Lorca
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Lorca said later that Doña Rosita depicts the “vulgar” and “ordinary” of urban life; he called attention to the play’s turn-of-the-century setting, terming it an era of black cancan stockings, big-breasted women, lights, and jewels. He praised the work’s “magnificent bad taste.” “Because it’s a drama of the sadness of bad taste. The desolate and terrible tragedy of vulgarity,” he said. Through Rosita—particularly through its peripheral characters, who are more accurately caricatures than three-dimensional characters—Lorca mocked the bourgeois pretensions of his middle-class Granadan neighbors, and showed them to be captives of unyielding mores. The play embodies “the tragic history of our social life,” he said. It embraces “the whole tragedy of Spanish and provincial pretentiousness.”
A reviewer later asked Lorca if Doña Rosita was a satire. “Perhaps,” he mused. “Maybe it’s an elegy,” he added. He told his brother while writing the play that if “in certain scenes the audience doesn’t know what to do, whether to laugh or to cry, that will be a success for me.” The most Chekhovian of his plays, Rosita is a fusion of pathos and farce that culminates in a scene of near-tragic dimension, one whose structure and tone recall the final act of The Cherry Orchard, a play Lorca undoubtedly knew. He had read and admired Chekhov’s short stories as an adolescent and very likely saw one or both of Eva Le Gallienne’s productions of both The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull during his visit to New York; Le Gallienne modeled her version of The Cherry Orchard on the Moscow Art Theater’s innovative production of the work in the early 1920s. The last act of Lorca’s Doña Rosita suggests the structure and tone of Chekhov’s play. Forced by financial need to vacate the home they have lived in for decades, Rosita and her aunt remove the last of the flowerpots from the greenhouse that belonged to Rosita’s late uncle. As dusk arrives, the women depart the house. Moments later, a loose door to the greenhouse begins banging offstage. The rear balcony opens, and white curtains flutter in the wind. The final curtain falls.
The action of the play is sparse: Rosita becomes engaged; she waits for her fiancé to return from Argentina; she reconciles herself to spinsterhood and leaves her childhood home. Act 1 takes place in 1885, Act 2 in 1900, and Act 3 in 1911—a year Lorca characterized as “tight-fitting skirts, the airplane. One step further, the war.” The play, like Once Five Years Pass, is a “legend of time” replete with reminders of time: striking clocks, tolling bells, changing dress styles, the daily arrival of the postman, the physical aging of its protagonists. There is much talk of the twentieth century and its inventions. Rosita herself is obsessed with time. “She wants everything in a hurry,” the Housekeeper complains. “It’s today and already she’d like it to be the day after tomorrow.” As the play unfolds, Rosita evolves from a young woman preoccupied with the future into an aging spinster haunted by the past. Her progress is mirrored by the changes that befall her uncle’s prize rose, the celebrated rosa mutabilis, which blooms in Act 1, is accidentally clipped in Act 2 (“It was still red,” her uncle laments), and ultimately dies.
Toward the end of the play, Rosita speaks of the suffering she has endured. Her speech—one of the most beautiful in Lorca’s theater—is at once a heartbreaking meditation on the destructive power of time and a tribute to the dignity of the human spirit. During the course of the play, Rosita has seen childhood friends marry, give birth, and die; all the while, she has waited for her own life to begin. The symbolic and social death she endures at the close of the play is more terrible than many of the real deaths Lorca gave to other protagonists. “Each year that passed was like an intimate piece of clothing torn from my body,” Rosita tells her aunt.
And today one friend gets married, and another and another, and tomorrow she has a son, and he grows up and comes to show me his examination marks, and they build new houses and make new songs, and I stay the same, with the same trembling as always; there I am, the same as before, cutting the same carnation, watching the same clouds; and one day I’m out walking, and I realize I don’t know anyone. Girls and boys leave me behind because I can’t keep up, and one says, “There’s the old maid.” And another one, a handsome boy with curly hair, says, “No one would cast an eye at her anymore.” And I hear it, and I can’t cry out, but go on, with a mouth full of poison and an overpowering desire to flee, to take off my shoes, to rest and never, never move from my corner again.
