Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  With this play, Lorca called for nothing less than the abolition of the theater as he knew it—the “open air theater” of lies and appearances. In its place he proposes a revolutionary new “theater beneath the sand,” a theater capable of unmasking society’s most repellant truths. Heeding the example of authors he had admired since childhood—Goethe, Shakespeare, Calderón—he envisions the theater as a metaphor for the world. In doing so, his appeal for theatrical truth becomes a broader cry for human truth.

  The Audience opens with a straightforward premise: a theater company has decided to stage an experimental production of Romeo and Juliet, in which the two protagonists are to be played, respectively, by a man of thirty and a boy of fifteen, who in “real life” are genuinely in love. From this simple foundation Lorca constructs a maze of images and actions through which the play’s characters are led to investigate the nature of desire, and in particular homosexual desire. The play’s two protagonists, Enrique and Gonzalo, occupy the work’s moral center. Although their appearances and even identities shift throughout the drama, they remain essentially the same two men.

  Alone among a cast of role-playing cowards, Gonzalo speaks the truth. He is virile and brave, a Whitmanesque homosexual who boasts of being “more of a man than Adam.” Publicly Gonzalo declares his passion for Enrique and demands that they display their love onstage, thereby inaugurating the “true theater, the theater beneath the sand.” But Enrique, whose several guises include that of a stage director, resists him. Timid and duplicitous, he denies any attachment to Gonzalo and announces that his theater “will always be in the open air!” To prove his heterosexual vigor, Enrique calls out for Helen—the quintessential woman of ancient mythology, Faust’s feminine ideal. “She loved me greatly when my theater was in the open air,” he insists.

  Intent on exposing Enrique’s hypocrisy, Gonzalo retaliates. “I’ve got to put you on the stage whether you like it or not. You’ve made me suffer too much.” He calls for a folding screen to be brought out. The play’s most commanding image, the screen, functions throughout the drama as a kind of lie detector; no one can pass behind it without having the truth about himself revealed. When Enrique is pushed behind the screen, he emerges as a young boy dressed in a white satin outfit with a white ruff. According to Lorca’s stage direction, the boy should be played by an actress. Others who cross behind the screen—men who have attempted to hide their true sexuality—metamorphose into effeminate pederasts carrying lorgnettes and whips. Only the Director’s manservant, the one true heterosexual in the play, remains unchanged by the device.

  That Lorca admired Gonzalo, and yearned to undertake his same crusade for the truth, is plain. From one scene to the next, one identity to another, Gonzalo challenges Enrique to bare the truth—much as Lorca sought, in part through this play, to confront disingenuous men such as Emilio Aladrén. Gonzalo vows to struggle “with the mask” until he succeeds in seeing Enrique naked. “I love you in front of the others because I abhor the mask, and because now I’ve succeeded in ripping it off you,” he says. But conventional society will not tolerate truthsayers like Gonzalo. Ultimately he is crucified for his deeds. Suspended nude on an upright bed, with a crown of blue thorns on his head, he is attended by a sadistic male nurse who periodically extracts blood from his moribund body.

  Never again would Lorca bare the truth about himself so explicitly. The language of The Audience is blunt and often scatalogical. There is a frank discussion of the anus; the character of Juliet is costumed so that her “pink celluloid breasts” are exposed. The world of the play, like that of the New York poems, is harsh, cold, menacing. In one of Lorca’s more startling moments, several horses break into Juliet’s tomb, order her to strip, then proceed to lash her naked buttocks with their tails, and to “urinate” on her by releasing jets of water from the black lacquer canes they carry. “Now we’ve inaugurated the true theater. The theater beneath the sand,” one of them proclaims.

