personal freedom, his own untimely death was the greatest tragedy of all.

The Butterfly’s Evil Spell

There is an obvious thematic connection between García Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, and, notably, poems such as “Los encuentros de un caracol aventurero,” “Canción otoñal,” and “Balada triste,” from his first collection, Libro de poemas. Romantic in theme but influenced by the subtle symbolism of the early poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, both the poems and the play tell of love, illusion, frustration, and death; a new force breaks through the tranquillity of the old order, leaving senses and soul perturbed. The play dramatizes in lyric form the confusion caused in the daily life of a community of insects by the eruption of love which is mortal. The hero of this miniature tragedy, the cockroach poet Curianito, breaks with the logic, conventions, and strictures of his codified world by falling in love with “a vision which was far removed from his life,” a dying butterfly that has fallen to the ground. Precisely his atypical condition of poet makes Curianito seek union with the butterfly, which is at once the incarnation of an unrealizable ideal and the victim of the desire to attain that ideal. Through the impossible love between Curianito and the butterfly, García Lorca dramatizes the subtle relationship between aspiration and goal and the inevitable frustration of both as deviance in an otherwise ordered world.

The essential dramatic situation of all García Lorca’s theater is present even in this early effort. The dramatic structure derives from the clash between the norm and the ideal worked out onstage by archetypal characters (who will reappear in the later plays) such as the mother (Doña Curiana), the spinster (Curianita Silvia), the doomed lovers (Curianito and the butterfly), and the tyrannical voice of public opinion emanating from the chorus of neighbors and onlookers (beetles and worms).

With encouragement from Gregorio Martínez Sierra, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell was performed at the Teatro Eslava, in Madrid, on March 22, 1920. Despite García Lorca’s pious hope, expressed in the prologue, that his audience would appreciate this lesson from the natural world, the public had little interest in a play ostensibly about beetles and worms. Accustomed to the drawing-room plays of the commercial theater, they booed it mercilessly off the stage. Bitterly disillusioned, García Lorca learned the hard way that the Spanish theatergoing public still needed to be educated in the modern techniques so successful in Prague and Paris.

Mariana Pineda

Seven years elapsed before García Lorca ventured back to the commercial stage, and to a resounding triumph. Mariana Pineda was performed in June, 1927, at the Teatro Goya, in Barcelona, by Margarita Xirgu’s company, with scenery designed by Salvador Dalí and under García Lorca’s own direction. It premiered that October at the Teatro Fontalba, in Madrid.

In part, García Lorca’s success was a matter of felicitous timing. Mariana Pineda was a legendary figure of Granada, and her contribution to the republican opposition to Ferdinand VII had contemporary relevance for a twentieth century audience living under Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Probably this currency was rather more political than García Lorca intended; he had seized on the poetic possibilities of the historical facts. Certainly, García Lorca’s second dramatic production was less esoteric than the first. His starting point was the ballad about Mariana Pineda sung in Granada’s streets; this was developed into a total spectacle by expert staging and intuitive choreography. Such a combination, with the added appeal of topicality, assured the play a successful run.

On its simplest level, the play is a romantic love story full of passion and sacrifice. Mariana’s association with the liberals of Granada is explained by her love for one of them, Pedro de Sotomayor, but both her love and the cause are doomed. Pedro escapes, leaving Mariana to face Pedrosa, the king’s representative, and certain death. The play moves through moments of great lyricism, notably the meeting between Mariana and Pedro in act 2, and Mariana’s tragic view of love in the final moments of the play. Good use is made of poetic symbolism both in a traditional visual fashion (for example, the red lettering on the banner and the children’s game, which combine to suggest spilled blood and death, or the conflict between good and evil reflected in the use of white and black in the scene sets and costumes) and in novel poetic interludes or portents of disaster when García Lorca interjects a romance extraneous to the plot but integral to the play’s thematic unity (for example, Amparo’s retelling of the bullfight in act 1 or Mariana’s lullaby of the tragic fate of Duke Lucena in act 2).

