventually flees, Maria Josefa’s escape point, the stable that houses the unseen stallion, and even the sonic "outside" from which gossiping voices and reapers’ songs emerged. A white line of powder resembling salt marked off the set, rearranging the set for the “play in an aisle.” We were introduced to the sisters as they sat and prayed, bathed in stark white light, creatively evoking the sterile "white rooms" of Lorca’s text. The production, centred around five sisters locked into an eight-year mourning, would in the next 80 minutes stage “a version of Lorca’s work that feels honest and urgent” to Suhaani Gala (UG’26) and her co-creators’ vision.

The casting choice to have four of the five actor-creators – Gopika Sunil (UG’26), Kyra Semelhago (UG’26), Mihika Kulkarni (UG’26), Shivanya Vardhan (UG’28), and Smriti (UG’26) – play two roles each created moments of mastery and ingenuity but also those of confusion. Kyra distinguished Bernarda and Maria Josefa with movement; Smriti separated Amelia from Magdalena through vocal shifts; Mihika’s transition into the elderly servant Poncia was marked by a hunch. But even with Kulkarni, Semelhago and Smriti’s celebrated theatrical prowess, the doubling came in the way of audience attachment with the characters by troubling differentiation. At times, it was difficult to track who was who: was it Amelia or Magdalena who cried in the opening scene? And yet, this confusion mirrored how both characters already occupy similar supporting and mediating roles in the story. Smriti’s scene performing a conversation between two of her roles was impressive, but such flashes could not fully compensate for the absence of contextual scaffolding. At some point, I fully relied on the now barely visible pamphlet to keep up, and wished the dialogues invoked more first names for my convenience.

It seemed coherent with the production’s attempt to redirect attention away from secondary characters and contextual detail and toward the intersubjectivity between the sisters. With the visiting neighbour cut, class markers muted, and much of the sisters’ personal histories pared away, the production relies heavily on how the five performers inhabit the same corridor. They moved in synced sewing choreography, interlocked legs in moments of domestic routine, and occasionally mirrored gestures. They wore intricate and identical white lace gowns with black corsets. The three long tables, occupying the central rectangle, were repurposed endlessly as doors, sewing stands, dining surfaces, and symbolic thresholds. The lighting and the costume team managed to produce scintillating effects with the least amount of moving parts.

Through meticulously orchestrated spatial and movement patterns, the production built a visual unity that anchored the entire staging. Yet, there were moments where the sisters did not feel like a cohesive unit shaped by shared upbringing. Adela, played by Vardhan, remained isolated in her private grief and revolt from the beginning. Smriti’s (playing Amelia and Magadalena) grief during the funeral hinted at a personal history with her father, but the production did not supply the information needed to understand individual relationships within the family. Kulkarni played Martirio’s jealousy with maddening intensity, but the production under-foreshadowed her feelings; there was little evidence of any private longing, acquaintance, or even opinion of Pepe El Romano (the offstage figure all characters in the play eventually become entangled with) that might have rooted her obsession. So when Adela embraces Martirio pleading “It’s not my fault!” or after rejection, delivers the lines the play was marketed with, ("They tell us we should love our sisters. God must have abandoned me to dwell in darkness, because I look at you as if I had never seen you before.”) the audience struggles to mourn the end of an interpersonal relationship it has seen little of.

Bernarda’s authority was conveyed almost entirely through near-perfect non-contact choreography: when she struck her cane, the daughters crumpled several feet away; when she scolded Angustias for wearing makeup, Sunil mimed wiping her own face. Bernarda’s influence was established as something atmospheric rather than physical, and raised the question: Was the tyranny a detached loyalty to tradition or perhaps pain slipping through the cracks of her own horrors?

There seem to be clues in how Gala chose to end her production. By cutting the two brief exchanges after the gunshot: Martirio’s false announcement that Pepe is dead, which pushes Adela toward suicide, and her near-instant admission afterwards that he has survived – the production kept both the sisters and the audience trapped in a single, unbroken moment of shock. In Lorca’s text, that detail nudges the tragedy toward a fuller reckoning: Adela’s death is shaped by a misapprehension, deliberately caused by her own sister. This ending instead foregrounds Adela’s loss as both cause and effect to an irreversible corruption of this family while setting aside the immediate circumstances that precede and follow it. 

More striking still is the removal of one of Bernarda’s final lines, “She, the youngest of Bernarda Alba’s daughters, died a virgin!” In the original, that assertion is the play’s ideological fulcrum – a last, brutal gesture of control that exposes Bernarda’s commitment to reputation above truth, compassion, or even familial cohesion. Its absence opens multiple interpretive possibilities. Perhaps this Bernarda is momentarily undone by what has unfolded; as she tries to yell “Quiet,” but her voice fails her, perhaps the production simply refuses to give her the last word. All my guesses soften the rigid worldview that Lorca encodes in that line, replacing it with attachment to this household we see collapse in front of our eyes. Instead of being found in a room not pictured, Adela’s body, represented symbolically by a falling green dress, drops and hangs in the middle of the stage. The ending, just like the set and atmosphere, seems to be lodged inside. 

The final result is an experiment in form and adaptation that is haunting, elegantly executed with Gala’s minimalism, and emotionally resonant, even if it leaves Lorca’s larger machinery of repression less fully illuminated. 

(Edited by Giya Sood.)