ABOUT THE PLAY

Setting

The play takes place in the house of Bernarda Alba in a small Andalusian village during a sweltering hot spell in the summer of 1936.

Characters

• Bernarda, age 60
• Maria Josefa (Bernarda’s mother), age 80
• Angustias (Bernarda’s daughter), age 39
• Magdalena (Bernarda’s daughter), age 30
• Amelia (Bernarda’s daughter), age 27
• Martirio (Bernarda’s daughter), age 24
• Adela (Bernarda’s daughter), age 20
• Maid, age 50
• Poncia (maid), age 60
• Prudencia (Bernarda’s friend), age 50

Synopsis

Immediately following the funeral for her husband, Bernarda Alba announces to her five daughters that they will observe an eight-year period of mourning in which they may not leave the house. The young women are devastated.

The three middle sisters, Magdalena, Amelia, and Martirio, begin discussing the rumor that a handsome young man, Pepe el Romano, will propose marriage to Angustias, the eldest and wealthiest sister. Magdalena remarks sadly that Romano is interested in Angustias only for her money. When Adela (the youngest) hears of Romano’s intentions, she is dismayed.

At the beginning of Act II, Poncia and the sisters (except for Adela) discuss Angustias’ impending marriage to Romano and his courtship at her bedroom window the night before. Although the other sisters insist that Romano remained outside the house until just before dawn, Angustias swears that he left her window at 1:30 in the morning. Later, when Adela and Poncia are alone, Poncia questions her relationship with Romano. Adela, defiant, vows to continue her clandestine affair.

Act III opens in the evening. Suspicion, jealousy, and frustration among the sisters have been mounting. Poncia warns Bernarda that the volatile emotions in the house will surely explode, but Bernarda refuses to believe that her control over both her house and her daughters is not absolute, and she goes to bed. Meanwhile, Adela sneaks outside for a liaison with Romano, unaware that Martirio has followed her. After a heated argument, Martirio wakes the household and exposes Adela’s transgression. Bernarda descends upon Adela, but Adela, seizing her mother’s cane and breaking it in two, declares that she will henceforth take orders only from her lover.

Bernarda calls for a gun, and she and Martirio rush out into the yard. A shot is heard. Believing her lover dead, Adela hangs herself. Upon discovering Adela’s lifeless body, Bernarda orders that it be dressed in white. Insisting loudly that Adela died a virgin, Bernarda attempts, above all, to avoid the public shame she would face if the village discovered the truth. As the drama closes, Bernarda calls for silence and for crying to cease as she regains control of her house.

THE PLAYWRIGHT AND HIS WORK

Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 in the village of Fuente Vasqueros, near the city of Granada, in southern Spain. He was the first of four children of Don Federico García Rodriguez, a prosperous landowner, and his second wife, Doña Vicenta Lorca Romero, a former high school teacher with a passion for music, particularly Andalusian folk songs. Lorca’s education began at home, and his mother introduced him to the joys of music, poetry and painting. He was also greatly influenced during these formative years by Spanish folklore and literature, which his family treasured. In addition to learning to play the piano and the guitar, Lorca improvised short poems, songs, and puppet plays, often inspired by the folk traditions of rural Spain.

In 1909, the family moved to Granada so that the children could attend better schools, but they returned to the Andalusian countryside each summer. Lorca would later acknowledge his rural roots as source of intense inspiration for his works. “My oldest childhood memories have the flavor of the earth... My very earliest emotional experiences are associated with the land and the work of the land...Shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Total simplicity... I have an enormous storage place of childhood recollections — there I can hear the voices of people speaking.”

Lorca enrolled at the University of Granada in 1915, studying philosophy and law. During his four years there, two professors helped to change the course of his life. With Martin Dominguez Berrueta, a professor of literary theory, Lorca took two tours of northern and western Spain. On these trips, Lorca recorded his experiences with the places and people he saw in a series of prose sketches that became his first publication, Impressions and Landscapes,in 1918.