In late June 1935, Lorca went home for the summer to his family’s flower-filled Huerta de San Vicente. A Galician-born journalist and friend, Eduardo Blanco-Amor, joined him in Granada for an extended visit. Blanco-Amor had lived in Argentina since 1919, where he worked as a correspondent for La Nación; he had returned to Spain in 1934 for a year’s stay, and during that time had met Lorca through fellow Galician Ernesto Pérez Guerra. Swarthy and stout, with black hair, dark eyes, and a foppish air, Blanco-Amor was one year older than Lorca and viewed himself as Lorca’s “spiritual representative.” He told Federico he intended to defend and exalt his career as if it were his own. “In the end,” he said, “if my life had no other aim than to serve you, it would be well justified.”
He was rumored to have tried seducing Lorca. Lorca referred to him, privately, as “artificial, with the vulgar qualities of an Argentine tango.” Nevertheless, he found Blanco-Amor sufficiently useful and entertaining that he welcomed him into his home that summer and even turned to the journalist for help in revising the six Galician poems he had begun a few years earlier. During his stay in Granada, Blanco-Amor published three articles detailing his visit with Lorca; decades later he issued an additional series of articles recalling the 1935 visit. He told of touring the Huerta de San Vicente with Lorca’s father, who caressed tufts of wheat as he strode through his fields. He described Vicenta Lorca as she sat sewing, “tiny, gracious, harmonious.” He mentioned Concha García Lorca’s daily visits to the Huerta with her three young children.
Acutely conscious of his host’s fame, Blanco-Amor toyed with writing a biography of the poet called “Excursion to Federico García Lorca.” He took photographs of Lorca in various settings around the Huerta. One picture shows Lorca with his mother, a petite, sober-faced woman in her mid-sixties, with gray hair swept back in a loose bun. Lorca inscribed the image for Blanco-Amor: “For Eduardo, with the woman I love most in the world. Lorca, 1935.” In another photograph, Lorca stands at the desk in his bedroom, dressed in his Barraca coveralls, grinning. Behind him, a Barraca poster hangs on the wall.
Violence briefly disrupted their holiday. In early July, Lorca’s old friend Constantino Ruiz Carnero, editor in chief of the Defensor de Granada and a former member of the Rinconcillo, was assaulted in his home by the local president of Acción Popular, a political group affiliated with CEDA, the right-wing Catholic alliance. For months the Defensor had issued stinging attacks against CEDA; Ruiz Carnero’s beating was clearly an act of retribution. Within a day of its occurrence, Blanco-Amor published an account of the incident. He claimed that he and Lorca had been visiting a friend when suddenly they heard “terrible blows” in the apartment below them. They went downstairs and found Ruiz Carnero on the floor, his glasses shattered. Whether or not Blanco-Amor was telling the truth in insisting that he and Lorca witnessed the aftermath of the assault—he was sometimes prone to exaggeration—it is plain that Lorca was aware of the incident and shared his fellow citizens’ indignation at its occurrence.
In early May 1935, Prime Minister Lerroux formed a new cabinet that included five members of CEDA, among them the party’s fanatical leader, Gil Robles, el Jefe, whom Lerroux designated Minister of War. Gil Robles promptly recalled General Francisco Franco from his post in Morocco, and appointed him Chief of the General Staff. Lerroux’s CEDA-dominated government worked to further dismantle the reforms Manuel Azaña and his administration had set into place, and to purge loyal republican officers from the ranks of the Spanish army. By the summer of 1935 conservative government forces had prevailed in their long-standing efforts to cut government spending for La Bar
raca, and the troupe had lost much of its funding. El Liberal reported in June that La Barraca faced both economic and political difficulties. Company members were told they could no longer rehearse in the auditorium at the Residencia. Earlier in the year a new Falangist newspaper, Haz, had criticized the company’s pro-republican production of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. The paper accused the troupe of having transformed “an authentically Spanish drama” into a “petty Russophile drama,” and suggested that in staging the production Lorca had been swayed by “undesirable elements of the most repugnant communist type.”
