Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  The extent to which Yerma reflects Lorca’s own yearning for a child is a matter of speculation—as it was among his friends at the time of Yerma’s premiere. He had grown up in a pair of villages like the one Yerma inhabits. He knew the attitudes that governed village life. He knew that as the oldest son of a wealthy Andalusian landowner he was expected to engender offspring to perpetuate his family’s name. That he loved children was clear. He lavished attention on his nieces and nephew. When his oldest niece, Tica, fell gravely ill, he spent hours sitting with the girl in her bedroom, singing songs and trying to make her laugh. Children—lost, unborn, drowned, longed for—permeate Lorca’s work, nowhere more poignantly than in Yerma. At the play’s opening in December of 1934, his close friend Encarnación López, who had known him for fifteen years, remarked, “The work is Federico’s own tragedy. What he’d like most in this world is to get pregnant and give birth … It’s what he truly longs for: to be pregnant, to give birth to a little boy or little girl … Yerma is Federico, the tragedy of Federico.”

  Two weeks before opening night, Lorca gave an interview in which he talked about Yerma, his work in general, and his desire to write socially relevant plays. “I want to take topics and problems that people are afraid of confronting and put them onstage,” he said. He declared his allegiance to the poor and disenfranchised, to the working classes. “In this world I am, and will always remain, on the side of the poor. I will always be on the side of those who have nothing, those to whom even the peace of having nothing is denied. We—and I’m referring to those of us who matter intellectually, who were educated in well-off, middle-class surroundings—have been called to the sacrifice. We must accept it.” In the wake of the Asturian rebellion, some construed his remarks—which appeared in the December 15 edition of El Sol and a week later in the Defensor de Granada—as inflammatory.

  By opening night, December 29, 1934, it was widely rumored that members of the far Right planned to disrupt the premiere of Yerma. The play’s opponents had two aims: to protest against Lorca and to denounce his leading actress, Margarita Xirgu, whose friendship with the republican leader and sometime playwright Manuel Azaña was widely known. After Azaña’s release from prison on December 28, Xirgu had offered him asylum in her home near Barcelona—a gesture the right wing could not tolerate. Xirgu later defended her actions by pointing out that Azaña was married to one of her closest friends, the sister of the stage director Cipriano Rivas Cherif. She rejected charges that by siding with Azaña and by producing his plays, she was creating political theater: “The only thing I cared about was continuing my work as an actress.”

  Tickets for opening night sold out almost the moment the box office at the Teatro Español opened to the public. Lorca feared that his adversaries—right-wing extremists who opposed his liberal views and unconventional lifestyle and who envied his fame—had bought out the house in order to humiliate him by deliberately refusing to fill the seats. As curtain time approached on the night of the twenty-ninth he stood backstage, dressed in a black tuxedo, and asked José Caballero if anyone was in the audience. “Nobody’s going to come,” he muttered.

  “The theater is full,” Caballero told him.

  “That doesn’t mean anything!” Lorca snapped.

  Carlos Morla Lynch arrived at the Español to find scalpers doing a brisk trade outside the massive stone building, and a line of taxis and automobiles depositing theatergoers at the doors. Inside, the auditorium was packed. Many of the city’s intelligentsia were present, including Miguel de Unamuno, who had so admired the play at its dress rehearsal that he chose to see it a second time. Lorca waited backstage, wringing his hands and trying to smile. At one point he quipped to Caballero, “If it doesn’t go well and things don’t turn out the way they should, it’s your fault.”

  At approximately ten o’clock the curtain rose on artist Manuel Fontanals’s stylized rendering of a hillside Andalusian village with tall white houses under a brilliant blue sky. Xirgu, as Yerma, sat motionless, her eyes closed, on a stool in front of one of the houses. Offstage, a voice began to sing a lullaby. Then, from one of the theater’s upper balconies, several members of the Spanish Falange began to hiss. Shouts followed. For a moment, Xirgu had to suspend her performance. But she remained serene. Audience members cried out for silence. Backstage, Lorca could hear shouts of protest and the sound of stomping feet.

