Word: lorca
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...splendid resilience and vitality so powerful that he draws the Bride (Ann Lilley Kerr) into the circle of his power; she and Leonardo's wife (Pat Fay in an unhappily neutral role) flash and charm in his presence. If anybody has duende Kerr has; he explains better than Lorca can how Leonardo manages to drag the Bride along like "the pull of the sea." Yet out of what, in this production, does he drag her? Certainly not a tight, musky web, an oppressive atmosphere of blood and vengeance. Rather a cheery village of polite, almost inaudible gossips; Frank Perkins...
Except for a terrified and confusing depiction of Harlem Negroes as Congolese savage-Chiefs, Blood Wedding is Garcia Lorca's most fantastic poem, and his most intense effort to draw dramatic situations from people's most primitive conflicts. Everything is straight and crude: the wedding brings together the son of a powerful widow (who wants him to produce more sons to carry on a family vendetta that killed her husband) and the daughter of a grasping landowner (who wants to grasp more land...
...bride makes a definite return to the village, announcing that she has followed the rule of custom at least in that she remains caste--and so leaves Leonardo to be the tragic protagonist, the only individual outside the force of ritual and hence the only character to whom Lorca gives a specific name...
This is rural tragedy; by squeezing humanity in a Granadan village into an even more primitive lump than it actually is, Lorca wanted to fill his stage with constricting unreality: characters talk to each other in indirect but elemental metaphors, and one character, Death as a beggar-woman, actually exists as such a metaphor. Even the Moon comes on to make a speech. The simple trouble is that like nearly all rural tragedy Blood Wedding is the sort of melodrama into which actors are reluctant to empty their energies, and that therefore strikes audiences as faintly embarrassing vulgarity...
...Lorca had a solution for this, which he liked to lecture about and call the duende, an energetic Andalusian daemon of black sounds that supplements (and stomps on) mere form and technique in art--especially in Spanish art. "The arrival of the Duende... gives a sense of refreshment unknown till then, together with that quality of the just-opening rose, of the miraculous, which comes and instills an almost religious transport." Blood Wedding, I would imagine, expects the daemon to emerge in the performance...