  Lorca’s aim was not merely to shock but to reveal the unpleasant truth about human existence, to transcend the bounds of social convention by showing how much of life takes place behind masks. “In the bedroom, when we stick our fingers in our noses, or delicately explore our rear,” the Director observes, “the plaster of the mask pushes down so heavily on our flesh that we can scarcely lie down on the bed.” Toward the end of this dizzying play-within-a-play, the audience attending the Director’s experimental production of Romeo and Juliet riots upon discovering that the two protagonists are actually men. They murder the actors, seek to kill both the author and the Director, and in a sequence reminiscent of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, a group of bourgeois ladies stumbles about the darkened theater, madly hunting for an exit to reality.

  Several students in the audience defend the unorthodox production. “In the final analysis,” one asks, “do Romeo and Juliet necessarily have to be a man and a woman for the tomb scene to come off in a heartrending and lifelike way?”

  “No,” says another. “It’s not necessary, and that’s what the Stage Director set out so brilliantly to demonstrate.”

  Lorca maintained that The Audience was impossible to stage. And yet the following year, when an actress named Irene López Heredia expressed interest in producing the play, he triumphantly told his parents that if a production of The Audience were to take place, it “would be sensational and one of the greatest literary battles of its time.” For the moment, at least, he seemed open to parental knowledge of the work, although there is no further indication that Lorca’s parents read the play. López Heredia eventually rejected the idea of a production, as did Cipriano Rivas Cherif, the man who had boldly premiered his own drama about homosexual love in 1928, and who had tried to produce Lorca’s Don Perlimplín in early 1929. Apparently even Rivas Cherif lacked either the courage or the means to take on The Audience.

  Much as he cherished his play, Lorca knew the danger it posed. In 1933 he told a journalist he had no intention of producing The Audience. “I don’t think any company would dare to present it onstage, and no audience would tolerate it without becoming indignant,” he said. “Because it’s a mirror image of the audience. Onstage it displays the private dramas that are going on inside each and every spectator as he watches the performance. And since people’s private dramas are often quite bitter and generally dishonorable, the spectators would immediately rise up and demand that the performance be stopped.”

  He repeatedly called the play “a poem to be hissed.” Nevertheless, he openly discussed the work with reporters, and in 1933 published two scenes from The Audience in a Spanish literary journal. Among friends and acquaintances he continued to read the play. One spring afternoon he invited several friends to join him in his Madrid apartment to hear the work. It was hot, and, according to at least one of the four men who attended the reading, Lorca insisted on taking off his clothes. Naked, he proceeded to read his play.

  By the time Lorca returned to Madrid in October 1930, Margarita Xirgu and her theater company had opened a new season at the Teatro Español, one of the oldest and most important theaters in the capital. Ever since her production of Mariana Pineda three years earlier, the statuesque Catalan actress had hoped to premiere another Lorca work. For some time, she had had her eye on The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, the lively two-act farce Lorca first began writing in 1924 and finished revising in 1929 during his stay in New York.

  Lorca was untroubled by the seeming discrepancy between a light-hearted work such as The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and the radical new theater he was trying to achieve with The Audience. He regarded both plays as cures for the ailing Spanish stage—the first, because it embraced the country’s vital popular tradition, and the second, because it shattered nearly every convention of the bourgeois theater. But Lorca was shrewd enough to realize that if he intended to succeed on the stage, let alone make money, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife was the play to produce. Besides, Xirgu clearly preferred it to the e
xperimental work.

  In early December, Lorca read the farce to the actress and her company. Delighted by the work, Xirgu announced to the press that she intended to produce a “chamber” version of the play within the next few weeks. Rehearsals began at once under the direction of her close friend and literary adviser, Cipriano Rivas Cherif. Lorca agreed to design The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and to assist Rivas Cherif with its staging. As a director, Lorca proved resourceful. He brought to the task a painter’s sense of composition and a musician’s understanding of timing. Rhythm—the tempo of the performance—was crucial. “An actor can’t be one second late on an entrance,” he stated. Xirgu learned to trust him implicitly. She reportedly told Vicenta Lorca, “If Federico wants us to roll on the floor, we’ll do it.”

