Ground Floor of Experimental Theater in Phoenix: Blood Wedding

HowlRound: Orange Theatre’s reimagined Federico García Lorca’s 1932 Spanish play Blood Wedding is infused with go-go dancing, nineties sit-coms, contemporary television commercials, sexploitation, calypso, and some self-aware fourth-wall breakage. That’s a partial list. The danger with experimental theater is that audience members may feel cheated out of the satisfactions of a traditional play. Hence, experimental theater isn’t the most commercially successful or reliable type of art. The problem is partially that experimental theater is often stigmatized as “weird.” Especially if audiences are paying for theater, they might not want to gamble on what is “weird.”