From the first, love dominates the scene, and there is a growing sense of individuals caught helplessly in their own passion and in the affairs of others: Mariana in her love for Pedro, Fernando in his love for Mariana, Mariana and Pedro in their hatred for Pedrosa, who himself hates Pedro and desires Mariana.

Mariana, the first fully realized character in García Lorca’s theater, is also the first in a long succession of society’s victims, but she never acts from purely political motives. This realization leads the spectator or reader to the second level of the play’s action: a dramatic situation in which love and liberty become identical. García Lorca’s heroine learns that individual liberty and society are mutually exclusive, that any attempt at personal freedom is doomed to failure and death.

The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita

García Lorca’s early romanticism was one reaction against realism onstage; a return to the puppet theater of his youth, with its frantic pace, cross-purposes, and knockabout action, was another. His two puppet plays, The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, are, in effect, two versions of the same story, the second version being the more stylized.

In The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita, the theme of love in conflict with parental obligation is treated with dramatic vigor: The father sells his daughter Rosita to Don Cristóbal, a rich man known for his lechery and cruelty. In this broadly comic farce, however, the fact that Rosita and her true love Cocoliche kiss in front of the cuckolded husband is enough to make Don Cristóbal fume and die, literally, ha estallado. Again, the dramatic situation exposes the power that feeds on fear, lies, and covetousness and argues in favor of the authenticity of the individual who escapes societal conventions.

In the Frame of Don Cristóbal

In his In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, García Lorca shows some of the innovative technique that distinguishes the more ambitious The Audience by beginning the farce with a prólogo hablado in which Director and Poet turn the original story inside out. Don Cristóbal, by definition evil, now turns out to be good at the heart and forced by society to play an evil role, and Rosita has the truly insatiable sexual appetite. By replacing the lyric with the grotesque, García Lorca followed closely the esperpentos of Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and, as the Director notes, a whole tradition from “the Gallician ‘Bululu,’ Monsieur Guignol from Paris, and Bergamo’s Signor Harlequin.” How significant was this return to “the very essence of the theater” in order to give the theater new life is better seen in García Lorca’s two farces for people, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden.

The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife

García Lorca started work on The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in 1926, but he did not finish the play until 1930. It was performed publicly first on December 24, 1930, at the Teatro Español with Margarita Xirgu in the leading role, Rivas Cherif as director, and costumes designed by Pablo Picasso; García Lorca subsequently revised and expanded the play into the version known today, which was premiered by Lola Membrives and her company on November 30, 1933, in Buenos Aires and on March 18, 1935, at the Teatro Coliseo in Madrid. The play was a huge success; its similarities to the highly stylized forms of ballet and operetta were noted and parallels were drawn with Manuel de Falla’s adaptation of El sombrero de tres picos (1874). Theater critics appreciated García Lorca’s blend of dialogue, poetry, and song, pointing out how he had captured the essence of Andalusian speech rhythms. The protagonist was considered a tour de force; a modern version of the unhappily married wife who, however unhappy her condition, consistently rejects all suitors, she is one more in a distinguished literary lineage that dates back to the earliest Spanish ballads.

García Lorca, himself, however, insisted on the universality of the Shoemaker’s Wife and increasingly emphasized the poetic element of her struggle. In interviews held in 1932, he explained that “the Shoemaker’s Wife is not any woman in particular but all women” and, moreover, that “every spectator has a Shoemaker’s Wife beating in his breast.” He conceived this “poetic example of the human soul” to portray the violence of the clash between fantasy and reality:The poetic creature which the author has dressed as a shoemaker’s wife with the grace of a refrain or simple ballad, lives and sparkles everywhere, and the public should not be surprised if she appears violent or assumes a bitter tone, for she is continually in conflict, she struggles against the reality which surrounds her and she struggles against fantasy when this becomes visible reality.

