If the allegory in Blood Wedding is at times excessive, as some of Lorca’s critics and friends charged, it is nonetheless striking. The play, in essence, is a long poem, in which passages of verse and prose combine to produce a lyrical portrait of Spain and its people. Lorca’s productions of Golden Age drama earlier in the year had reinforced his appreciation for the power of spectacle. To his brother, he described the Golden Age theater as a visual and musical “holiday” for the senses—an effect to which he clearly aspired in Blood Wedding. The bride’s home is rendered in “gray whites and cold blues,” while the bride herself wears a black wedding dress. The play’s final scene, a requiem for the dead, takes place in a brilliant white room without “a single gray, or a single shadow, or the barest trace of perspective.” Against this backdrop two girls in dark blue dresses wind a skein of red yarn.
Critical moments of the play are set to music. In both a lullaby and a wedding song, Lorca blends traditional verbal motifs and lyrics with metaphors of his own invention to suggest the impending tragedy. Structurally, Blood Wedding reveals traces of the Bach cantata to which he listened so assiduously while working. Parts of the drama correspond to arias, recitatives, and chorales. In at least one production of Blood Wedding, Lorca underscored the play’s affinity with Bach by introducing the forest scene with a passage from the Second Brandenburg Concerto.
In its shape, tone, and subject, its compression of detail and dense verbal imagery, the play recalls its Renaissance and baroque forebears—Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Calderón—as well as the tragedies of classical Greece. But Lorca’s work is also contemporary. Techniques from the expressionist theater inform much of the play. Only one character in Blood Wedding, the bride’s cousin, Leonardo, is called by name; others are referred to by type: Bride, Mother-in-Law, Wife. The climactic forest scene, which Lorca later cited as his favorite part of the play, marks an abrupt stylistic shift from the more conventional passages that precede it. With its “great, moist tree trunks,” “murky atmosphere,” and fantastical woodcutters, it is reminiscent of the jungle in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, a play Lorca very probably knew. When the Moon and Death, in the guise of a Beggar Woman, appear, he said, “the realism that dominates the tragedy until that moment is ruptured and gives way to poetic fantasy, where naturally I find myself most at home, like a fish in water.”
Visual and musical symbols suggest the actual moment of death. Seconds before the two male protagonists kill one another, the stage turns blue, the Moon emerges, and a violin duet sounds. Suddenly two screams shatter the air, and the music stops. In silence, the Beggar Woman, draped in a shroud, steps onstage. With her back turned to the audience she spreads her cloak, like a prehistoric bird, and the curtain falls.
In a sense Lorca had been rehearsing this scene for years. Components of the forest sequence—the woodcutters, the Moon, Death, the forest itself—appear, variously, in The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Once Five Years Pass, and Gypsy Ballads. The moon, in particular, had obsessed Lorca at least since adolescence. At twenty he described the moon’s light as “sacred, sacred, sacred,” in spite of the fact that it “wounds you too much.” In Impressions and Landscapes he called the moon a “comforter of the sad. Poets’ aide. Refuge of the passionate. Perverse and chaste rose. Ark of sensuality and mysticism. Infinite. artist of the minor key.” He viewed the moon as the richest of the celestial bodies, a force linked to fertility, water, time, and death, a substance whose reflected light suggests reflected things—recollections of childhood, of lost loves. The moon had cast its pale light on Lorca’s work from the start. “I am a poet of the night,” observes the Poet in Lorca’s The Billy Club Puppets. “Pay me in silver. Silver coins look like they’re lit by the moon.”
Lorca had no sooner finished Blood Wedding than he set off on his second expedition with La Barraca. The group left Madrid on August 21 for a tour of northern Spain, including Galicia, where they received flattering press coverage. One reviewer hailed the company as an emblem of “freedom” and “revolution.”