Fernando de los Ríos, a law instructor and leading figure of the Grenadan socialist left, was the second mentor that Lorca would encounter at the University of Grenada. De los Ríos convinced Lorca’s parents to allow their son to move to Madrid in order to take a place at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a university residence hall and cultural center which had been playing a pivotal role in educating liberal Spanish youth since 1910. Lorca began his studies in Madrid in 1919, and remained at the Residencia until 1928.

Lorca’s participation in the artistic and cultural circles of Madrid resulted in close friendships and lasting collaborations with some of the major artists of twentieth-century Spain: the painter Salvador Dali; the poets Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado, Jorge Guillen and Rafael Alberti; the filmmaker Luis Buñuel; and the composer Manuel de Falla.

In Madrid, Lorca impressed those in his circle with the remarkable poetry he had been writing. He had a talent for recitation and gave many performances. He felt that poetry required the presence of the poet as well as the expressive power of voice and gesture, thereby linking lyric poetry with theater. His reputation as a poet and musician, both classical and folk, spread throughout Madrid, where he was called by friends, “the last of the bards.” He continued to write and publish poetry through the 1920s and to collaborate with others in the genres of folk music, visual art, and puppet theater.

In 1927 and 1928, Lorca published the volumes Songs and Gypsy Ballads. These made him a public figure, and although he was now well known for his poetry, he did not emerge as a major force in Spanish theater until the 1930s.

In the summer of 1928, Lorca’s friendship with surrealist artist Salvador Dali dissolved, and he experienced an emotional crisis. In 1929, he traveled to New York and studied for a time at Columbia University, visited friends, and eventually went to Cuba to deliver a series of lectures. His response to America resulted in some of his best poetry, a cycle calledPoet in New York.

The political turmoil of the early ’30s moved Spain from the monarchy and the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera to the Second Republic that followed the general elections of April 1931. While in power, the Second Republic worked to address Spain’s seriously uneven economic development, its severe rural poverty, and its 30-50 percent illiteracy rate. These attempts drew the attention of the monarchist and pro-fascist right-wing forces that wanted to subvert the government’s attempts at liberal reforms.

It was against this highly charged political backdrop that Lorca proposed the idea for a traveling theater company that would bring the classics of Spanish theater to provincial capitals and isolated country villages. He called the new theater company La Barraca (The Caravan). Lorca found ideological and financial support for La Barraca with the new neo-liberal Republican government, and especially with its Minister of Education, his old friend and mentor Fernando de los Ríos.

Lorca and La Barraca went on the road. From then until he withdrew from the company in 1935, he was constantly involved with writing, adapting, and directing productions for La Barraca, as well as producing and directing his own works in Madrid, Barcelona, and in 1933-34, Buenos Aires. His mature works, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba (together known as “The Rural Trilogy”) were all written during this period and earned him an international reputation as a playwright (although The House of Bernarda Alba was not produced until after his death).

By the spring of 1936, Lorca was enjoying substantial public recognition for his theater work and poetry. He was also associated with a group of Spanish artists and intellectuals who opposed the rising tide of international fascism which had support in Spain. In the summer of 1936, General Francisco Franco led a military insurrection that resulted in the Spanish Civil War. Lorca was probably seen by those who seized power as one of the most widely known personalities on the “enemy” side. That he was openly homosexual also put him at risk from right-wing forces and may have contributed to his being marked for execution.

The details of Lorca’s tragic and untimely death are few. In July 1936, he was in Madrid. It may have been on the night of July 12 that he read his final script of the newly completed Bernarda Alba to friends at a large gathering. Political tensions were mounting, and a civil war seemed imminent. Fearing for his safety and wanting to be with his family, Lorca traveled to Granada on July 15, against the advice of his friends.

Shortly after his arrival in Granada, the city fell into the hands of Franco’s forces and there were widespread arrests of liberals and leftists. In August, the socialist mayor of the city (who also happened to be Lorca’s brother-in-law) was executed by fascist troops. While at his family’s country home, Lorca was attacked by two armed men who came to the house searching for a worker they claimed was a Communist. After that, Lorca returned to Granada to stay in seclusion with a friend whose right-wing sympathies he hoped would protect him. Later that month the fascist police, known as the Black Squad, came to the friend’s house and took Lorca away to a makeshift prison. During the last hours of August 18 or early on August 19, 1936, he was executed and buried anonymously in a mass gravesite. His body was never found.