Violence is certainly the main characteristic of the Shoemaker’s Wife; the play opens and closes with her sharp retorts: “Be silent, tattle tongue” and “Be quiet, chinwags.” The whole of act 1 is rooted in violent antipathy: that of the Shoemaker’s Wife toward her neighbors and toward her husband, which never diminishes. Although García Lorca provides some details about the conditions of this mismarriage (its basis in her poverty and his loneliness, the considerable differences in age and outlook) and its difficult circumstances (the harmful gossip and ill will of the neighbors), these motivations are not sufficient in themselves to account for such a violent attitude. In a novel interpretation somewhat out of line with usual criticism, Ruiz Ramón makes much of García Lorca’s own avowed intention to dramatize “a myth of our pure unsatisfied illusion.” Thus, the anger of the Shoemaker’s Wife derives from frustration at the extent to which reality limits not only her individual dreams or desires but also her whole way of being. Her husband’s physical presence confines her very self; absent, he is absorbed into that fanciful self and so remembered with nostalgic affection; on his return, as he discloses his true identity, he again triggers her angry verbal abuse.

In Mariana Pineda, García Lorca depicts the incarnation of liberty as an ideal; in contrast, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife shows much more directly how personal liberty is attacked and endangered on a daily basis. The only nonthreatening presence is that of the child, “a compendium of tenderness and a symbol of that which is germinating and yet has long before it blossoms”; otherwise, the alienation of the Shoemaker’s Wife is complete. This violence done to the self by the other takes on tragic proportions in Yerma. Here (in The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife), humor and the comic spirit are ascendant. Act 2 is a particularly good example of the comic treatment of integrity as reputation and public opinion and integrity as the self inviolate. The Shoemaker’s Wife repulses Don Mirlo, the mayor, and others but is subject to increased vilification by the neighbors; she pursues her own dream reality, but this is shattered on the return of her husband. Hence, the gap widens between individual honor and societal norms. Precisely those forces that overwhelm the characters in the later play are at least superficially contained here: The couple agree on a modus vivendi in order to confront, together, the villagers’ malicious tongues. The self joins with the other, but one may well ask oneself at what cost.

The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden

This pattern of the antagonistic couple as protagonists appears once more in farce in The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, in which a marriage is contracted between two incompatible partners: the fifty-year-old Perlimplín, inexperienced in love, and the young and nubile Belisa, who dreams, half naked on her balcony, of her lovers. The characterization goes beyond caricature; in this farcical treatment of the juxtaposition of youth and age, sensuality and frustration, there is a certain element of pathos. The comic action of the wedding night that brings the discovery of the delights of love to Perlimplín (and makes him a five-time cuckold) turns to tragedy as he plans the conquest of his wife by becoming the embodiment of her vision of love, an illusion brilliant and alluring, but one whose death is implicit in its creation. In such a paradox, García Lorca strips certain elements of farce (disguise and mistaken identity) of their comic effect and moves nearer to the innovative cryptodramas The Audience and When Five Years Pass, in which the techniques of farce are used for different and more subtle ends.

Innovative Plays

During his stay at the Residencia de Estudiantes, García Lorca enjoyed close friendships with Dalí and Buñuel, which were to have an obvious effect on his work. Increasingly as the 1920’s wore on, García Lorca’s theater became more experimental; Surrealism, cinematic techniques, and E. Gordon Craig’s theories of stagecraft permeated this most avant-garde phase of his drama, which belongs roughly to the years from 1929 to 1931 and has much in common with his contemporaneous New York poems.

García Lorca, wise from his initial bad experience with the commercial theater, had few illusions about his more innovative plays, calling them “irrepresentables.” The Audience and When Five Years Pass were coldly received even by García Lorca’s most intimate friends. Quite rightly, García Lorca considered that the frank treatment of homosexuality and the violence in The Audience placed it far beyond the grasp of the average audience of its time. Only the minority experimental theater clubs might have been persuaded to stage this kind of drama, and in 1936 there were plans (which came to nothing) for a performance of When Five Years Pass by Pura Ucelay’s group, the Club Anfistora. If public taste and attitudes were not then ready, García Lorca knew that “the impossible plays contain my true intention.” Time would confirm his opinion: In 1972, students at the University of Texas claimed The Audience for their own with great excitement, while in 1978, when When Five Years Pass finally reached the Spanish stage, it was hailed as García Lorca’s most original contribution to the national theater.

