Since the end of the Civil War, the Spanish theater has been plagued by the arrested historical development of the country—an amalgam of authoritarian rule, censorship, a predominantly conservative theater-going public, and a marked cultural lag in the appearance in Spain of new currents and works of the modern theater.

Out of these singular conditions has emerged a Spanish Theater of Commitment whose allegiance is to Matthew Arnold's concept that art is meant to be a criticism of life, but whose dramatic thrust is modified by the special conditions existing in Spain today.

Leader of this new theater is Antonio Buero Vallejo…. The Theater of Commitment is characterized by the importance of the dramatist's political views in relation to his art. It may be best described by the term zeitstuck, a play that tries to cope with a problem of the day. It is not a literature of approval or tribute, but rather of protest and outrage. What is important is less the script itself than the terms of when and where and how it is presented. Its message must be put across in a special way. It does not lay claim to portraiture, nor an interest in all of a man or of a social class. As Eric Bentley points out in The Theatre of Commitment …, the ending is open. Just before the curtain falls, the playwright seems to say, "What happens after this is up to you, the public." (p. 354)

As for the "open" ending, Buero Vallejo, just before the curtain falls, sometimes has a character pose a question which is left unanswered. The Spanish playwright has said, "Answers to that question belong to life, not necessarily to art."

While the term commitment usually suggests engagé, Spanish dramatists do not regularly strive to present the philosophical superstructure which frames the works of Jean-Paul Sartre….

Buero Vallejo and his followers generally use lower-class characters in their home habitat. The protagonists struggle against something undefined and undetermined in the play. That something would be, in the normal play, the antagonist, and it would be specific. Not so here, because the antagonist in the Theater of Commitment is the Establishment. To point out specifically the nature of that antagonist … would mean the play would remain unstaged. That antagonist does not appear on stage. It exists in the mind of the audience. The cause of the evil conditions remains unspecified, but implied: the Spanish Establishment. (p. 355)

These, then, are plays of protest and outrage directed to the middle-class theater-going public. There is no direct protest, yet their hoped-for effect—on middle-level people "who may be vaguely sympathetic to the cause preached but are a little sluggish and sleepy about it"—is one of thoughtful anger.

Ushering in the Commitment style in Spanish drama is Buero's Historia de una escalera ["Story of a Stairway," 1949], the first truly distinguished play of the post-Civil War era in Spain. (pp. 355-56)

["Story of a Stairway"], which recalls the work of Elmer Rice, Sidney Kingsley, and Arthur Miller, is in the social-realist vein, plotted carefully to avoid censorship. Buero cross-laces the lives of families living in a Madrid tenement at three separate dates…. The story line follows the competition between a sincere, hard-working proletarian type and a would-be petty-bourgeois individual for success….

Coursing through the play are sharp scenes of individual conflict which gather like a summer storm and break with lightning rapidity over the staircase. Simmering there are such words as: misery, squalor, pettiness, quarrels, anguish, poverty.

Buero's thesis is clear: Successive generations of Spaniards remain shackled to a pattern of life which does not change. Yet each generation begins by rebelling against the atmosphere of poverty, misery, and rancor which it has inherited, intent upon making its way out of the social dead end. In due time, because of concessions, indecision, or lack of personal vigor, that generation too allows itself to be defeated by life, as had the previous ones….

With this melodramatic yet effective play, Buero Vallejo shook up audiences and critics alike. He struck a social nerve. Although opinion was not unanimous on the work—and it does reveal structural flaws—most critics saw in this play an affinity with the tragic theme in Spanish letters. (p. 356)

As he gained in technical competence, Buero Vallejo turned to writing dramas of a historical nature which, by symbolic application to life in Spain today, reflect the playwright's commitment just as fully as do [his earlier plays]. These plays are in the tragic vein, but, since Buero is dealing basically with historical material, he does not use the lower-class element or humble apartment locales of his other plays.

In his historical cycle, the dramatist reveals a growth in symbolical depth, imaginative concern, and universal appeal. While modifying his field of operations, Buero Vallejo has not changed his objective—which is still commitment, through theatrical invention, to a change in the pattern of life for large segments of the Spanish population. (p. 357)