Ms. Ensler wants to soften the ever-fraught relationship between American women and their bodies, to expose the destructive formulas that lead them to assuage their insecurities by punishing their flesh...rich in pointed, amusing details...forthrightly funny [Marnich] has an ear for warm, natural dialogue that eschews snarky quips and truisms...the play's linguistic honesty satisfies. --Time Out NY. ...has a humanistic glow...clockwork precision...an initially comic and ultimately tragic look at how individual wome
In Doña Rosita the Spinster, set in Granada around 1900, Lorca paints a sympathetic picture of a young girl as she waits in vain for her fiancé to return and her hopes of marriage fade. The fate of Rosita, symbolised by the rosa mutabile, which pales from red to pink to white in the course of a day, appears the more poignant as Lorca casts a satirical eye at the middle-class society of Granada by which she is surrounded. First performed in 1935, Doña Rosita was greeted as one of Lorca's finest achievements and it remains a classic work of Spanish theatre alongside Lorca's Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba and Yerma. This Student Edition features parallel English and Spanish texts of the play, together with a full commentary, questions and a bibliography. 'Doña Rosita is the most accessible and personal of all his plays - a wistful tragic-comedy of unfulfilled love' Guardian
In his four last plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, Dona Rosita the Spinster) Federico Garc ́ia Lorca offered his disturbed and disturbing personal vision to Spanish audiences of the 1930s---unready, as he thought them, for the sexual frankness and surreal expression of his more experimental work. The authentic sense of danger of Lorca's theatre is finely conveyed here in John Edmunds's fluent and rhythmic new translations that lend themselves admirably to performance.
Lorca wrote more than a dozen plays, of which these later four, created in the 1930's, are the best known and most popular. Written to support the 'theatre of social action', while travelling with a touring company through rural Spain, the plays employ simple but poetic language, strong passionate speech, and intense moments of action or emotion, to convey the claustrophobic life of the people. Lorca wrote: 'Theatre is a school of tears and laughter, a forum for liberty, where people can question obsolete or erroneous social norms, and explain through living characters the eternal modes of the human heart.' While exploring the stifling aspects of contemporary life for both the rural poor and the isolated individual, his plays also challenged the conventional roles of women in society, and allowed him to express, indirectly, his frustrations with attitudes to sexuality and homo-eroticism which affected him personally, and may have contributed to his subsequent persecution within Spain and his death.
Spain in the twentieth century gave birth to an array of astounding artistic and literary talent, including the passionately iconoclastic writer Federico Garcia Lorca. But his works were ill received in the homophobic atmosphere of institutionalized Spanish criticism. Because of this atmosphere, even today's critics have effectively marginalized and disavowed intimations of homo-affectivity and homoeroticism in the great Spanish works. This book first appeared in Spain in 1991 as counter-discourse against those prevailing ideological structures. Before its appearance, no significant work had focused on the position of Spanish culture towards homosexuality or on how homosexuality could affect the works of canonical writers. Engaging with homosexuality as an imperative source of meaning in artistic work, this volume rigorously studies the works of Federico Garcia Lorca and several of his marginalized homosexual contemporaries, including Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Juan Gil-Albert, and Salvador Dali. The study relies on the textual evidence presented by these authors to define the homosexual culture as one plagued by the realities of rejection, fear of the law, self-doubts, the lack of an authorized language with which to convey emotions, the awareness of disgust around the individual, the need to accept marginality to find sexual or emotional satisfaction, and the knowledge of one's own social divergence, all of which have an enormous influence on any artist's work. With this new and updated translation, this work offers English-speaking readers the opportunity to focus on formal aspects of literary expressions of homosexuality.
"Lorca is one of the few indisputably great dramatists of the twentieth century" Observer Mariana Pineda achieved immediate critical success on its first performance in Barcelona in 1927. The Public is a powerful and uncompromising demand for sexual, and specifically homosexual, freedom - as predicted it was never performed in Lorca's time - it was first performed in this country by Theatre Royal Stratford East in the 80s. Play Without a Title, an unfinished Lorca rarity, realises his wish 'to do something different, including modern plays on the age we live in'.
Lorca, Bunuel and Dali were, in their respective fields of poetry and theatre, cinema, and painting, three of the most imaginative creative artists of the twentieth century; their impact was felt far beyond the boundaries of their native Spain. But if individually they have been examined by many, their connected lives have rarely been considered. It is these, the ties that bind them, that constitute the subject of this illuminating book. They were born within six years of each other and, as Gwynne Edwards reveals, their childhood circumstances were very similar. Each was affected by a narrow-minded society and an intolerant religious background which equated sex with sin and led all three to experience sexual problems of different kinds: Lorca the guilt and anguish associated with his homosexuality; Bunuel feelings of sexual inhibition; and, Dali virtual impotence. Having met during the 1920s at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, they developed intense personal relationships and channelled their respective obsessions into the cultural forms then prevalent in Europe, in particular Surrealism. Rooted in emotional turmoil, their work - from Lorca's dramatic characters in search of sexual fulfilment, to Bunuel's frustrated men and women, and Dali's potent images of shame and guilt - is highly autobiographical. Their left-wing outrage directed at bourgeois values and the Catholic Church was strongly felt, and in the case of Lorca in particular, was sharpened by the catastrophic Civil War of 1936-9, during the first months of which he was murdered by Franco's fascists. The war hastened Bunuel's departure to France and Mexico and Dali's to New York. Edwards describes how, for the rest of his life, Bunuel clung to his left-wing ideals and made outstanding films, while the increasingly eccentric and money-obsessed Dali embraced Fascism and the Catholic Church, and saw his art go into rapid decline.
Blood Wedding is set in a village community in Lorca's Andalusia, and tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage. This tragic and poetic play is the work on which his international reputation was founded. Like many of Lorca's passionate and intensely lyrical plays that focus on peasant life and the forces of nature, Blood Wedding combines innovatory dramatic technique with Spanish popular tradition. Methuen Drama Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. As well as the complete text of the play itself, the volume contains a chronology of the playwright's life and work; an introduction giving the background to the play; a discussion of the various interpretations; notes on individual words and phrases in the text; and questions for further study.
Yerma (meaning 'Barren') is one of three tragic plays about peasants and rural life that make up Lorca's 'rural trilogy'. It is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. The woman's barrenness becomes a metaphor for her marriage in a traditional society that denies women sexual or social equality. Her desperate desire for a child drives her to commit a terrible crime at the end of the play.
Bernarda Alba is a widow, and her five daughters are incarcerated in mourning along with her. One by one they make a bid for freedom, with tragic consequences. Lorca's tale depicts the repression of women within Catholic Spain in the years before the war. The House of Bernarda Alba is Lorca's last and possibly finest play, completed shortly before he was murdered by Nationalist sympathisers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Inspired by real characters and described by the author as 'a true record of village life', it is a tragic tale of frustration and explosive passions in a household of women rulled by a tyrannical mother. Edited with invaluable student notes - a must for students of Spanish drama