The Audience

The Spanish title of The Audience, El público, stark and clinical, is, like its sets and most of its dialogue, a mystery designed to make one reflect on the meaning of love and life. As spectators, the audience observes the stage action, but, just as the play is the image of life, so the audience recognizes the masks and attitudes assumed by the actors as its own. There is, finally, no separation between actors and audience, between the episodes and incidents onstage and in life. R. Martínez Nadal’s reconstruction of the incomplete text (1978) includes perhaps the most powerful and direct statement by García Lorca on the function of the theater: “My characters . . . burn the curtain and die in the presence of the public. . . . One must destroy the theatre or live in it!”

The audience of The Audience witnesses the process of self-discovery by the stage characters, who put on and take off their masks in a frenzied search for identity. They discuss the nature of the drama and participate in their own drama. By the offstage performance of Romeo and Juliet, the play-within-the-play, life is brought to the issues of homosexual love, the frustration of love by death, the treachery of appearances, and the shifting nature of all reality. For the spectators of this action onstage, the issues assume a living form; the characters are reflections of the public, and the audience of them. Boundaries and demarcations are dissolved and become, instead, an infinity of mirror images. In its intellectual range and daring use of technique and dialogue, The Audience is a startlingly “modern” play, certainly of the caliber of the experimental theater of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, or Eugène Ionesco written some twenty years later.

When Five Years Pass

When Five Years Pass was completed in 1931, barely a year after The Audience. Despite its difficulty, which stems from the same arbitrary radicalism and almost perversely individual symbolism of all experimental theater, it is less obscure and less shocking in theme and dialogue. Unambiguously, the title and subtitle, “A Legend of Time Passing in Three Acts and Five Scenes,” point to the central issue, but the composition is a musical one whereby García Lorca has dramatized in a series of fugues the tragedy of time passing for people, who are always at counterpoint, desiring the impossible and destroying what they have. Once again the characters are facets of the individual or the personification of differing attitudes toward a certain fact. El Amigo, Amigo 2 and El Viejo correspond to different facets of El Joven; their varying opinions on time passing are his at different moments in his life. They reflect the opinions and experience of the audience as well, for the play is an image which projects man’s common concerns with time, love, and death.

Blood Wedding

The Audience and When Five Years Pass are García Lorca’s dramas on the lives of men; too frank and disturbing for their time, they never enjoyed the acclaim given to his dramas on the lives of women. The premiere of Blood Wedding on March 8, 1933, at the Teatro Beatriz in Madrid, with García Lorca directing Josefina Díaz de Artigas and her company, and its enthusiastic reception by both critics and public, marked the beginning of the final and most successful phase of García Lorca’s dramatic career both within Spain and abroad. The play was translated into French by Marcel Auclair and Jean Provost and was performed in English in New York in 1935; most important, its run in Buenos Aires, with Lola Membrives in the leading role, led to García Lorca’s wildly successful tour of the River Plate Republics and the beginning of the myth that continues to this day. Blood Wedding and Lola Membrives’ revivals of Mariana Pineda and The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife made García Lorca famous, financially independent, and sure of his ability as dramatist and director. From a technical point of view, Blood Wedding reflects García Lorca’s decision to set aside experimental theater in favor of another kind of experiment, equally audacious in its way: “We must go back to writing tragedy. We are compelled to do so by our theatrical tradition. There will be time later for comedies and farces. Meanwhile I want to give the theater tragedies.”