The tour went smoothly. In cities and villages along the country’s verdant northern coast, audiences welcomed the young troupe. According to Lorca, La Barraca typically attracted two types of people: writers and intellectuals, and those Lorca simplistically described as “rustic campesinos,” poorly educated men and women who worked in fields and factories. The single group that did not warm to the company, he said, was the “frivolous and material-minded” bourgeoisie. Despite the fact that he and his family belonged to it, Lorca despised Spain’s middle class. He accused it of having “killed” the theater, of having “perverted it.” His remarks seemed not to affect his affluent parents, who over the years had grown accustomed to their son’s hyperbole.
In interviews and conversation Lorca insisted time and again that La Barraca’s best audiences were ordinary Spaniards. They “know what the theater is. They gave birth to it.” Although they might not grasp the intellectual or theological ramifications of a play such as Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, he noted with condescension, they could nevertheless “feel it.” Lorca loved to study the crowds who came to watch La Barraca, to scrutinize their response to the company’s work. He relished their slightest gesture of approval. The purity of people’s reactions to the troupe reaffirmed his faith in the power and magic of the theater. On the day after a performance, villagers would often spot Barraca actors on the street, and in their excitement cry out, “She was so and so! He was that one!” An elderly man once murmured wistfully to several company members, “How I’d love to travel around with you to God’s little villages, playing the fool.”
On reaching a new town, Lorca often struck out by himself to explore the sights while his crew unpacked costumes and set up the stage. Dressed in his blue mechanic’s coveralls, with the Barraca emblem boldly displayed on his breast pocket, he visited churches and monuments and chatted with townspeople. He often gave coins to the curious children who inevitably clustered around him. He loved playing the star. Occasionally he made a clumsy attempt at helping with preparations for the evening performance, but for the most part he left his colleagues to attend to the more mundane tasks of their enterprise. Despite his affection for the working-class uniform he wore with such pride, Lorca disdained manual labor and used his childhood limp as an excuse to avoid it. “Federico was not made for physical work,” one company member recalled kindly.
In most towns the routine was the same. The troupe arrived by truck and selected a performance site—often in a square backed by a picturesque church or civic building. As they unpacked, a town crier would roam the streets, announcing their presence. At curtain time residents brought chairs and cushions into the square and settled down to watch Lorca’s young actors perform. After the production, which generally lasted ninety minutes, company members dismantled the stage and stored their equipment. The following day, enthusiastic reviews usually appeared in the local press. The actors always bought copies to take home.
Lorca staged his Barraca productions with an eye to authenticity and innovation. He used traditional musical instruments—lutes, guitars, vihuelas—to accompany his shows. He carefully selected the company’s designers and sketched many of La Barraca’s costumes himself. Visually his productions were novel. Instead of conventional footlights, actors were lit by overhead spotlights. And yet there was nothing fussy about his work. “This is not art theater,” Lorca cautioned. For financial as well as logistical reasons, productions remained simple.
Lorca’s pioneering work nonetheless helped spark the rejuvenation of Spanish stagecraft in the 1930s, and as such was the realization of a lifelong dream. “For me La Barraca is my entire work, the work that interests me, that excites me even more than my literary work,” he said. During his years with La Barraca he wrote almost no poetry. It didn’t matter. The theater gratified him in ways that verse could not. It was alive, and therefore always in flux. No performance was immutable—hence Lorca’s constant impulse to tink
er with both productions and scripts. Late in 1932 he was asked if he had neglected poetry for La Barraca. “No,” he replied. “I haven’t set it aside. At the moment we’re immersed in the poetry of Calderón, Cervantes, and Lope de Rueda.”