Lorca defended his company. He said he intended to do only one thing about La Barraca’s dire financial situation: “Go on performing. Somebody will pay.” La Barraca, he vowed, “will not die because I don’t intend for it to die.” When his actors ran out of costumes, they would perform in their blue coveralls. If authorities refused to let them perform in the streets, “We’ll perform in caves and create a secret theater.”
Lorca accompanied the group on its last tour to Santander in late August 1935. The local press welcomed the company’s arrival but noted the sadness of the occasion, given the “miserable subsidy” to which the troupe had been reduced. Rain fell throughout their week-long residency. Lorca stayed long enough to attend the final dress rehearsal of the troupe’s new production of Lope’s The Knight of Olmedo, but the play was underrehearsed, and even Lorca lacked enthusiasm for it. He left Santander immediately afterward and returned to Madrid without waiting for the opening night. The rest of the company departed a few days later. “Will we ever hear them again?” a journalist asked after they had left.
In late August, Lorca attended Margarita Xirgu’s new production of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna in the town of Fuenteovejuna in southern Spain. He had seen the same production earlier in the summer in Granada. The play, about political repression and upheaval in a fifteenth-century Spanish village, sparked controversy, as it had when La Barraca first premiered a version of the work in 1933—although any such controversy was now heightened as a result of the Asturian uprising
When Xirgu and her company reached Fuenteovejuna, they discovered that village authorities had imprisoned a local anarchist so that he could not hear the performance and be inspired by it. Lorca joined Xirgu in announcing to the town that she would not present the play unless the anarchist was freed. The mayor yielded, and the man was released. During the final curtain call for the play, audience members were so moved by the work and its call for liberty that they rushed the stage crying, “Fuenteovejuna, all for one!” They pushed aside local officials, who in turn tried to fight off the villagers. Lorca was terrified. He thought the crowd wanted to lynch the actors who had played the villains. To his relief, he eventually realized the audience was simply trying to express its gratitude, both for the play and for the release of the anarchist.
Days later Xirgu presented Lorca’s adaptation of Lope’s La dama boba in Madrid. The performance took place in the midst of a poplar grove in the city’s elegant Retiro Park; some 5,000 people attended. Afterward, the poet and playwright Manuel Machado read lines of verse in honor of Lope de Vega. Lorca told reporters that in adapting Lope’s script—which he had first done in Buenos Aires for the actress Eva Franco—he had sought to achieve the rhythm of a Moliére farce. To that end, he had cut a number of “unnecessary” and “bad” lines from the play. Some reviewers questioned his choice; they complained that by “meddling” with the text, Lorca had “betrayed” one of Spain’s classical authors. Lorca countered that his actions were no different than those of a musician who interprets a Chopin piano piece. The interpretation might change, he said, but the work remained the same. The Spanish classics could likewise be interpreted and reinterpreted in dozens of ways, “so long as it’s always done by a poet who lives them in his heart and soul.” He had merely eliminated the “dead spots” in La dama boba. “The classical Spanish theater is full of such dead spots.”
Since 1931, and the advent of the Republic, the Spanish theater had undergone a small but profound renaissance. Plays such as Lorca’s Yerma, and productions like Xirgu’s Fuenteovejuna and La dama boba, signaled a new direction in stagecraft and dramatic technique, as well as a greater awareness of the nation’s Golden Age roots. Xirgu herself had all but stopped producing mainstream commercial plays during the Republic. Except for a handful of works by Jacinto Benavente, she concentrated solely on revivals of classical authors (Sophocles, Goethe, Lope de Vega, Calderón) and new work by innovative modern playwrights, primarily Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, and Lorca, about whom she said, “Each of his plays is more beautiful, more transcendent than the last.”
Xirgu’s productions were straightforward and clean; she removed the prompter’s shell from the stage, and in her interpretations of the classics strove for a rare accuracy of detail. Toward that end, she, like her idol, Eleonora Duse, spent hours studying old paintings in the Prado and other museums. Xirgu was vocal in her praise of the republican government’s role in helping to promote and sustain a theatrical revolution in Spain. She noted that previous administrations had granted not “one peseta” to protect and guarantee theatrical activity. Her own 1933 production of Medea, directed by Cipriano Rivas Cherif and performed at the ancient Roman amphitheater in Mérida, Spain, drew three thousand people, among them the president of the Republic and several high-ranking republican officials. The quality of Xirgu’s work in that performance moved one observer to credit the actress with the inauguration of “a grand new era in theatrical culture.”