Not conceived as a single offering, Blood Wedding was to be the first part of “a dramatic trilogy of the Spanish land.” In 1933, García Lorca admitted that, if he was working hard on the second with its theme of the barren wife, “the third is maturing deep inside me. It will be called La destrucción de Sodoma”; despite García Lorca’s assurances early in 1935 that this tragedy, also known as Las hijas de Loth, was “almost finished” and “very advanced,” no version survives. Martínez Nadal again provides the only details available concerning the “magnificent theme” whose very title García Lorca conceded was “grave and compromising”: “Jehovah destroys the city because of the sin of Sodom and the result is the sin of incest. What a lesson against the decrees of Justice! And the two sins, what a manifestation of the power of sex!” While it is difficult to talk of structural unity when one of the three parts is missing, García Lorca did insist, first, that he was writing a trilogy and, second, that his tragedies were according to the classical model, “with four principal characters and chorus, as tragedies are meant to be.” García Lorca probably intended a modern version of the ancient Greek trilogies; the common theme was the illustration of the power of sexual energy in conflict with established societal norms and conventions. In Blood Wedding, in an attempt to circumvent the passionate love between Leonardo and the Novia, a marriage is arranged that ends in the death of the only two surviving male members of the feuding families; in Yerma, the passionate desire for maternity destroys its only hope of fulfillment. All tragedies in the trilogy were to present a struggle to the death between the two opposing principles of authority and personal freedom. The conflict is a constant in García Lorca’s work, but his revival of the classical form converts it into a spectacle of great theatricality.

Much has been made of the Aristotelian pattern of Blood Wedding. Catharsis is possible because the characters who suffer are closely related. The catastrophe that overtakes both the Mother and the Bride may be attributed to their error, the Mother’s in her unforgiving hatred of the Félix family, which results in the death of her own son, and the Bride’s in marrying a man she does not love. Because the Mother brings about her son’s death, thereby thwarting her own desire to see her family grow and prosper, there is reversal of intention and, because she finally listens to the Bride’s story, recognition. The final solitude and pain of both the Mother and the Bride awaken pity and terror in the audience. The figures of Moon and Death provide the supernatural intervention in human life, and woodcutters and neighbors supply the chorus.

The classical pattern gives style to the original source of the play, a short newspaper account in El defensor de Granada. The real incident and the play’s action are identical, but García Lorca removed the concrete beings to an unreal world, converting them into forces whose incentives are beyond human control. This conversion of the personal to the generic is marked by the integration of poetry and drama.

With great dramatic economy, García Lorca built a logical construct: On the axis of action, the Novia and Leonardo are placed in jealous rivalry for family and personal reasons, while on the axis of passivity the respective parents arrange a marriage in which economic factors (money and land to be joined) and animal-like sexuality (“My son will cover her well. He’s of good seed” and “My daughter is wide-hipped and your son is strong”) outweigh any consideration of the Novia. The dramatic situation takes shape in the theme of passion first repressed and then triumphant: The Novia cannot resist Leonardo, the “pull of the sea,” “the head toss of a mule,” or force, which drives her to destruction. The power of sexual passion overthrows the proposed order (the marriage designed to lead to economic and moral prosperity) and justice, in that society demands retribution (persecution of the lovers), which leads to death: “On their appointed day, between two and three,/ these two men killed each other for love.” The Luna-(Muerte)-Mendiga scene thus symbolizes the fatal relationship between the tragedy’s two themes.

Yerma

This same conflict may be seen in Yerma, if one accepts García Lorca’s own definition of the tragedy’s theme: “Yerma will be the tragedy of the sterile woman.” It is the only theme worked out in a poema trágico that deals with one character’s continuous development. As the action begins, Yerma has been married for two years and twenty days; by the end of act 1, three years; and from act 2 until the end of the drama, five years. This concept of time passing is fundamental; it marks the movement from anxiety to desperation as Yerma suffers a gamut of emotions until she finally accepts her sterility. The entire action centers on Yerma because the other characters—Juan, Victor, Dolores, and the Vieja—derive their dramatic life from interaction with Yerma, and the chorus of washerwomen and neighbors merely provides a dramatic representation of conflicting views (her sterility or her husband’s).

As Yerma begins the process of indicting her husband in order not to accept the truth about herself, the opposition between Yerma and Juan increases: He becomes the symbol of society’s values, she a humiliated exception to nature’s rule of fecundity. Again, as in Blood Wedding, at the height of the action, realism is displaced by poetic fantasy. As Yerma resists the truth, so the real world loses its reality for her until, in desperation, she seeks fecundity in magic.

