La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca  (1898-1936) is arguably Spain’s greatest playwright and poet.  When he was brutally murdered at the age of 38 by ultra right-wing forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he had already produced a substantial body of plays and poetry. We can only imagine how much more he would have written had he not been killed precisely because his verses and theater railed against the forces of oppression and the tragic sense of enclosure and frustrated desire.  Acutely aware of the persecution experienced by gypsies in his native Andalusia, coupled with his own personal conflicts as a homosexual in a narrow, restrictive society, he channeled his rich poetic and dramatic talent to give voice to those who longed for freedom.

Lorca’s three rural tragedies—Bodas de sangre (1933, Blood Wedding), Yerma (1934), and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936, The House of Bernarda Alba) -- are masterful examples of his skill in communicating the escalating tension  between desire and authority, freedom and oppression, individual passion and societal restrictions.  Particularly sensitive to the repression women experienced in a social milieu which ordained them to little more than needle and thread, his plays give voice to their desire to experience love, sexual passion, and freedom beyond the enclosed walls of their prison-like house.  In each one of his tragedies, their words explode with both realism and poetry as the spectator watches in despair their slow march to tragedy. Silence and death are the victors, but Lorca’s characters do not disappear.  They continue to live and cry out every time one of his plays is read or performed.

La casa de Bernarda Alba, in particular, has been performed so many times throughout the world as drama, opera, musical, and dance that the prospect of revisiting it is one that would terrify any lover of his work.  But Lorca is a gentle muse who assists those who adapt his works and blend their voices with his own.  Situated in southern Spain in the 1930s in a dried-out village without a river and far from the sea, the words of this play transcend its specific context.  When Bernarda Alba shouts “Silence” at her daughters and demands total obedience, images of countless dictators come to mind, first among them Francisco Franco, who assumed control of Spain after the Spanish Civil War and whose ideology Lorca had targeted in both his writings and social activism.   But others follow Franco’s footsteps throughout the decades, making Lorca’s denunciation of tyranny even more important to continue to present and revisit. 

This adaptation implicitly asks how the characters of Lorca's other plays would respond to the crisis and conflicts faced by Bernarda’s daughters.  Wouldn’t they want to offer them words of advice, caution, or solace?  And wouldn’t these same characters that Lorca created in Bernarda Alba want to ask him, the playwright, why he fashioned them with so many desires impossible to realize?  Hence, this version of La casa de Bernarda Alba which recreates the voices of many characters from Lorca’s tragedies as well as his own voice and poetry as he assumes the role of witness to his characters’ struggles.