IDEAS AND THEMES

From Honor to Death

The House of Bernarda Alba is the story of a woman whose tyrannical oppression of her daughters transforms her house into a powder keg of tension, jealousy, anger, and fear. The play’s subtitle, A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain, underscores the fact that the story is about rural women. In the village, where everyone knows everything about everybody, honor is serious business. Robert Lima, in his book The Theatre of García Lorca, writes “Lorca’s theater revolves on a single axis: the preservation of Honor leads to the frustration of love, hence, of life itself; this frustration, in turn, becomes a despair, which leads to Death.”

Honor, as Lorca sees it, is a traditional code based on superstition, law, and religion. Originally this code served society’s desire for betterment, but eventually it became an instrument of self-torture. “Thus, ”writes Lima, “Lorca’s characters are their own worst enemies.” The House of Bernarda Alba is the last of his three major plays, all with rural settings. The other two are Blood Wedding 1933) and Yerma (1934). The instigating force behind each is honor; the central characters all live, react, and die in the shadow of this burdensome code. And the majority of this burden is borne by women.

The subtitle of Bernarda Alba also suggests a critique of the status of women in a male-dominated society. Lorca views his women as tragic figures because of their roles as child bearers, prisoners of custom, and servants of men. While their male counterparts are out in the fields acting in whatever manner they choose, Lorca’s women must stay at home, obeying men’s commands and the rules of tradition. Men may ignore these rules if they choose, and it is Lorca’s depiction of double standards that makes his female characters so passionate and so memorable.

Her Own Worst Enemy

Lorca exposes the tormenting paradox of authority that permeates the thick walls of Bernarda Alba’s house. Bernarda takes on the authoritarian mantle, because there is no man to do so. With this authority, she oppresses her daughters; hence the oppressed becomes the oppressor. As she tries ferociously to quell the chaotic force of passion under her roof. her efforts drive that very passion to destroy her daughter Adela. She also wields authority over her servant, Poncia; but because Poncia can foresee the looming tragedy that Bernarda cannot, Poncia is powerful in her own way. Bernarda’s tyranny deprives her of her daughters’ love, and her imperious command over her servant deprives her of valuable insight. Finally, her acceptance of the authority of the church deprives her of her own happiness.

The Role of Religion

The Catholic Church is a constant presence in the play. An enormous crucifix dominates the set. Church bells are tolling as the drama opens and will toll again after Adela’s suicide. This oppressive presence is embodied by Bernarda’s fierce standards of piety and purity for her household. Showing respect for the dead is part of that piety, but Bernarda takes extreme measures in both the duration of the period of mourning she imposes and in the severity with which she enforces the convention. At the end of the play, Bernarda’s immediate reaction to Adela’s suicide is to plunge the family into even deeper mourning — thereby eliminating all of her daughters’ hopes of marriage and children. Bernarda may be diligent about the way in which her family should show respect for the dead, but that is as far as her Christianity extends. For her, religion means unquestioning adherence to an established set of rules observed solely for the purpose of keeping up appearances. She embodies what Lorca feels to be wrong about traditional Catholicism: it imprisons the individual instead of liberating him, it corrupts his life instead of perfecting it.

In his essay “Religion in the Rural Tragedies,” John Gilmour argues that Lorca’s social conscience motivated him to present religion in such a negative manner. Lorca’s critical stance on traditional Catholic morality is very much in line with the Republican thinking of his time. The main objective of the legislation introduced by the left-wing Republican government of the early 1930s was to ensure that the personality of the individual could develop in total liberty. This meant lessening the power and influence of the Church on Spanish society.

“The poor are like animals.”

In addition to condemning authoritarianism, The House of Bernarda Alba attacks the class system that perpetuates it. Wealthier than her neighbors, Bernarda despises them. “The poor are like animals,” Bernarda remarks. “They seem to be made of other substances.” This attitude prevents her from allowing her daughters to marry. She banishes Martirio’s suitor (“My blood will never mix with that of the Humanas family — not as long as I live! His father was a field hand!”), and Martirio’s resulting jealousy and bitterness becomes the driving force behind Adela’s tragic death.