  They planned to open the play on Christmas Eve. In the meantime, the Society of Courses and Lectures in Madrid announced that it intended to premiere Lorca’s puppet play, The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal, early the following year. The writer and columnist Ramón Gómez de la Serna published a glowing analysis of the play in El Sol, and praised Lorca as a “miraculous poet.” “As you can see,” Lorca informed his parents, “I’ve become a fashionable little boy after my useful and advantageous trip to America.”

  He was also in demand on the lecture circuit. In early December he made a quick trip north to give a pair of talks in the coastal cities of San Sebastián and Gijón. In San Sebastián he delivered his lecture on deep song. The local press hailed his gifts “as both a poet and a scholar.” While in the Basque resort, Lorca met up with Emilio Aladrén, in what was apparently their first encounter in more than a year. Penniless but dapper, Aladrén evidently charmed Lorca into paying his way “for everything” during their short time together. One observer who saw the two men in San Sebastián remembered Lorca’s plump legs and flat-footed gait, in contrast to the tall, slender Aladrén, who though disheveled wore an elegant raincoat.

  Earlier in the year Aladrén had sent Lorca an effusive note welcoming him home from America: “Emilio Aladrén Perojo K.[isses] T.[he] H.[and] of Federico García Lorca, is delighted to hear of his return to Spain, and takes this opportunity to tell him that he cannot imagine how pleased he would be to receive word of him.” It is not known whether Lorca responded to the invitation, but he saved Aladrén’s note. Less than a year after his reunion with Lorca in San Sebastián, Aladrén married an Englishwoman.

  Lorca repeated his lecture on deep song in Gijón on December 14. But the event went unreported, as recent political events had abruptly shut down the press. Two days earlier, on December 12, a band of pro-republican army officers in Jaca, a tiny garrison town in the Spanish Pyrenees, had attempted a coup d’état. Loyalist troops immediately quashed the uprising and arrested its two chief conspirators, Captains Fermín Galán Rodríguez and Angel García Hernández. On December 14, the day of Lorca’s talk, the two men were executed. The following day, republican sympathizers staged demonstrations across the country, and Spanish workers declared a general strike. The government quickly took control of the situation and jailed Spain’s six principal republican leaders—among them Lorca’s friend Fernando de los Ríos.

  Despite the failure of the December rising, the republican cause flourished. Citizens throughout Spain condemned the government for its savage response to the attempted coup, and Fermín Galán Rodríguez and Angel García Hernández became martyrs. From prison, de los Ríos and his fellow republican leaders resumed their struggle for a democratically elected Spanish government. In Madrid, clandestine pamphlets and pro-republican broadsheets began to circulate. According to poet Pedro Salinas, the atmosphere in the capital became “absolutely pre-revolutionary.”

  Lorca remained detached from the situation. Although he worried about de los Ríos, as did the rest of the Lorca family, he was preoccupied with the impending premiere of his play at the Teatro Español. On the evening of December 24, 1930, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife opened as scheduled. Due to the Christmas holiday, nearly every other commercial theater in the city was dark that night, a fact that only reinforced the unconventional nature of the performance at the Español. Vicenta Lorca wrote from Granada to say she hoped the production would be a success, for that alone would “compensate” for the play’s having disrupted a family holiday.

  Lorca was mildly apprehensive about the play. In an interview published that morning, he took pains to distinguish between The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and what he called his “real work. My real work is yet to come,” he told a reporter. “… Do you know what I call it? The Audience. That’s the one … that’s the one … Profound drama, very profound.”

  As he sat in the plush interior of the Teatro Español on Christmas Eve and watched his brother’s play unfold, Paco García Lorca recalled the puppet show Federico had staged eight years earlier in the family’s living room in Granada. Then, as now, Lorca had exercised control over nearly every aspect of the production. In addition to writing the script and assisting Rivas Cherif with its direction, Lorca had transcribed songs and music for The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, designed the play’s brightly colored costumes and sets, and on opening night even performed the work’s prologue. He did so, he said, in order to “share the anxiety of opening night as both author and actor.” Dressed-—like the allegorical author who opens Calderón’s Grand Theater of the World—in a top hat and a huge cape sprinkled with stars, Lorca took to the stage of the Español and bluntly commanded his audience to pay attention and his actors to be quiet. Watching his brother, Paco was reminded of the Federico who had crouched behind a handmade puppet stage in the family’s living room in 1923, and in the role of the irascible Don Cristóbal had badgered and bantered with his audience until gales of high-pitched laughter filled the room.

