Dramatizing Queer Visibility inEl público: Federico García Lorca in Search of a Modern Theatre

Abstract

As perhaps no other of Federico García Lorca’s works for the stage, his unfinished and posthumously published play El público (“the public” or “the audience”) stands out for its formal difficulty and idiosyncrasy: called unstageable and “a poem to be booed at” by Lorca, El público is an iconoclastic metatheatrical drama that draws on international vanguardist desires to offend rather than to entertain audiences. However, few commentators have explicitly connected the play’s radical vision for the theatre to its concern with queer representation, or what I call queer visibility. This article argues that El público self-consciously dramatizes a search for a modern theatre by reflecting on the spectator’s ability to see and endure queer visibility on stage. Applying an unapologetically queer reading to the play’s absorption of international influences, this article also aims to recover El público for the canon of queer modernist drama.