  The episode did not last long. The protesters were quickly evicted, and the play went on without incident. The audience doubled its applause during the work’s two choral scenes, and as the final curtain fell on Yerma’s desperate cry—“I have killed my child!”—the crowd burst into a long and tumultuous ovation. People from the upper seats streamed into the orchestra section. Overcome by emotion, Lorca made his way onto the stage. When Xirgu broke down and hid her face in her hands, Lorca put his arm around her and motioned to the crowd to applaud the actress. As the curtain fell for the final time, he kissed Xirgu’s hands, one after the other, and said, “Your hand took me to the stage for the first time … You gave me your hand then, and you continue giving it to me now.”

  “Today I give it to you,” the actress replied. “When I’m old, you’ll give it to me. But until then, you’ll write me many plays.”

  Reviews were mixed. In general, right-wing newspapers attacked the play, while left-wing publications praised it. Adjectives used to describe the work ranged from “brilliant” and “irreverent” to “crude” and “immoral.” (Curiously, the official government censor had found nothing objectionable, “either morally or politically,” in the work.) The sheer volume of reviews was so great that Lorca’s family hired a clipping service to track the press coverage. Several critics commented on the unusual prevalence of young people and intellectuals among the opening night crowd—a phenomenon unique to playwrights like Lorca and Alberti, whose innovative work attracted audiences weary of the country’s more traditional theatrical fare. At least two reviewers suggested that it was only because of its youthful and “indiscriminate” audience that Yerma received such a warm ovation at its premiere. One right-wing critic called attention to the number of homosexuals present on opening night, and suggested that until the public prosecutor shut down the production, Yerma would continue to be a “shameful affront” both to the Spanish theater and to all “honorable and decent people.”

  Reviewers on both sides of the political spectrum remarked on the lack of a conventional plot in Yerma. Some felt this detracted from the play, while others regarded it as a surprising stylistic choice that heightened the work’s tension and theatricality. Many noted the drama’s highly poetic nature, and the familiar debate as to whether Lorca was a better poet than playwright resurfaced. A handful of critics concluded that with Yerma, Lorca had proven himself superior as a poet. La Nación charged that the subject of Yerma was not substantial enough to warrant a three-act play. Lorca “should have looked for problems that are more accessible and better suited to the stage, and should stay away from topics like this, which are virtually obstetrical in origin.” ABC lamented the work’s “slow and repetitive development,” and advised “Señor García Lorca” to eliminate the script’s many vulgarities, in accordance with the “laws of culture and elegance—if not other, more powerful laws.” El Debate contended that in his “hallucinatory desire for originality,” Lorca had followed “paths of extravagance.” The paper called Yerma a “miserable production” filled with “blasphemies.”

  Others heralded the play’s novelty. In his review for the democratic El Pueblo, Ceferino Avecilla declared that with Yerma, Spain had at last joined the mainstream of contemporary European theater. Avecilla hailed the work’s “revolutionary theatricality” and defended the politics and artistry of its leading actress. The Madrid daily La Tierra termed Yerma the salvation of a theatrical season that had otherwise been dominated by tasteless bourgeois melodrama. In Alicante, the critic Isaac Pacheco proclaimed Yerma “the start of a revolution in the theater.”


  Drawn, in large part, by its provocative treatment of taboo subjects—sex, adultery, maternal instinct, murder—audiences flocked to the play. By mid-March, Yerma had exceeded a hundred consecutive performances—the first of Lorca’s plays to do so in Spain. It was his biggest domestic hit to date. But controversy continued to boil. Opponents of the work objected to Yerma for two primary reasons: Xirgu’s friendship with Manuel Azaña, and the play’s purported immorality, specifically its anti-Catholicism, as epitomized by the character of the old pagan woman. In early January, Gratia y Justicia published a snide account of the drama, noting its “many blasphemies, artistic and otherwise,” which “García’s friends applauded furiously.” The following day, in a front-page article for the Diario de Madrid, the critic Corpus Barga analyzed Yerma in social and political as well as artistic terms, suggesting that Lorca had posed “the deepest political problem—why is the Spanish woman as she is?” Barga criticized those who viewed the play as exclusively political, forgetting “that it is tragedy,” and that “all tragedy is politics.” Lorca’s play, he submitted, “is the tragedy of sexuality in Spain … Before the social revolution in Russia wasn’t there a sexual revolution?”