Watching Lorca at work with La Barraca, barking orders, singing, stepping over sets and properties as he got ready for a performance, his friend Pedro Salinas was reminded of the boy Federico who “set up a theater in the living room of his home in Granada.” La Barraca was Lorca’s “big toy, his childhood dream come to life.” To the student actors and designers in his troupe he was an inspiration, a teacher, an irrepressible comic with a bagful of tricks, a virtuoso—albeit one whose relentless antics sometimes tested their patience. On the road, Lorca sang with the group. The company even had a special song for truck breakdowns. In every town he visited he unearthed a piano, often untuned, and with his actors at his side he played popular melodies and belted out songs. He talked nonstop; he always had a topic. He read his work to the group. One night in the small medieval town of Santillana del Mar, after rain had forced the company to cancel its performance, Lorca assembled the entourage by a fireplace in their hotel and read Once Five Years Pass. Many found the play perplexing, but few forgot the reading.
He was somehow larger than life. Dressed in the shapeless blue coveralls he had grown to love, he would run his fingers dramatically through his black hair, and as he did so his massive head seemed larger and more imposing than ever, one Barraca actress remembered. There was an air of exaggeration and mischief to almost everything he did. At dinners he sometimes urged his actors to rub their fingernails together so that they could hear the “song of the little lice,” and he taught them to unfurl their napkins over their faces, like stage curtains. It was one of his favorite tricks.
Inevitably, his constant need for attention, persistent chatter, and histrionics became irritating. Before every Barraca performance Lorca spoke to the audience, explaining the company’s goals and introducing the play they were about to see. He stood onstage, reading from tiny sheets of paper on which he had scribbled his remarks. Some actors thought the talks “excessively pompous,” and to an extent they were right. At times Lorca expounded at length, with considerable bombast, on the history of the Spanish theater. During one such session a backstage technician managed to attach a chain to Lorca. In the midst of Lorca’s long delivery, the technician suddenly yanked on the chain and dragged him offstage.
In September Lorca returned to Madrid, brandishing his draft of Blood Wedding. “I’ve got a drama you’re going to love,” he crowed to a colleague shortly after his arrival.
He immediately began reading the play to friends. At a small gathering in Rafael Martínez Nadal’s apartment, people drank wine and argued for hours about the work’s forest scene. Was it a “grotesque” disruption of an otherwise authentic tragedy? Lorca maintained that it was not.
When he read his play late one night to a small gathering in Morla Lynch’s apartment, the group was spellbound. It didn’t matter that Lorca at first lost his script and as a result did not begin the reading until one-thirty in the morning, or that Morla himself insisted the play’s title was too melodramatic. When the reading ended, no one spoke. Their silence, Morla thought, was “more eloquent” than any applause.
Lorca continued to read the play, and to his delight, people liked it. Virtually no one had appreciated Once Five Years Pass or The Audience, and for the most part he had consigned those scripts to a desk drawer. But listeners were riveted by Blood Wedding. Lorca read simply, interpreting each character through word as well as gesture, but without overt histrionics. By the sheer force of his delivery he was able to suggest both the setting and the ambience of the play. At the end of one reading, a friend broke down in tears. Encouraged by such reactions, Lorca began circulating the play among prospective producers. He first sent the script to the celebrated Argentine actress Lola Membrives, then touring in Madrid, whom he envisioned in the role of the Bride’s Mother. But Membrives turned him down, citing prior commitments. In truth, she wanted to play the Bride. Lorca was annoyed. When they met for the first time a few days later, Membrives said, “Lorca, you’ve got to write a play for me in which I sing, dance, play the guitar, die, and do everything.”
“Why?” he shrugged. “It’s already been written. Do Carmen.”
Late one night he telephoned another actress, the beautiful, fine-featured Josefina Díaz de Artigas, to ask if he could read his new play to her. “Come whenever you want,” the actress said.
“Would you mind if I came over right now?” Lorca asked.
Shortly afterward Lorca turned up at Diaz’s home with his friends Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and La Argentinita. Lorca plunged into a recital of Blood Wedding. The actress was captivated. Despite the fact that she and her ensemble were known chiefly for their productions of light comedies, she agreed that night to stage Lorca’s tragedy later in the season. She too wanted to play the role of the Bride.
