Spanish Theater: Jardiel Poncela to Lorca’s Tragedies
Intellectual Humor in Theater
Jardiel Poncela: An author who plays with language and grotesque situations.
Miguel Mihura: A precursor of the theater of the absurd. Notable work: Three Top Hats.
Theater of the Generation of ’27
Three noteworthy facets:
- Purification of poetic drama.
- Incorporating cutting-edge forms.
- Bringing theater to the people.
Key Figures of the Generation of ’27
Rafael Alberti: Avant-garde theater that moves toward compromise. Surrealist works include Man Uninhabited. On a Republican hero, Fermin Galan: poetic drama: Night of War in the Prado Museum.
Miguel Hernandez: Theater that is vindictive and engaged, with simple plots.
Alejandro Casona: Lyrical, with an “unreal world of dreams.” Notable works: The Trees Die Standing, Lady of the Soul.
Max Aub: His theme is man’s inability to understand reality and to communicate. Works: Dying for Closing Your Eyes, Not…
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)
Born and died in Granada, studying law. He resided in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, noted for his personality and talent. He organized events, lectures, and recitals, collaborated with leading magazines, and wrote his best books of poems and plays.
Lorca’s personality had two key features:
- Overwhelming vitality, full of intimate sympathy.
- Discomfort, pain of living, a feeling of frustration.
Lorca’s Dramatic Works
His theatrical production is one of the peaks of Spanish drama. Lorca and Valle are largely responsible for the renewal of 20th-century theater in Spain.
Features of Lorca’s Theater
- The vision of theater as social and didactic. He conceived of the barraca with other university students.
- The basic theme is the clash between desire and oppressive reality, i.e., between the individual and their environment. The conflict between the individual and society leads to drama, always resolved with the individual’s death. This issue includes others such as the discomfort of the outcast, the struggle against conventions, impossible or frustrated love, etc. All of this gives the scene the spirit of the Spanish tragedy.
- It’s a poetic drama that presents a stylized, constant poetization of everyday life. This is achieved with poetic fragments loaded with symbolism.
- Popular tradition is present in his dramatic works, not only in the characters, language, and rural setting, but also in his interest in puppetry. Works: The Puppet Play of Don Cristobal, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, Love of Don Perlimplin with Belisa in the Garden, The Curse of the Butterfly.
Evolution of Lorca’s Style
Evolution toward a higher dramatic density and more universal dimension. He combines verse and prose. He is interested in collective problems and the social dimension of theater.
Three Stages:
- 1st Stage (’20s decade): Following small works like The Curse of the Butterfly and puppets, he achieved success with Mariana Pineda, a drama about a young woman executed in Granada. The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife is closer to the stage farce about impossible love.
- 2nd Stage: Surrealist language breaks into the theater. Works: The Public and As Five Years Pass, whose themes are the test of time and death.
- 3rd Stage (1933-1936): He wrote his most important dramas starring women. Belonging to this stage are Dona Rosita the Spinster, or the Language of Flowers, and especially the height of his theatrical trilogy on Spanish soil: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba.
The House of Bernarda Alba
The House of Bernarda Alba stars Bernarda Alba, a tough and tyrannical woman who imposes eight years of mourning on her five daughters after the death of her husband. Lorca constructs a work of universal scope, exploring the struggle between the desires of the individual and the social rules that prevent the satisfaction of such desires. The theme is the clash between freedom and authority. Bernarda embodies the power and the suppression of natural instincts; her five daughters represent different attitudes: Adela, rebelliousness; Pepe Romano, Angustias’s boyfriend, embodies masculinity and the desire awakened in the five sisters.
In the play, symbols abound: the water shortage represents the lack of life and isolation; the fan symbolizes vitality and the desire for freedom. It uses popular language full of metaphors, similes, and proverbs.