  By late January, word of the furor surrounding Yerma had reached France. To Lorca’s delight, a prominent Italian theater journal compared the uproar to that provoked by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at its premiere. Throughout the first months of 1935, Lorca followed the debate with interest. At home, he accumulated a stack of clippings and correspondence, including a letter from a woman who wrote to condemn his depiction of motherhood in the play. “May it please you to know, Señor Idiot, that there are many, many women who are so honorable and good that they have become mothers without once experiencing any sensual sensation with the male (vulgar husband),” she wrote.

  For the most part Lorca dismissed such attacks, yet he regretted the political overtones his play had acquired as a result of its contentious premiere. “As you know,” he told a friend on opening night, “I’m liberal and antifascist, but I don’t like extremists.” Although he supported Azaña, whom he saw with some frequency in Madrid, he was not on close terms with the man, as Xirgu was. His dealings with the republican leadership in general always occurred in either a social or theatrical context: encounters in Morla Lynch’s salon or in the Teatro Español, or appearances with La Barraca. Lorca repeatedly sought to distance himself and his art from political motives. When a reporter asked if some of the attitudes expressed in Yerma—in particular the protagonist’s insistence on honor—weren’t, in fact, “conservative” rather than “politically insurgent,” as many claimed, Lorca sidestepped both terms. “I’m a Christian,” he said. “My protagonist’s free will is limited … by the Spanish concept of honor.”

  In early 1935, the conservative Catholic daily El Siglo Futuro included Yerma on a list of spectacles that readers should refrain from seeing. The paper pronounced the drama crude, disrespectful, and overly sensual. Months later, officials in Granada banned the presentation of Yerma during the city’s 1935 Corpus Christi celebrations. They argued that the play’s moral content would be particularly offensive to the local population during a high Christian holiday.

  24

  Theater of Poets

  1935

  Emboldened by the public’s response to Yerma, Lorca announced shortly after the start of the new year that he was about to complete the third installment in his trilogy of Spanish tragedies. He described his new play, The Destruction of Sodom, as an “audacious” work with a “grave and compromising title.” “I think those who have liked my latest works will not be disappointed.” He had in fact drafted only fragments of the play; he never finished The Destruction of Sodom.

  To members of the press he talked about other projects: Doña Rosita the Spinster, a play into which he had poured his “greatest feelings”; his adaptation of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba, which Margarita Xirgu intended to produce in 1935. On his own he made a list of further plays he hoped to write: Chimera (“Hallucination”); The Flavor of Blood (“Drama of Desire”); The Fear of the Sea (“Drama of the Cantabrian Coast”); The Man and the Pony (“Andalusian Myth”); The Beautiful Woman (“Poem of the Desired Woman”); The Dark Stone (“Epéntico Drama”); House of Maternity; Flesh of the Cannon (“Anti-War Drama”); The Dark Corners (“Flamenco Work”); The Nuns of Granada (“Poetic Chronicle”). Of these, Lorca evidently began work on only two: Chimera and House of Maternity. He later claimed to have embarked on an additional drama, Blood Has No Voice, a work about incest, whose “crudeness and passionate violence” would make Yerma, by contrast, seem to possess “a language of archangels.”

  “I have no interest in being ancient or modern, only in being myself, in being natural,” he said of his work as a dramatist. “I know very well how to do semi-intellectual theater, but that’s not what counts. In our day, the poet must open his veins for the people. That’s why … I’ve devoted myself to the theater, because it permits a more direct contact with the masses.” His remarks appeared in the February 18, 1935, edition of La Voz, one of several Madrid newspapers then participating in a subscription drive to benefit children orphaned by the previous year’s Asturian revolt.

