The theatre of Garcia Lorca: text, performance, psychoanalysis

Abstract

The Theatre of Garcia Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis. By Paul Julian Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 185 pages. The most recent contribution by Professor Smith offers a novel approach to the much-studied theater of Garcia Lorca via comparisons with thencontemporary happenings in theater, medicine, and psychoanalysis in an attempt to move the critical discourse on Lorca's theater in a new direction. The principal methodology is to associate Lorca's plays with other texts and thus to make inferences, directly or indirectly, about specific issues, notably Lorca's homosexuality. Among such texts, Smith uses Langston Hughes's translation of Bodas de sangre, Bitter Oleander, which emphasizes a more sensual-sexual interpretation of the Lorca text, and suggestive references to psychological theories, concepts, and case studies popularized by Freud, but also in a Spanish context, Gregorio Maranon. He also uses specific historical productions of Lorca's plays as barometers of prevalent attitudes at a given moment. Also in this context, he features very recent plays about the playwright's life as a means to penetrate the many difficult textual problems and attitudes toward the relationship between the dramatist's life and art. Smith uses the psychological texts as counterpoints for specific readings: for example, Maranon's ideas on bisexuality in relation to Yerma and Freud's famous case study of Nora in relation to Asi que pasen cinco anos. His use of specific productions includes Marcelle Auclair's French translation and stage production of Asi que pasen cinco afros during the late fifties in order to contextualize the historical discourse regarding the content of Lorca's plays and inferences about his person. Auclair's production is thus placed in the additional context of Jean-Louis Schonberg's raising of the homosexual issue (for the first time in a public medium). The study deals primarily with only four plays, long discussions of two commercial plays-Yerma and Bodas de sangre-and two experimental works-Asi que pasen cinco anos and El publico, the last discussed as part of a final section of contemporary interpretations of Lorca's theater and dramatic representations of his life. Although such counterpoints offer a more immediate and historical context for reading these plays in a different light and Smith's concluding discussion of contemporary representations of El publico and dramatic interpretations of Lorca's life is astute, I must nevertheless conclude that in spite of a well-written and thoroughly interesting hypothesis that the conclusions fall short of an ultimately satisfying reading of Lorca's theater. The most serious shortcoming is the meager number of plays chosen for analysis. A more productive and historically sensitive reading could have been possible with the inclusion of other texts. Even with an expanded text base, however, the results would likely have been the same since, like most of Lorca's critics, Smith reconfirms a longstanding tradition of finding what one is looking for in Lorca's theater. …