Federico García Lorca
Original score, dramaturg, author / playwright, dramaturge
Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5,1898; died near Granada, August 19,1936, García Lorca is Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poet and dramatist. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with MACHADO as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced this century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age. As a poet, his early reputation rested on the Romancero gitano (Madrid, 1928; tr. R. Humphries, The Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca, Bloomington, 1953), the poems of Poema del Cante Jondo (Madrid, 1931), and Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Madrid, 1935; tr. A. L. Lloyd, in Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, and Other Poems, London, 1937), all profoundly Andalusian, richly sombre in their mood and imagery, and disquieting in their projection of a part-primitive, part-private world of myth moved by dark and not precisely identifiable forces; but, beneath the flamenco trappings, there is a deeper - perhaps personal - anguish, as well as a superb rhythmical and linguistic sense (the Llanto is one of the four best elegies in the Spanish language). Critical interest has since shifted to the tortured, ambiguous and deliberately dissonant surrealist poems of Poeta en Nueva York (Mexico City, 1940; tr. B. Belitt, Poet in New York, London, 1955), and to the arabesque casidas and gacelas of Divein de Tamarit (NY, 1940). An early major anthology in English is Poems (tr. S. Spender & J. L. Gili, London, 1939). As a dramatist, early romantic pieces with social implications such as Mariana Pineda (Madrid, 1928; tr. J. GrahamLuidn & R. L. O'Connell in Collected Plays, London, 1976) and the comic invention of La zapatera prodigiosa (first performed 1930, amplified 1935, pub. Buenos Aires, 1938; The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife in Collected Plays) established him in the public eye, while his fostering of popular theatre gave him a left-wing reputation which contributed to his death (although his homosexuality also made him a target). His reputation as a playwright rests, however, mainly on the three 'folk tragedies', whose settings recall the Romancero gitano, as do the unspecified dark forces (associated with earth, blood, sex, water, fertility/infertility, death, and the moon) which appear to manipulate the characters in Bodas de sangre and Yerma. Both these plays are richly poetic, with an almost ritualized primitivism (Lorca was highly superstitious, and his dark forces were not mere dramatic ploys). La casa de Bernarda Alba is starker: deliberately prosaic, more readily interpretable as social criticism (i.e. of the pressures of convention, the imprisoning effect of mourning customs, the frustration of female sexuality by the need to wait for an acceptable match), but it is so dominated by the title character - who tyrannizes her five daughters - that it emerges as the study of a unique individual rather than a typical woman. Each tragedy has one outstanding female role, those of Yerma and Bernarda having been written for the great tragic actress Margarita Xirgu. Lorca's technical experimentation (which has affinities with innovators as dissimilar as PIRANDELLO and BRECHT) was immensely versatile, and he had a superb sense for stage-effects to reinforce the web of his recurrent imagery.
Notes: +
Information available in Spanish; click "Español" in the upper right hand side of the page.
Written texts: +
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El retablillo de Don Cristóbal
Author / Playwright -
Los títeres de cachiporra
Author / Playwright -
Bodas de sangre
Author / Playwright -
Doña Rosita, la soltera
Author / Playwright
1935 -
La casa de Bernarda Alba
Author / Playwright -
La zapatera prodigiosa
Author / Playwright
1930 -
Así que pasen cinco años
Author / Playwright -
Quimera
Author / Playwright -
Los amores de don Perlimplín
Author / Playwright -
El paseo de Buster Keaton
Author / Playwright -
Yerma
Author / Playwright
1934 -
El amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín
Author / Playwright -
El público
Author / Playwright -
Federico
Author / Playwright -
Lorca en el diván
Author / Playwright -
El maleficio de la mariposa
Author / Playwright -
Romance Sonámbulo
Author / Playwright -
La doncella, el marinero, y el estudiante
Author / Playwright -
Poemas y prosas juveniles
Author / Playwright -
La niña que riega la albahaca y el príncipe preguntón
Author / Playwright -
La Tarumba
Author / Playwright -
Granada/ La Vida Breve
Author / Playwright -
Lola la comedianta
Dramaturge -
Doña Rosita la soltera
Author / Playwright
Productions: +
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Bodas de sangre
Original score
Sala Teatro Hubert de Blanck
1981 -
Bodas de sangre
Original score
Sala Teatro Hubert de Blanck
November 23, 1979 -
El irrepresentable paseo de Buster Keaton
Dramaturg
Teatro Academia Vicentina de la Torre
October 4, 2016 - October 5, 2016
Bibliography: +
Secondary: +
- Homenaje a Berta
- Raw, Primal Emotion Fuels "House" Tragedy
- Keeping it in the Family
- Lorca's Classic Still Lingers in Cruz's Updated House
- Teatro del Viento regresa al camino
- Mirar atrás desde el XXI
- A Mix of Emotions
- Una isla llamada Cuba, una isla llamada Federico
- Migdalia Cruz Takes New Look at Lorca's House
- Another Part of the House
- House and Home
- El tercer festival de teatro hispano
- Un Garcia Lorca desapasionado
- Hispanic Theater Discovers Strength in Ethnic Diversity
- A Theatrical Haven for Spanish Art
- Theater: Lorca's 'Alba'
- Stage: 'Yerma' Now Playing in English
Author: Norma Ford (2010)