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.

A study of the plays of García Lorca, the greatest Spanish dramatist of the twentieth century.

Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal) and the two ‘human’ farces The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba). Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Physical desire and metaphysical love in the theatre of Federico García Lorca. A dialectical tension between physical desire and metaphysical love lies at the heart of the theatre works of Federico García Lorca, and the deployment of queer theory's critique of gender and identity is surprisingly effective inthis discussion of love versus desire. Seldom is enough attention paid to the poet's early works, and so this book offers a timely review of the 'religious tragedy' Cristo, as well as Mariana Pineda, uncoveringin these early offerings an explicit proposal of the supremacy of love over desire. A meditation on the fragmentary and challenging El público yields a vivid panorama of identity in crisis, and a paradigmatic Lorcan sacrifice of self for love. The ostensibly more conventional tragedies of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín and Yerma are also reassessed in terms of self-sacrifice and self-love. The study concludes with an argument for a practical re-reading of La casa de Bernarda Alba, which emphasises how the play might be saved from po-faced realism with music, humour and drag performance. PAUL McDERMID lectures in Spanish at Queen's University Belfast.

Newly repackaged, three plays by Federico García Lorca In these three plays, Federico García Lorca's acknowledged masterpieces, he searched for a contemporary mode of tragedy and reminded his audience that dramatic poetry—or poetic drama—depends less on formal convention that on an elemental, radical outlook on human life. His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have created these versions expressly for the stage. The results, both performable and readable, have been thoroughly revised for this edition, which has an introduction by Christopher Maurer, the general editor of the Complete Poetical Works of García Lorca.

Two additional comedies, published here in book form in English for the first time, are The Billy-Club Puppets -- a guignol-type farce with delicate wit; and The Butterfly's Evil Spell, an "insect comedy" about a beetle-poet who aspires to be a butterfly.