Mediocre performances of trite plays performed by overworked, underpaid actors nevertheless continued to dominate Spain’s main stages during the 1930s. Lorca steadily voiced his contempt for such work. Asked in 1933 to give his opinion of the Spanish theater of his day, he replied, “The contemporary Spanish theater doesn’t interest me.”
In 1934, shortly before Yerma’s premiere, he again attacked the commercial stage, decrying the fact that “because some man has a few million at his disposal he can establish himself as a censor of works and a definer of the theater. This is intolerable and shameful. It’s a tyranny, which like other tyrannies, only leads to disaster.” He praised theatrical managers like Xirgu, who in selecting her company’s mostly classical repertoire bravely ignored both prevailing tastes and financial concerns. Her innovative work at the Teatro Español with director Rivas Cherif had helped achieve Lorca’s dream of a classless theater, one where “blue-blooded ladies” sit side by side with their maids. “The moment the people in the top balconies come down into the orchestra seats,” he said, “everything will be resolved.”
In the spring of 1935 Lorca remarked in an interview that “the contemporary Spanish theater is unquestionably poor and lacks any sort of poetic virtue.” He affirmed that the only theater capable of enduring “is the theater of poets…. And the greater the poet, the better the theater.” But he drew a distinction between “lyric” and “dramatic”, or theatrical, poetry: “In the theater, the presence of verse does not signify poetry.” He described his own theater as “poetic, and always poetic.”
In May 1935, a journalist asked Lorca if he was optimistic about the rehabilitation of the contemporary Spanish stage. “I believe in and fervently hope for the reblossoming of our theatrical art,” he replied. “We have more than enough intelligence and artistic ability.” Neither the continued popularity of bourgeois melodrama nor the imminent demise of his cherished Barraca, had entirely dampened his spirits. The theater’s “true mission,” he said, is “to educate the multitudes,” a concept he described as “Nietzschean. That’s why Nietzsche wounds my heart.” “If I’ve momentarily reduced my poetic output, it’s because I now consider my dramatic output to be sufficiently beneficial that I am modestly putting it to educational use.” In another interview, later that summer, he told a reporter, “I’m always an optimist, but now even more so.”
25
To Enter into the Soul
of the People
On September 8, Margarita Xirgu gave a final performance of La dama boba in Madrid. Four days later she and her company opened the fall season in Barcelona with a production of the same play. Audiences loved the work, and critics praised Lorca’s “delicate and careful” adaptation of Lope de Vega’s text. Lorca joined Xirgu in Catalunya and settled into the actress’s seaside home in Badalona, a fishing village forty-five minutes from Barcelona. It was his first protracted stay in the region since 1927. From the balconies of Xirgu’s house he could see fishing boats and nets scattered on the shores of the Mediterranean, a body of water, he had once said, which made him forget “my sex, my status, my soul, my gift of tears … everything! My heart alone is pierced by a keen desire to imitate it and to remain like it, bitter, phosphoric, and eternally awake.”
He planned to stay with Xirgu throughout the fall while the actress presented first La dama boba, then Yerma, and eventually Doña Rosita the Spinster. Lorca quickly became the talk of Barcelona and a regular at cafés in the city’s theater district. Journalists fought for the chance to profile him. One reporter noted that he possessed “the eyes and the feet and spontaneous grace of a legitimate Andalusian.” Lorca capitalized on the exotic nature of his southern origins by talking insistently about bullfights, Gypsies, and deep song. To the theater critic Ignacio Agustí, who befriended the playwright during his stay in Barcelona, Lorca showed a more “ordinary” side. Judging from his appearance (turtleneck sweaters, rumpled shirts), “he could have been a mechanic, a carpenter, or a bricklayer—not a poet,” Agustí recalled.