La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca

Lorca felt acutely the suffering of oppressed people, but avoided direct involvement in politics. His writing is intellectual in its conception and symbolism, but nevertheless touches basic human emotions. Although celebrated primarily for his writing about the Spanish countryside, Lorca did not wish to be labeled merely a poet of rural life. (Although by Spanish custom his surname is properly Garcia Lorca, he is more commonly known by his mother’s surname.) Lorca produced a body of work that is considered among the greatest in the Spanish language, and which has been enthusiastically embraced by audiences around the world. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYįederico Garcia Lorca was born Jin a village near Granada, Spain, the son of Federico Garcia Rodriguez, a liberal landowner, and Vicenta Lorca, a schoolteacher. In the United States, the play has been enjoyed in both English and Spanish productions. Its setting is specific to the values and customs of a rural Spanish people, but the play’s appeal is universal rather than national. The House of Bernarda Alba continues to be revived and read all over the world.

Given the repression of artistic expression in Spain during Franco’s regime, it was not until 1964 that Lorca’s last play was finally produced in his native country, at Madrid’s Goya Theatre. In 1960 it was adapted for American television and in 1963 produced at the Encore Theater in San Francisco. The play later had important productions at the ANTA Theater, New York, in 1951 and the Crescent Theatre, Birmingham, England, in 1952. The play was produced in Buenos Aries in 1945, and was published the same year, in Argentina. The House of Bernarda Alba finally had its stage premiere nearly a decade after Lorca’s death. It is also a play expressing the costs of repressing the freedom of others. These late works Dennis Klein in Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba called “the most accomplished and mature efforts of the finest Spanish playwright of the twentieth century.” If Blood Wedding is a nuptial tragedy and Yerma the tragedy of barren women, The House of Bernarda Alba might be seen as the tragedy of virginity, of rural Spanish women who will never have the opportunity to choose a husband. The play, along with Blood Wedding and Yerma, forms a trilogy expressing what Lorca saw as the tragic life of Spanish women. The House of Bernarda Alba is Federico Garcia Lorca’s last play, written the year he was killed at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca