Dark, Small Magic in a Quiet Space

Federico Garcia Lorca, born in Spain ear the turn of the century, is one of the most remarkable and most ambitious literary figures of the past century, his creative ability manifesting itself not only in is legacy of poetry, prose and drama but also in drawing, painting and music, His body of delicately sensuous, highly symbolic poems are still considered among the most beautiful written in Spanish; the literary autobiography he wrote while attending Columbia university in 1930, A poet in New York, is a modern classic.

Garcia Lorca also had ambitions to preform and revitalize the Spanish dramatic tradition. Unfortunately, the themes that his lyrical dramatic works treated--questioning the structures of patriarchy, religious authority, sexuality and social convention--were considered too subversive by the national authorities, the Fascist government of Francisco Franco. In August of 1936, Garcia Lorca was dragged into a field and murdered by Franco's agents, his body dumped into an unmarked grave.

Yerma is among Garcia Lorca's last says, and it seems to have been one of those which brought to him the unwanted attention of the Republican censors. As the centenary of the poet's birth approaches and his country gears up for a massive celebration of his life and work, it is appropriate that the dramatic pieces in which he developed a new lyrical idiom for the stage be brought back to light, and the recent production in the Leverett Old Library does the play the justice its power deserves.

Yerma is on the surface a simple story--in fact, it seems to be caught in a kind of emotional stasis. Yerma is a "country girl" of rural Spain, loving and tender toward her young husband Juan, and desiring nothing more than to have a child; it's a desire which has remained unfulfilled for the first two years of their marriage. As time passes and Yerma's age mates become pregnant and bear children, Yerma remains barren, "empty." Her desire for a baby becomes an obsession, her infertility a trauma that begins to blur the boundaries between psychological and physical pain until it becomes an unbearable torment to her ("Every woman has enough blood inside her for three or four children," she says despairingly, "and if she doesn't have them, it'll turn to poison.")

Yerma's incessant railing against her 'fate" drives her to increasingly desperate measures as she attempts to understand and correct what is wrong inside her womb and her "blood." Isolated with her despair, she becomes alienated from her husband and from the rest of her village until her unbearable pain explodes in a climax of sexual and emotional anguish, violence and murder.

This may not sound like everyone's cup of tea, but it's to the credit of director Gili Bar-Hillel and Yerma's excellent cast that they have pulled it off remarkably well: Despite its essentially static structure, this drama of emotions remains spellbinding for its full two hours. The play's success must be credited in large part in to the startlingly beautiful and lucid performance of Lara Jirmanus '01 as Yerma. Jirmanus's Yerma retains our attention for the duration of the play; striking precisely the right balance between Yerma's haunting desires and the earthy reality of her everyday life, she manages to retain our interest and sympathy even as her essentially unchanging character becomes more and more tightly wound up, more despairing, more obsessed.

Yerma is largely a women's play. Director Bar-Hillel says that she selected it for performance in part because she wanted to take advantage of the often under-utilized "pool of talented women at Harvard," and this she has succeeded in doing. The actresses in the play's supporting roles do not fade beside Jirmanus's splendid Yerma but instead complement her and each other, bringing a multitextured and vibrant life to the text's potentially flat and symbolic set of characters.

The flexible features and resonant voice of Devin Moriarity '98 lend extraordinary character and strength to the self-assured, smugly knowledgeable elderly woman to whom Yerma turns for advice about her infertility (in fact, Moriarity's delivery is so powerful that at times the echoing acoustics of the Old Library, unfortunately, cause her lines to be drowned out by her own voice).

