Four Key Plays: The Audience, Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba

by Federico García Lorca, Michael Kidd (Translator)

In addition to a substantial introduction to the life and works of Federico García Lorca—avant-garde poet, playwright, and soul of Spain's "Generation of '27"—this collection features vibrant new English translations of four of his plays. The legacy of a dramatic, religious, and social iconoclast whose death made him a martyr of the left in Civil-War Spain and who today is embraced as a gay icon shines through in Michael Kidd's stage-worthy renderings of Yerma, Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba, and a more experimental play, The Audience, a kaleidoscopic exploration of sexual identity and theater.

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 3, 2019

About the author

Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.

Reviews

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beauty of great literature in a foreign language that you haven't mastered yet is that a recent translation can lead you to read an old work again, literally anew. So while I've no complaints with Lorca's "Three Tragedies" translated by James Graham-Luján and Richard L. O'Connell circa 1955, I also got swept away by Michael Kidd's excellent 2019 collection "Four Key Plays" which adds the decidedly avant garde "The Audience" to the mix. Every script herein deals with women destined for tragedy: "Blood Wedding" finds a bride led astray by a former lover; "Yerma" charts the downfall of a wife who cannot conceive a baby or divorce; and "The House of Bernarda Alba" documents an all-female household driven to the brink by a despotic matriarch in mourning. Even "The Audience" swirls wildly around Juliet from Shakespeare's most famous romance. (Romeo is nowhere to be seen.) Courted by a white horse instead of the prince who usually rides him, our famous heroine can't quite escape her final resting place despite the surreal chaos that surrounds her. The poetry may be most pronounced in this experimental work but it's also abundant in the other Lorca plays here, too.