From Federico García to a hidden corpse

Abstract

This article examines different strategies for staging García Lorca as a presence, either through physical or invisible embodiment, in plays that draw on his own works for inspiration. Ernesto Caballero’s Pepe el Romano (2000) incorporates a character called Federico García in a social structure of toxic masculinity. Alberto Conejero echoes Doña Rosita la soltera in an eerie scenario where an allegedly missing body is searched for Conejero’s Todas las noches de un día (2015), while it also refracts Lorca’s death through alternative political bodies in La piedra oscura (2016) and El sueño de la vida (2019). Both authors acknowledge Lorca’s status as cultural icon and symbol of the country’s unresolved past, while they participate in a search for ways to take the author’s literary legacy beyond biographical determinism. My analysis considers ideas of heritage performance that theorize the body as an archive and as spectre, and also cultural policy as vehicle for reframing legacy.