Don Perlimplin: Lorca’s Theatre-Poetry

For something like forty years poets in English-speaking countries have been trying to write poetic drama for the modern stage. This movement, if something so scattered and diverse may be called a movement, stems largely from Yeats and Eliot. Their plays are still the best modern poetic drama we have, and their theories still define the prevailing conception of poetic drama. But no one is quite satisfied with the results. We still lack a poetic theatre-form comparable to those of more fortunate ages, or to the “unpoetic” convention of modern realism. Poetic drama in English remains unsure of itself, highbrow and cultish—unless Elizabeth the Queen, Venus Observed, and The Cocktail Party, which are fairly well accepted in the show-shops, are to be called poetic drama.

Federico García Lorca also wrote poetic drama, very much as Yeats and Eliot have taught us to understand it, yet his plays are neither cultish nor middlebrow-Ersatz: they are theatre-poetry which lives naturally on the modern stage. Lorca did very little theorizing, but he found, at a very early age, in pre-Franco Spain, singularly direct ways to use the stage for the purposes of poetry. It is true that he is not a creature of the commercial theatre. Madrid in his time had a theatre corresponding to Broadway, but Lorca was always in more or less hidden opposition to it. He was the director of “La Barraca,” a group of University players which was subsidized by the government and toured the provincial towns and cities of Spain with a repertory of classics. It is evident that his own plays owe a great deal to this experience. La Barraca found an “off-Broadway” audience in Spain, and since then Lorca’s plays have found audiences in France, Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, South America, and college towns all over this country. No one has succeeded in producing him successfully on Broadway, but in being rejected by the timid snobbery of Times Square he is in excellent company. And there is no doubt that he can by-pass the taboos of the market, and reach a wide contemporary audience in free Europe and the Americas.