INTERVIEW: Eliza Lynch’s story comes to life on NYC stage
Photo: Ballet Panambí Vera, under the direction of choreographer Iliana Gauto, features the dancers Mia Fleitas, Michelle Galeano, Denisse Gonzalez and Jaclyn Neir. Photo courtesy of Russ Rowland / Provided by DARR Publicity with permission.
Madame Lynch, the new show from The Drunkard’s Wife, follows the surprising and controversial adventures of Eliza Lynch, a real-life figure who went from surviving the Irish potato famine to becoming a French courtesan to taking on a cultural importance in Paraguay. The show, which features music and dance from the Paraguayan folkloric group Ballet Panambí Vera, comes to New York City courtesy of the New Ohio Theatre and IRT Theater.
Performances of Madame Lynch run through June 15.
Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin serve as both writers and directors of the show, which is at times spectacular and horrifying, detailing the extent and realities of cultural imperialism.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Sherwood and Flanagin about the theatrical project. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired you to adapt the story of Eliza Lynch?
Sherwood: Well, Craig first went to Paraguay in the early 2000s. His first encounter with Eliza Lynch was in a supermarket. He was in the SuperSeis in Encarnacion with his friend, Jorge, and he saw all these packages of white bread — then a fairly new thing in Paraguay — with an image of a fancy lady on them. ‘Who is this lady on the bread?’ he asked Jorge. ‘She was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.’
The bread was ‘Madame Lynch’ brand.
When Craig told me this story, I was fascinated, and we both tried to find out as much as we could about her. John Gimette’s book At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig has a chapter on Madame Lynch, and that introduced me to some of the more over-the-top stories about her.
I was fascinated by these (probably specious) stories that were spread in the Argentine press and figure in most biographies: that she longed to be powerful and a cultural leader in Paraguay, but that she was roundly rejected by the upper-class ladies of Asuncion, and she exacted her revenge by devising elaborate social humiliations for them.
In one case, she threw a ball where attendance was compulsory, and all attendees had to wear costumes that she chose, with the most humiliating costumes reserved for her chief enemies. Another concerns a pleasure cruise with these same ladies where, in response to a slight, she had all of the food thrown off of the boat and anchored the boat in the middle of the river for 10 hours. I was so interested in the extreme cruelty and fragility of this character, and also in the fact that, for someone who had a rough life in some ways (as a refugee, as a courtesan), she seemed to have no empathy for others.
What do you believe Eliza’s story can teach a 2019 audience?
Flanagin: Madame Lynch’s story and the way it has come down to us are a reminder that history is often more subtle and more complex than we make space for. Eliza Lynch’s story seems to resonate with some received ideas about how women wield power and the way cultural imperialism works, but the more we researched, the more complicated our picture of her and her cultural significance became.
Sherwood: When we began this process, I noticed that of the works of fiction, theater, film that take on this story, most are focused on romance, or see Eliza’s priorities as love and family and see her outsized cruelty as motivated by feminine jealousy. This seemed to me like a limited way to understand this character or to understand her extreme revenges. I wanted to try to understand her through the lens of her vision of herself as an artist, a cultural leader, and to find the tragedy in the story through the way this vision blinded her to the realities of her situation, the priorities of and agency of the other people who made up the society she was trying to influence.
One of the complexities we try to reckon with is that for all that Madame Lynch encountered various kinds of resistance personally and to her ideas about manners and culture when she tried to introduce them, she is now understood as this foundational cultural figure in Paraguay. Partly that has to with Paraguay’s history in the 20th century, and the way that Lynch and Francisco Solano Lopez were held up as national heroes during the regime of the dictator Stroessner in the 1950s through the ’80s, and partly with the fact the dances and music she introduced have entered the folk culture. And she influences Paraguayan art to this day.
Flanagin: While many things are universal, many are unique to a particular time and place, and the difference is not always apparent. But the way I think we can generalize from this particular case of Eliza Lynch is that histories are full of people like Eliza who are complicated and hard to understand or appreciate from a contemporary vantage point. There’s a lot that doesn’t resolve neatly in her story.
How much research went into the creation of the show?
Flanagin and Sherwood: Madame Lynch and the War of the Triple Alliance are as recent to Paraguayans as the Civil War is to us. Like contemporary Americans, contemporary Paraguayans are strongly opinionated about their history and how it implicates their current world and their own identity.
In Paraguay, over the course of our visits over the years, we’ve shared dozens of conversations on the topic with historians, dramatists, choreographers, musicians and archivists — as well as hundreds more casual discussions, mainly over meals or over tereré, with friends and acquaintances across the country. We’ve seen Madame Lynch’s stylish dresses and the furniture she brought from Europe at the Museum of the Department of Defense. We’ve gone to sites around the country where this history happened.
In New York, through our friendship with the dancers of Panambí Vera, we spend time with many Paraguayan Americans, and they are quick to share their personal takes on Madame Lynch and the war. Several have seen sections or versions of our show in workshop and in rehearsal, and we’ve received their thoughts as the work progresses.
And, of course, in New York we see lots of great Paraguayan folkloric dancing and hear a lot of great music!
As far as traditional research, we’ve read practically every book available in English about Madame Lynch or about the forest people of eastern Paraguay. We’ve also read a few of the books available in Spanish, but only easy ones!
How has it been collaborating with the dance group Ballet Panambí Vera?
Flanagin: Wonderful! Their skill and dedication, their boundless energy and their commitment are inspiring. The community they’re part of is close-knit and warmly proud of their cultural heritage — and it’s so great to see the younger girls in the group taking up the dance and art, and participating in bringing it to a worldwide audience.
We can’t say enough nice things about their leader and choreographer, Iliana Gauto, who’s been enthusiastic about and supportive of sharing in this endeavor from the first.
Panambí Vera are welcoming, they’re generous, and their work is lovely.
What was the collaboration like between the two of you? How would you trade off responsibilities?
Flanagin and Sherwood: Besides our individual work, both of us have been making collaborative art in various media with various collaborators our entire lives. The Drunkard’s Wife was founded on our impulse to collaborate together.
We started as a band wearing fabulous costumes and acting out little skits and morphed into a theater company. In this instance, Normandy heard about this story from Craig, got fascinated, and wrote a draft of this play. It was developed early on by Normandy and Craig at Little Theatre at Dixon Place and at one point with Normandy’s old company, The National Theater of the United States of America. But then it sat in a drawer for many years.
When Robert Lyons invited us to the Archive Residency in 2017, we decided to take this play out of the drawer, tear it apart and rewrite it together. That’s what we did! We wrote and directed the play together. Craig attended more to the sound and music; Normandy attended more to costumes, and they both worked on props and set.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Drunkard’s Wife production of Madame Lynch plays through June 15 at New Ohio Theatre on Christopher Street in New York City. The production is the second Archive Residency show from New Ohio Theatre and IRT Theater. Click here for more information and tickets.