When Yerma does accept her sterility during the romería, the dramatic situation is again conflictive. By killing Juan, Yerma takes possession of her inner life, but, like the Novia, she is “dead” to society; by her act of will, she is the author of her own sterility rather than the victim society would make of her. By engineering her own destiny, she destroys forever her own dream. The principle of authority is again set against that of personal freedom; sexual power is manifest in the overthrow of the natural order. The fecundity for which Yerma yearns but which she is denied becomes a destructive, not a creative, force, truly a “scandal” worthy of García Lorca’s proposed trilogy.

Doña Rosita the Spinster

Yerma followed Blood Wedding in quick succession: The premiere took place at the Teatro Español, Madrid, on December 29, 1934, performed by Margarita Xirgu and her company and directed by Rivas Cherif. García Lorca did not, however, capitalize on its success and finish the trilogy. Instead, on December 13, 1935, he offered Doña Rosita the Spinster: Or, The Language of the Flowers, with Xirgu again in the leading role and again under Cherif’s direction, to the Teatro Palacio Principal in Barcelona.

According to García Lorca, Doña Rosita the Spinster was conceived in 1924, when José Moreno Villa told him of the rosa mutabile. This became the central image for the passing of time in a play in which costumes, scenery, and dialogue change in minute detail with each act in order to recapture “the life, peaceful on the outside yet seething within, of a Granadine virgin who gradually becomes that being at once grotesque and moving which is the spinster in Spain.” Gradually a difference is made between “real” time and the “inner” time of Rosita, who waits without hope for her fiancé’s return. Like the Shoemaker’s Wife, her self stays inviolate only while separate from the others. In act 2, Rosita explains to her aunt how easily she could divorce herself from the aging process, which occurs only through the eyes of others. Her tragedy is not the betrayal of her love but the destruction of her personal dream that she is loved.

In García Lorca’s dramatic universe, other people, by their presence and their comments, pose a grave threat to the individual self’s inner life. At first sight, Rosita is a banal heroine, one whose fussy gentility makes her pathetic self-sacrifice slightly ridiculous; she is, in fact, an excellent study in repression, revealing “the drama of Spanish vulgarity, of Spanish prurience, of the desire for enjoyment that women must suppress deep down in their febrile beings.”

The House of Bernarda Alba

García Lorca never completed his projected trilogy, but shortly before his death he gave a private reading of The House of Bernarda Alba, the synthesis of his Spanish rural tragedies. His best work, it was an exciting shift away from poetic drama in favor of social realism. Its first public performance was by Xirgu and her company in Buenos Aires in 1945; it was not performed in Spain until January 10, 1964.

Like Blood Wedding, the play’s inspiration was real enough: The original Doña Bernarda kept a tyrannical watch over her unmarried daughters in the house next door to that owned by García Lorca’s parents in the small village of Valderrubio. Indeed, nothing is invented here except the story in García Lorca’s attempt at un documental fotográfico on women’s lives in rural Spain. The most violent conflict in García Lorca’s theater between the principles of authority and personal freedom unfolds in a closed space whose dimensions are physical (Bernarda’s house is variously described as a barracks, a prison, and a convent) and metaphorical (Bernarda’s first and last words impose silence). Authority here is the exercise of power to further a moral and social order based on public opinion, the qué diran. From the first, Bernarda, defined as cruel, cold, and tyrannical, is seen as the incarnation of that authority. Her instinct for absolute power denies anyone personal liberty and, finally, negates reality itself. In opposition to this instinct for power, personal freedom translates into an equally basic instinct: sex. In a conflict lacking human or rational moments, Bernarda and the members of her household are isolated from the world and from one another. The only solution is the destruction of one or another of the conflicting forces. Madness or suicide provides the only way out of this closed world; both are extreme, neither is successful. María Josefa eludes Bernarda’s locks and bolts only in her fanciful ramblings; Adela’s final rebellion questions Bernarda’s authority, but Bernarda’s word is final: “The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence, silence, I said. Silence!”