Lorca's theater, a dramatic song to female rebellion
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Madrid, Jun 15 (EFE) .- Poet melted into a playwright, Federico García Lorca looked, knew and portrayed the female soul like no one else in his best plays, which the Castro Library now recovers in a volume by Professor Andrés Soria Olmedo .
Castro's volume, coordinated by Soria Olmedo, professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada, includes fifteen texts by Lorca (Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, 1898 - on the way from Víznar to Alfacar, 1936).
Of these fifteen texts, those in which the female presence is most powerful stand out. They are, nothing less, "Mariana Pineda" (1925), "The prodigious shoemaker" (1930), "Blood wedding" (1932), "Yerma" (1934), "Doña Rosita la soltera" (1935) and "La Bernarda Alba's house "(1936).
Lorca has a particular criterion for choosing his women: "He always puts a yoke on them against which they rebel," Professor Soria explains to EFE.
It happens with Mariana and her martyrdom for the liberal cause; with the shoemaker who is forced to marry at 18 to a man of 53; with those Weddings condemned to the tragedy of love and death; with that Yerma that suffers a life marked by sterility; with Dona Rosita, who suffers, in the promise of eternal love, the then scourge of singleness; with the confinement of eight years, disguised in mourning, of the daughters of Bernarda Alba.
Lorca explained the nature of his dramatic work, often tragic, saying something very symbolic: "Theater is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human."
From Granada to the core, life gave him to surround himself with friends in the Student Residence, to travel to New York, and to organize that fabulous project that was "La Barraca", a traveling university theater that sought to renew the Spanish scene using of the classics as educators of popular taste.
He took La Barraca through the towns of Spain because - Soria explains - "he did not want to do the bourgeois comedy that dominated the commercial halls of his time, the living room comedy that does not address the great human themes: love, death, the passage of time. time, oppression and rebellion, the force of destiny. "
Lorca works with the help of Salvador Dalí, Manuel de Falla or Benjamín Palencia. And he has two great actresses, his muses, who elevate him to the altars: the immense Margarita Xirgu in Spain, and the enormous Buenos Aires Lola Membrives, who takes our author out of the modest Spanish Theater in Madrid to take him to the tremendous Avenida Theater in Buenos Aires. .
His famous trip to the Big Apple was decisive for the future of his theater because he saw abundant avant-garde works and there he wrote, totally or partially, "Poet in New York", "Trip to the moon", "The Public" and "So that five years pass ", impossible theater, renovating theater in the Second Spanish Republic.
"La casa de Bernarda Alba", for many its masterpiece - eloquently subtitled "Drama of women in the towns of Spain" - is a posthumous play that premiered with the Xirgu in exile in Buenos Aires on March 8, 1945, six years after the end of the Civil War caused by the military rebellion of 1936.
Lorca's creative heyday, "his most absolute triumph in the field of theater," explains Soria Olmedo, "took place around 1935, both in Madrid and in Buenos Aires, just a year before he was shot."
