YERMA
A thirsty soul in a dry time, Garcia Lorca wrote poems and plays (The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding) that seethe with the frustrations of a man poisoned by his soil. Garcia Lorca grew up in Andalusia, a land of blood feuds, barren land, and Catholic ecstasies. Typically, he wrote: “Many Spaniards live between walls until the day they die, when they are taken out to the sun. A dead person in Spain is more alive when dead than is the case anywhere else.” Indeed, watching Alba is like being shut up in an arid tomb; only at the end do you seem to breathe again.
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Where death is palpable, one turns to love as refuge from despair. According to a recent biographer, Garcia Lorca’s theme is always “love lost, of the love that could or should have been.” His hunger made him create in his plays memorable women who mirrored his own sexual struggle in their resistance to the repressions that rule their lives. In his 1934 Yerma, a searing dramatic folktale in which Garcia Lorca believed he had dressed “the body of tragedy in new clothing,” the playwright made the title character a living metaphor for barrenness.
Yerma would be a harsh, misogynistic indictment of one woman’s biological misfortune if it weren’t so close to the poet’s heart. Aching and unfulfilled, Yerma is the moral center of this play. No one comes close to matching her intensity or life. Also intense and alive is this strong new revival by the Blueprint Theatre Group, a production that employs Peter Luke’s supple, very contemporary translation.
Both Yermas share a sensuous score composed by the Marcel Duchamp Memorial Players. Unfortunately, the songs are raucously rendered, especially the rocky laundresses’ quartet. It’s enough, however, to pull off a two-hour play in two tongues; something was bound to fall by the wayside.