  In a subsequent interview, Lorca argued that the theater “must capture the drama of real life. An antiquated theater, nourished only by fantasy, is not theater.”

  The year 1935 marked the tricentennial of Lope de Vega’s death, an event widely celebrated by the Spanish theater community. Spain’s greatest, most prolific playwright, Lope was born in 1562, just seventeen months before Shakespeare, and died in August 1635. He wrote more than 1,500 plays during his career, nearly a third of which survive. Most are comedies rich in traditional Spanish folklore, song, and dance. Lope also wrote a handful of novels and thousands of poems, chiefly ballads, sonnets, and songs. He is widely considered the progenitor of a national Spanish theater. By drawing attention to Lope in his anniversary year, his twentieth-century heirs sought to establish a firm link between their own theatrical renaissance and the one Lope had engendered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. No intervening generation had approached Lope’s achievement. Common to both Lope and his twentieth-century proponents was a spirit of freedom and innovation sparked in part by tumultuous political change.

  Cervantes had called Lope a “Marvel of Nature.” Lorca spoke of him with veneration as “a man of national tradition” and praised his “theater of love, adventure, and grief.” He particularly admired, and sought to emulate, Lope’s method of integrating popular song—lullabies, serenades, threshing and wedding songs—into his plays, in such a way that these become not simply ornamental but vital to the action. Lorca saw himself as a spiritual and aesthetic heir to Lope, writing plays exalting Spain’s historical and cultural patrimony, and in the process participating in the creation of a second Spanish Golden Age.

  To help launch the country’s yearlong observation of Lope’s tricentennial, Lorca collaborated with Pura Ucelay, founder of the amateur Anfistora Club, on a production of Lope’s Peribáñez and the Knight Commander of Ocaña. The production opened on January 25, 1935, in Madrid’s Capitol Theater. Dozens of prominent Spanish critics and writers attended. In a speech to the opening-night audience, Lorca called for nothing less than “the whole climate of the Spanish theater arts” to change, for renewed contact to be made with the deepest traditions of the Spanish theater. He urged his listeners to restore Spain’s Golden Age authors—Lope de Vega, whose theater he described as “so very human”; Calderón; Tirso de Molina; Cervantes—to their rightful place, to rescue “our living, shining, immortal classical theater” from oblivion, to repair the “incredible estrangement” that marked the breach between contemporary Spaniards and “our most representative poets.”

  His own efforts at breaching the divide had led Lorca to help direct Peribáñez, a seventeenth-century play about a fifteenth-century figure, which he and Ucelay had chosen to perform in twentieth-century dress�
�a “necessary anachronism” if the production was to engage a contemporary audience. “A historic recreation of the period would get lost, without substance, in our hands,” Lorca argued. By costuming their cast in authentic peasant clothing from the Spanish countryside of 1935, he and Ucelay hoped to bring the atmosphere of Lope’s play “nobly and peacefully” to life. They had spent days scouring the province of Castile for both old clothes and old songs with which to “animate” their production. They had stopped at inns and asked to hear local songs, “the most ancient tunes, the ones the old folks know.” They had asked people to haul stored clothing from trunks. In order to procure one piece of attire, they had even fought with a priest. “How we had to plead in order to convince him!”

  Lorca did not mention that during his costume-finding expedition with Ucelay, he witnessed a scene so gruesome that it continued to prey on him long after its occurrence. While traveling one day through an area filled with evergreens and low hills, the car in which he and Ucelay were riding had broken down. As the automobile was being repaired, a herd of swine suddenly appeared and within minutes attacked a flock of lambs grazing nearby. By the time the assault ended the lambs were dead, and blood and trampled wool littered the landscape. Wild-eyed, Lorca drew his hand across his eyes, then took a piece of paper and scribbled a few lines of what appeared to be verse. Ucelay later asked to see what he had written, but Lorca claimed to have lost the paper. In writing the poem, Ucelay surmised, he had tried to free himself “from the horror” of the event.