Word: yerma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Yerma means barren in Spanish, and the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater means barren in English. The latest fiasco produced by the team of Herbert Blau and Jules Irving is a work of the late Federico Garcia Lorca, a gifted poet but an inept dramatist. For two hours, without intermission, the heroine Yerma (Gloria Foster) yearns publicly and privately to have a baby. The playgoer comes out of this hot bathos convinced that this Spanish , town could certainly use an adoption agency...
Actually, Yerma is no-barren. It is her husband Juan (Frank Langella) who is sterile - and doesn't want any babies around the house anyway. An old crone offers her son as an inseminative agent, but Lorca cannot let Yerma commit adultery because he intends the play as a tragic stalemate between honor and instinct. Surrounded by women who take a sensual delight in their fecundity, poor Yerma is reduced to beating her breasts and moaning, "I feel two blows of a hammer here instead of my baby's mouth...
This characteristic infelicity of image and language shows how Poet-Translator W. S. Merwin has diluted Lorca's intense lyricism, which in Spanish almost sustains the play. Having no place to go, the play capsizes into melodrama, with Yerma strangling her husband to death in the last scene...
...Machado or Miguel Hernandez among his contemporaries was a finer writer. Lorca was a romantic, and what he restored to the literature of Spain was the tragic vision that Cervantes understood and that left Hemingway mesmerized. "It is Spanish," said Actress Aurora Bautista of Lorca's greatest play, Yerma. "We are unused to things Spanish." And unused, too, to the terrible directness of vision that illuminated Lorca's best writing, as in his poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, in which he speaks of the death of a matador who died in a goring...
Passion & Loathing. Lorca wrote 13 plays, but he was not in any usual sense a playwright. His best works-Yerma, Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba-are really prose poems, and no one of them has the kind of dramat ic power that seals an audience in its seat. Yerma is the story of a young peasant woman who yearns so passionately for a child that she finally murders her sterile husband, crying "But I have killed my son!" Blood Wedding is a study of one of the terrible family feuds that used to be waged generation after generation...