¡Dignidad! is Repertorio Español’s arts-in-education program that helps students understand and appreciate theatre.
|
Through our Mentorship Program, Repertorio also believes that students can be introduced to careers in the arts such as acting, playwrights, designers, technicians, and administrators.
|
|
|
Garcia Lorca - The House of Bernarda Alba & Bodas de Sangre |
|
| bajar la guía entera >> |
|
Federico García Lorca
Lorca's major plays -- Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, as well as Mariana Pineda, The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife, and Doña Rosita the Spinster -- are among the most woman-centered plays in dramatic history.
In these plays, the pivotal characters are women. Women are the ones who suffer from desire and pass through conflict to tragic or comic resolution. Most of the scenes take place in women's spaces, the domestic interiors which they rule and from which men are estranged (or, as in The House of Bernarda Alba, completely prohibited).
The female characters reveal themselves most easily and deeply in conversations with other women. The poetry which erupts at moments of emotional intensity usually comes from the mouths of female characters. Especially in the three great tragedies which are known as his "trilogy of rural life," Lorca chooses women to exemplify the human life which is crushed by Spanish customs and social life.
In Blood Wedding, Lorca's story oscillates between the two magnetic poles of the Mother and the Bride. The Mother has internalized the mores and constrictions of her harsh, rural world. She is strict about money and marriage and contemptuous of feelings. She is deeply conservative about gender roles (men belong in the fields, women belong in the house), about the importance of procreation ("Your grandfather left a son on every corner"), and about relations between the sexes ("I looked at nobody-I looked at your father, and when they killed him I looked at the wall in front of me"). So there is no surprise when the Mother defines marriage for the Bride: "A man, some children, and a wall two yards thick for everything else."
Small wonder that the Bride rebels against this confining society, which stifles her voice as well as her sexuality. After the formal interview with her novio and his mother, she suddenly bites her hand and cries "Ay-y-y!" in inexpressible rage and desire. Clearly she desires Leonardo, but why? Does her need spring from love or lust or the frustration of a life with no choices and no control? In the moments surrounding the wedding, she shuns physical contact and struggles to deny her thwarted passion. Only after she has run away with Leonardo-while alone in the forest with her lover and then grieving with the bereaved Mother-can she unleash torrents of poetry, harsh and vivid images of her love and liberation and eventual tragedy.
A very similar pattern rules the all-feminine landscape of The House of Bernarda Alba. Bernarda is like the Mother in the sense that she embodies the harsh, restrictive social codes that repress women. Her law for the sexes is "Needle and thread for women. Whiplash and mules for men." She too is concerned with maintaining class distinctions, with amassing money, and with putting up "a good front" of "family harmony" no matter how miserable her daughters may be. And she is fiercely strong-as Poncia says, "perfectly capable of sitting on your heart and watching you die for a whole year without turning off that cold little smile." In opposition to her are her daughters with their silenced lusts. Are they "bad" as the servant says? "They're women without men, that's all," answers Poncia. "And in such matters even blood is forgotten." No one else could have slammed the door more irrevocably on her children, kept them more confined, than Bernarda herself.
Some contemporary feminists have difficulty sympathizing with the title character of Yerma since her rebellion and her tragedy come from an intense desire to bear children, which her husband Juan denies her. But Yerma's soul is bound and gagged by Juan, his sisters, her neighbors, and the social expectation that she be quiet and dutiful. Like the Mother and Bernarda, Juan is convinced that nature's way is "sheep in the fold and women at home." However, as Yerma responds, "men get other things out of life: their cattle, trees, conversations," whereas "women have only their children and the care of their children." She can imagine no other purpose for a woman's life, and for it she must depend only on her husband. Juan's indifference leads her to sweep aside her own sense of honor, to smash social conventions, and to turn herself into an outlaw.
What are contemporary readers to make of this male author and his female subjects? Is his use of these figures a true gesture of liberation or simply more sexism in a humanist disguise? Lorca had no interest in feminism per se and clearly did not portray his Spanish women with reference to a specific social or political program. Instead, like Ibsen, Chekhov, and Benavente before him, he used women as human beings and analyzed their problems as representative of broader human dilemmas. But at the same time, his heroines are distinctively modern women. Unlike Golden Age heroines, his women's difficulties are not primarily designed to push along a plot of intrigue or coquetry. They can be strident and forceful. The very heart of their drama is their struggle to gain control over their lives, and the fact that all but one of his leading women fail is a criticism of the society which makes tragedy out of such a struggle.
As a homosexual, Lorca had a special sympathy for oppressed, powerless groups and individuals, especially women. An English critic, Paul Binding, puts the case this way in his insightful book, Lorca: The Gay Imagination (1985): The homosexual writer, with singular qualification, can view women as autonomous beings; freed from the endowments of desire or acquisition, they can stand before him in all their complexity and their tragedy. Tragedy -- because he, more than his heterosexual fellows perhaps, can understand just what cost to their psychic life their enforced surrender to convention so frequently entails. Just as the gay man has had to put up with expectations from those around him that he has neither inclination nor ability to fulfill, so women, especially in traditional societies, have had to acquiesce to criteria of judgment -- founded on others' convenience -- which may find them wanting and which, in their inmost beings, they resent and despise.
Especially in the last decade, students of Lorca have come to understand Lorca's homosexuality in greater detail and depth. If he experienced tension about acknowledging his sexual nature, either to himself or to the world, he managed to keep that tension below the surface of his early poetry. But he wrote and then suppressed a number of poems about homosexuality in the 1920s. Several commentators have concluded that Lorca's crisis of soul during 1928, which sent him off to New York City, was in large part a crisis of sexuality. Part of its cure, as embodied in the Freudian, confessional odes of The Poet in New York, was a greater frankness about his emotional and sexual nature. At last in the 1930s, with his play The Public and the long-suppressed Sonnets of the Dark Love, Lorca experienced a creative "coming out" that astonished the friends to whom he read these late works.
But if we now have a fuller picture of Lorca's emotional nature, do we know how he came to make women so central to his work and to absorb their desires and natures? Are gay or lesbian artists different from heterosexuals with equally powerful visions? How do homosexual artists of either sex understand the other gender? Literary critics are only beginning to understand these and equally basic questions about our sexuality and creativity.
Current theorizing on these questions is in its infancy and may never yield us any useful generalizations. Human hearts and brains may work like precision instruments, but who can write the owner's manual for the human imagination?
|
|
| bajar la guía entera >> |
|
|
|
We Thank Our Sponsor
¿Quiere asegurar que una producción es apropiada para su clase? Usted y
un invitado pueden ver una de nuestras obras gratis con "Teacher Tryout Tickets."
Por favor llame al 212.889.2850 para la selección de obras disponibles.
¡Reserve boletos para grupos de estudiantes!
|
|