  When he first began writing The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in 1924, Lorca had envisioned the play as a bawdy, fast-paced puppet farce. Later versions of the work, though obviously intended for human actors, retained elements of the puppet theater. Critics who reviewed Xirgu’s 1930 production commented on the toylike quality of its costumes, sets, and characters. The production itself, some said, resembled a carnival. Lorca described his farce as “violent” and “vulgar,” and drew attention to its popular roots. In at least one stage direction to the 1930 script, he demanded that an actor speak “in an exaggerated way” and move his head “like a wire puppet.”

  An amalgam of styles, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife blends the ferocity of the puppet stage with the antics of Roman comedy and Italian commedia dell’arte and the humanity of Spanish Golden Age drama. Its title deliberately recalls Calderón’s The Prodigious Magician, whose protagonist, like Lorca’s Shoemaker’s Wife, performs “prodigious” deeds. But the play’s most palpable Golden Age source is Cervantes. Thematically Lorca’s farce draws on the stock situation of a young woman married to an old man, a motif Cervantes often employed. Stylistically the work shares the wit, speed, and comic excess of a Cervantes interlude or entremés, a one-act farcical skit with deep roots in the Spanish tradition, of which Cervantes was an acknowledged master.

  The text of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife is only a small part of its overall conception. Equally important are the color and pattern of its sets and costumes, the rhythm of its music and dance. Through his emphasis on spectacle, Lorca was able to stress the links between his play and other, less sophisticated forms of entertainment, such as the circus, cabaret, vaudeville, and the sainete, a type of lyrical, one-act sketch especially popular in eighteenth-century Spain. He viewed the farce as another episode in his ongoing struggle to combat the stale realism of the contemporary Spanish stage by restoring the theater to its popular origins.

  Laden with traditional Andalusian idioms, songs, and superstitions, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife is the most thoroughly popular of Lorca’s plays. He began writing it in 1924, at the height of his friendship with Manuel de Falla, whose comic operas spring directly from the popular tradition. Like F
alla, Lorca was an inveterate collector of village sayings and songs. Whenever he heard a striking utterance he almost always repeated it to friends, and eventually incorporated it into his work. For The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, he derived whole passages of dialogue from the conversational idiosyncrasies of a friend’s maid. “Ask a duchess to tell you the names of the lovers of Teruel,” he said once, referring to a popular Spanish folktale, “and she won’t know. But the cook, the cook, yes! And she’ll know hundreds of lines by heart from El Cid and Zorrilla’s Don Juan.”

  Lorca subtitled his play “A Violent Farce in Two Acts and A Prologue.” The word “violent,” he said, denotes the nature of the protagonist’s fight against reality—a fight that by implication Lorca shared. Elsewhere he described his play as “a simple farce, with a pure classical tone.” In his choice of genre, Lorca was acknowledging both historical precedent and contemporary taste, for by the mid-1920s, a number of writers, most notably the playwrights Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Jacinto Grau, both of whom Lorca knew personally, were experimenting with comedy as an antidote to the realism and sentimentality of mainstream Spanish literature.

  The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife is one of Lorca’s few comedies, and the only one of his plays not to end in the death, real or metaphorical, of a leading character. Lorca himself said that although he could have channeled the play’s “dramatic material” into a more serious form, he preferred to handle it “in a fresh, joyful way, leaving other possible treatments for later.” But while The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife follows the traditional plot line of farce and embraces many of the genre’s conventions, it is more deeply and subtly drawn. The play’s two protagonists, although based on stock comic characters, possess a poignant humanity, and their story, also drawn from comic convention, is enriched by Lorca’s complex poetic vision.