This social interpretation of The House of Bernarda Alba is justified, but is by itself inadequate. All three rural tragedies suggest not merely that society frustrates our intimate desires and instincts, but that those desires and instincts can never even be clearly identified. As Christopher Maurer says in his introduction to Three Plays, “Lorca’s characters are unhappy and tragic, not because society keeps them from attaining their object or reaching their destination, but because they cannot fully understand what it is that they want.” What drives the human spirit? Why is there longing without object? In his poem “The Qasida of the Rose” he expresses this idea of blind longing:

The rose
was not searching for the dawn.
Almost eternal on its stem,
it was seeking something else.
The rose
was not searching for knowledge or shadow.
Enclosure of flesh and dream,
it was seeking something else.
The rose
was not seeking the rose.
Immobile in the sky,
it was seeking something else!

That “something else”, says Maurer, lies beyond language. Poetry and drama cannot name it, but can only gesture toward it. They are the gesture: a mysterious, stylized gesture toward meaning.

The Play as a Photograph

As Lorca worked on The House of Bernarda Alba, he told a friend that it had “not a single drop of poetry.” Rather, Lorca characterizes the play as a “photographic documentary,” highlighting the importance of the visual impact and staging of the scenes. The Rep’s production, like most others, uses a black, white and gray color palette to strengthen the association with photography. In his stylized approach to realism, Lorca gives us snapshots of passion — pictures of oppression — in the same way that a photograph documents reality but does not, by itself, explain reality. The House of Bernarda Alba layers impressions one over another in order to conjure the mysterious nature of human longing.

THE DIRECTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH HUDDLE

In 1936, the year of his death, Lorca said, “Theater is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.” In The House of Bernarda Alba, director Elizabeth Huddle sees “not literal poetry, but a poetic instance of stylized realism.”

“Lorca’s work,” says Huddle, “is perhaps closer to opera than it is to an American idea of theater. He calls it naturalism,” she says, “but it is larger than that. Within his writing, color, music, and choreography are as important as plot.”

Acknowledging that this play can feel somewhat melodramatic to contemporary audiences, Huddle’s aim is to choreograph Madison Rep’s production in terms of the physical movement and the rhythms of the play, in order to take it up into heightened symbolic theater that is based in reality and even a step beyond that toward opera. “Lorca asks for careful performance rhythms, and in Alba, some of this is written in,” Huddle says, citing places in the text in which Lorca calls for beats and pauses and then for rapid, loud voices responding in counterpoint. “It’s very musical, and I’m going to enhance that even more. I will, in a sense, conduct the play even more than is asked for.”

Lorca’s words guide her: “One needs to rehearse for a long time, and very carefully, to achieve the rhythm that ought to govern the performance of a dramatical work. To me, this is very important. An actor cannot wait a second too long before opening a door. A flaw of this nature has a deplorable effect. It is as though, when one were interpreting a symphony, the melody, or some other musical effect, were to come in at the wrong time. The hardest thing to achieve in the theater is to have the work begin, develop, and end in accordance with an established rhythm.”

These performance rhythms played a pivotal role in Huddle’s selection of the translation by Carmen Zapata and Michael Dewell. “I think that translation feels the most authentic in terms of the rhythms. It feels more lyrical,” she says.

In Huddle’s mind, her production of The House of Bernarda Alba is guided by the play’s subtitle: A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain. “This is a village — these women are not incarcerated in an urban situation, but in an extremely rural situation,” she says. “What is confusing to us is that they appear wealthy — they are wealthy — so it is hard to understand that they are living very rurally and in an area that is not wealthy at all. They happen to be the only wealthy family, evidently, in the area.”

“The play,” she says, “reveals the fatal consequences of repression — social, sexual, and, by implication, political.” However, Huddle feels that an overtly political reading of the play, although justified, would “take the focus away from this particular story and the fact that it’s women who are being oppressed.”

This production focuses on the fact that one woman — Bernarda Alba — has been indoctrinated to such an extent that she becomes the oppressor. “What Bernarda buys into as much as church repression, is class repression. Since there is no one else in the village of their class, there is nothing for her daughters to do,” says Huddle. “She won’t leave, and she won’t let them leave.”