Nina Sawyer '01 provides a luminous foil for Yerma's intensity in Maria, a village friend of Yerma's who is lucky enough to be blessed with children--and to possess neither Yerma's depths nor her demons. Kate Arms assumes a commanding presence as the most cruel of the washerwomen who gossip about Yerma's barrenness and cast aspersions on her fidelity, but she is equally comfortable in the sympathetic, backgrounded role of Dolores, the witch-woman who provides Yerma with ancient pagan remedies against infertility. Even the minor players bring sparkle and depth to their characters: Kristen Rolf '99 [sparkles] with energy as yet another village girl, who chides Yerma to appreciate the freedom that comes with not having babies and rejoices in her own half-grown reputation as a "crazy woman." Candice Ackerman '99 is appropriately grim and threatening as the nearly silent "stepsister" whom Juan brings home to keep an oppressive eye on Yerma. And an unexpected lightness is lent [to the production] by Aidin Carey, a 12-year-old local actress who appears as the phantasmal child who skips and sings through Yerma's dreams.

The two major men's roles are also capably filled. Juri Henley-Cohn '00, who plays Yerma's husband Juan, strikes an admirable balance between his suffocating passion and his painful self-restraint; his performance's major flaw is that, in moments of high emotion, he tends to rip through his lines too quickly to make them entirely comprehensible--a shame, given that so much of the richness of this play derives from the poetry of its dialogue. Dan Berwick '01 does an excellent job in the smaller role of Victor, apparently an object of Yerma's repressed desire; the performers' hesitation and stammering body language when the two share the stage is understated to just the right degree.

But there are other elements in Yerma which make the play luminous. One of them is Garcia Lorca's astonishingly beautiful poetry itself; its delicate images and startling metaphors are rendered effectively by a cast which, with few exceptions, is capable of delivering the words without succumbing either to melodrama nor to the temptation to suffocate the lyricism out of embarrassment.

One of the elements which dominate both within the play's language and as a theme of the play itself is the sheer sensuality of emotion: passion, feelings, abstract thoughts, are conveyed in Garcia Lorca's poetry as physical, bodily experiences; the experiences of the heart and mind are mapped out onto the body. The dichotomy becomes visible when Yerma rages against the fact that her desire for a baby cannot be forced to translate itself to her body. "Wanting something in your head is one thing," she says, "but it's something else when your body--damn the body!--won't respond."

The idea of blood becomes a linking metaphor, a image that can be used to mean both the spirit and soul, and the body itself. Some of Garcia Lorca's most beautiful images derive from this juxtaposition. For instance, trying to describe the sensations she's experiencing, the newly pregnant Maria says to Yerma, "Have you ever held a live bird, tight, in your hand? Well, it's the same, but in your blood."

The sensuality of the play's poetry is brought to life in intriguing ways by its physical construction; light designer Ryan McGee '98 and set designers Mike DeCleene '98 and Dave Levy '00 have done interesting and creative work in a sparse setting. Lighting changes mark shifts in the movement from Yerma's inner world to the social world in which she lives: a cooler, bluer air surrounds her interactions in the social world. The outside world is marked from the world inside Yerma and Juan's house, and a warm orange light for her beautiful dreams of children. reminiscent of the dreamlike color and warmth of the womb, or the "blood-stream."

A simple but effective set, too, works toward making concrete the unifying themes of the text: the village's washer-women are provided with a river, via the simple expedient of a roll of blue fabric, making visible the torrent of water that infiltrates areas of the play as a symbol of fertility and female power. Inside Yerma's house, the furniture is sparse--a rocking chair, a table, jugs for water--and the dominating element is the starkest one of all: a doorway, erected against the air, marking the boundary between the house to which Yerma is expected to keep--in her unbearable loneliness--and the outside world, which calls her but offers still no solutions.

Equally vital is the musical element of the production. Garcia Lorca's text for the play makes occasional use of sung elements, and frequent use of monologues framed explicitly in the meters of lyrical poetry, rather than prose. The music used in Spanish-language productions of the play is usually based on traditional Spanish folk tunes, but setting the English translation to those melodies would have been difficult. Instead, Bar-Hillel worked with John Baxindine '00, a concentrator in English and Music, to compose an entirely new score for the play.

