ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, I have argued against the consideration of Lorca’s agrarian trilogy (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba) as the culmination of his trajectory in theater. This is a critical common place that results from a predominantly biographical interpretation of Lorca’s work that presents his incursions in the theater as a steady progression until the time of his death in 1936. To provide a more complex picture of Lorca as playwright, the first two chapters of this book have focused on the different ways through which Lorca problematized the theatrical stage in the 1920s. In Chapters 3 and 4, I have studied The Public and The Dream of Life, two iterations of the “impossible theater” that Lorca repeatedly discussed in the 1930s. Claiming the importance of these two plays, however, does not necessarily mean that they should receive more critical attention than the agrarian plays. In recent past, there have been scholars who have substituted one set of central plays with another, yet this alleged transgressive move has not resulted in any substantial gain as it basically perpetuates the center/periphery logic. One example is María Estela Harretche’s chapter on Lorca in Huerta Calvo’s History of Spanish Theater (2003). Harretche abandons the most basic chronological description to instead engage in a detailed discussion of three plays Lorca referred to as “impossible”—The Public, As Five Years Pass and The Dream of Life. She devotes thirty of the forty pages that form this chapter to these three dramas, to the detriment of the rest of Lorca’s theatrical production. 1 However, as I have demonstrated in this book, the complexity of the Lorquian dramatic corpus invalidates one-sided theories, and swinging the pendulum from one extreme to the other is not an adequate solution. Because Lorca wrote theater to see it staged, he often found himself exploring multiple paths simultaneously. Lorca depended heavily on external agents, such as the actress-managers that dominated the theater industry in Spain, and especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s he also had to navigate between two opposing forces: the avant-gardist circles and the representatives of the artistic establishment.