The play is read very often as a premonition of the Franco regime, and it does condemn authoritarianism. “But,” she adds, “the play is larger than that. It’s about primal and mysterious longings.”

“This play is passionate and complex, and it is my job, with the actors, to find the sexual imagery and the excruciating desire that lies behind the text,” says Huddle. In Spanish, the word alba means “dawn,” or “daybreak,” and can also mean “white.” In the name Alba, Huddle sees that “purity is enforced, but fruition is never allowed; sexuality is never allowed to happen.” Capturing its cycle of repression and explosion, the director summarizes The House of Bernarda Alba in a single statement: “To the degree that something is repressed, it will rebound twofold.”

A Brief Summary of Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Although he claimed to be apolitical, Lorca’s liberal ideals marked him as an enemy of the fascists and made him an early casualty of the Spanish Civil War. The war was a conflict in which conservative forces in Spain overthrew the Second Spanish Republic. It pitted the Nationalists, led by the landed aristocracy, Roman Catholic Church, military leaders, and the fascist Falange party against the Loyalists, consisting of liberals, anarchists, socialists, and Communists. In July 1936, General Francisco Franco led an army revolt in Morocco and invaded Spain to support right-wing rebels. The Nationalist army overran conservative areas in Northern Spain, while the Loyalists remained strong in Catalonia and the Basque Provinces. Volunteers abroad formed International Brigades to fight for the Loyalists, who received supplies from the Soviet Union. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany aided the Nationalists with modern arms and some 60,000 troops. The Loyalist side was divided by factional strife that was exacerbated by the Communists’ suppression of anarchists and Trotskyites. Nationalist forces, unified under Franco, gradually wore down Republican strength, conquering Barcelona and Madrid in early 1939. For Italy and Germany, the war was a testing ground for modern armaments and techniques to be used in World War II. For the youth of the 1930s, saving the Spanish Republic was the idealistic cause of the era. But the civil war’s huge death toll, human suffering, and material devastation were unparalleled in Spanish history. The war also ushered in a long era of right-wing dictatorship that ended only with Franco’s death in 1975.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Lorca’s Major Works

Lorca’s early reputation as a poet rested on the Romancero Gitano (The Gypsy Ballads), Poema del Cante Jondo (Poem of the Deep Song), and Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter). Other well-known works are the tortured, ambiguous and deliberately dissonant surrealist poems of Poesa in Nueva York (Poet in New York) and Diván del Tamarit. A good anthology is The Selected Poems of Federico Garc’a Lorca, D.M. Allen, ed., Norton, 1988.

In addition to the plays set in rural Spain (Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba) two other plays helped establish his reputation as a playwright, Mariana Pineda and The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife.

About Lorca

Gibson, Ian. The Assassination of Federico García Lorca. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Havard, Robert, ed. Lorca: Poet and Playwright. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Lima, Robert. The Theatre of García Lorca. New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1963.

Lorca, Federico García. Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

Lupu, Michael. “The Poet Lives On,” in The House of Bernarda Alba Theater Guide, prepared by the Guthrie Theater.

Moskovitz, Sandra. “The House of Bernarda Alba: A Teacher Resource Guide” (offered in conjunction with the McCarter Theatre production, October 21-November 9, 1997)

Soufas, C. Christopher. Audience and Authority in the Modernist Theater of Federico García Lorca. The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1996.

Stainton, Leslie. Lorca: A Dream of Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Lorca on the Web

There are thousands of Lorca-related Websites. Here are few to check out.

http://www.cyberspain.com/ contains a page on Lorca with samples of his poetry.

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9685/home.htm contains a brief biography of Lorca and links to 19 poems translated into English

Hablas Español? An extensive list of Lorca’s poems with full text in Spanish: http://www.isocanda.org/areas/poesia/Lorca/

The Spanish Civil War

http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2/Timeline/Prelude07/html has facts and chronology in the context of American History.

They still draw pictures —drawings by Spanish school children during the Spanish Civil War. http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/tsdp/index.html

About the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: http://www.alba-valb.org/

Audience Guide © Feb 1, 2001, Madison Repertory Theatre