In October, Lorca accompanied La Barraca to Granada, where they took part in a four-hundredth anniversary tribute to the University of Granada. The troupe gave two performances. During their visit Lorca took members of the company around the city and introduced them to his friends and family. He persuaded one of his young actors, a wealthy student with a showy convertible, to drive him through town in his car while Lorca waved ostentatiously to pedestrians. It was his way of poking fun at the city’s bourgeoisie.
Later in the month La Barraca gave two performances in Madrid. Critic Miguel Pérez Ferrero of the Heraldo de Madrid published a laudatory review of the company’s work, acknowledging, in particular, Lorca’s remarkable gifts as a director, actor, and poet. The conservative magazine Blanco y Negro also took note of La Barraca. In its November 6 issue it published a two-page photo spread showing the group in full dress for Life Is a Dream. Their costumes were boldly patterned and their makeup exaggerated. Lorca wore his gauzy black “shadow” headdress. At thirty-four, he still had a cherubic face. His eyes, their almond contours defined by thick black lines, stared gravely off to one side.
He had seldom been more celebrated or lived a more public existence. And yet he longed for companionship. Autumn arrived in Madrid, and with it crystalline days that recalled his youth in Granada. He grew wistful. To Eduardo Rodríguez Valdivieso, a young Granadan poet whom he had met the previous winter and with whom he was enamored, Lorca sketched the doleful city of his teens. “I remember with distant melancholy the huge yellow goblets on the old trees of the Campillo, and the acacia leaves that fill the solitary Plaza of the Lobos, and the divine first cold wind that ripples the water in the Plaza Nueva. Everything that is the Granada of my dreams and of my solitude, when I was an adolescent and no one had yet loved me.” He told Valdivieso he hoped their friendship would blossom, and he pleaded with the young man not to divulge the contents of their correspondence. “Because a letter that is shared is a bond that is broken.”
A brief lecture trip took Lorca to Galicia in late November. On his return he told Valdivieso that he felt “tired and rather alone.” In mid-December he made a hasty trip to Barcelona to give his lecture-recital “Poet in New York.” It was his first visit to the city since 1927, and the press showered him with attention. “García Lorca has travelled through all of Spain. He knows France, England, Cuba, the United States, Canada,” one paper reported. Presumably Lorca himself had supplied this inflated information. Another paper described him as “modernísimo.” At the recital itself, women in feathers and tulles sighed and murmured approvingly as he read. Later, during a private reception, several ladies begged Lorca to recite his famous Gypsy ballad “The Unfaithful Wife.” He refused. “No, not The Unfaithful Wife.’ No … It’s the one poem that dissatisfied women always ask me to read,” he said. The mawkish poem embarrassed him.
Reviewers praised his Barcelona recital. Critic Guillermo Díaz-Plaja declared that with his New York poems, Lorca had transformed himself from a “min
or poet” into one with an “epic voice.” He had become a national celebrity. Sixteen of his poems appeared in Gerardo Diego’s 1932 anthology, Contemporary Spanish Poetry, the first major compilation of work by members of the Generation of ’27 and their immediate predecessors. Lorca confessed to being pleased with the poems Diego had selected for the collection—a sampling of works, all of them elegiac in tone, dating back to Book of Poems. “You’ve captured me just as I am,” he said. “Because contrary to what people think, I’m not a happy poet but a sad one.” In a biographical note to the anthology, he admitted that his aesthetic stance was in a constant state of change. “I will burn down the Parthenon at night so that I can begin building it again in the morning and never finish.”
By late December 1932, he was back in Madrid. Earlier that month his parents had vacated their apartment in Granada and moved to the Spanish capital in order to be closer to their children. Their two sons were by then more or less permanent residents of Madrid, and their twenty-three-year-old daughter, Isabel, had recently begun to attend university there. Only Concha remained in Granada with her husband and two children. Although they would continue to spend their summers at the Huerta de San Vicente in Granada, Lorca’s family had decided to make Madrid their winter home.
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