Working with a recent English translation by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata, Baxindine has designed a languid, hauntingly lovely set of melodies to which several of the characters sing their poetry--Yerma's dream-monologues, a shepherd song by Victor, a complex six-part song by the village washerwomen--as well as incidental music. Exquisitely performed by Baxindine on piano and Marianne McPherson '01 on flute (filling in for regular Lori Sonderegger), the music fills the space of Old Library and combines with the delicate shifting of the light and the dreamlike lyricism of the poetry to create an atmosphere of dreamlike and rare beauty.

Yerma is an admirable and intriguing example of Garcia Lorca's attempts to revitalize the tradition of Spanish drama. Its themes are simultaneously fundamental and extremely complex and manifold--the ancient theme of the cyclicality of nature and of female fertility is beaten into the viewer like a hammer. But at the same time the play presents us with a vision of one in whom that cycle is broken--"blocked up," as many of the play's characters repeat of Yerma--and asked to try to understand, with Yerma, the meaning of this arresting of the natural cycle in terms of "fate" and of morality.

The fact that "God," evidently arbitrarily, refuses to help Yerma calls sharply into question the idea of a just and merciful God; the notion that Yerma ought to accept her "fate" as a childless woman is caught up in her husband's insistence that she accept her "woman's place" within the walls of her house, never straying outside to the wild world that tempts her mysteriously. Garcia Lorca's complaints against the oppression of women come through sharply in some of the ideas which Yerma herself embodies: when Juan suggests that she resign herself to being childless, she reproaches him, saying, "Men have another life--their flocks, their orchards, their conversations! Women only have their children and caring for their children."

Similarly, the suggestion that Yerma try to have a child with a man other than her husband is rebuffed by her with the insistence that she must maintain her family's "honor": "It is a burden that all [families] must bear." This is the very same "honor" which Juan feels is threatened by the very notion of women not being "shut up inside their houses."

All these elements--the questioning of traditional Spanish social patriarchy, of the established Church, of conventional morals--are the elements that caused suspicion and silencing to fall upon the play's author, and caused the decades-long censorship of his works. It is valuable to have these ideas spoken aloud again. After all, that's one of the themes of Yerma--naming the unspeakable. As Yerma herself says: "There are things locked up behind the walls that can never change, because nobody hears them! But if they suddenly exploded, they would shake the world."

At the same time, there is a certain uncertainty which surrounds all of Garcia Lorca's work: however lucid the image, the atmosphere remains more beautiful than the real, somehow symbolic, like a beautiful dream. We never know exactly why Yerma does not become pregnant. Moriarity's old woman would have it that Juan is infertile; the traditional wisdom of the village gossips suggests that Yerma is infertile because she somehow doesn't really want or deserve a child; Yerma herself rages against the "fate" whichs eems to have condemned her. Depending on which system of values the viewer uses to read the play--the rational, the magical, the spiritual and pre-ordained--the meaning is different, the mystery has a different solution.

And this, too, is part of Lorca's aesthetic goal. As the poet once wrote, "Only mystery makes us live." Combining the lucid with the ambiguoius, the symbolic with the earthy, the beautiful with the terrible, Lorca's vision is onw which deserves to be more widely performed and appreciated. As we approach the centennial anniversary of his death, and as his native country gears up for a massive celebration of his literary legacy, it's appropriate that such fine performances of his drama be performed in other languages--celebrating a poignant delicacy of speech which maintains its painful beauty, even in translation

The two major men's roles are also capably filled. Juri Henley-Cohn '00, who plays Yerma's husband Juan, strikes an admirable balance between his suffocating passion and his painful self-restraint; his performance's major flaw is that, in moments of high emotion, he tends to rip through his lines too quickly to make them entirely comprehensible--a shame, given that so much of the richness of this play derives from the poetry of its dialogue. Dan Berwick '01 does an excellent job in the smaller role of Victor, apparently an object of Yerma's repressed desire; the performers' hesitation and stammering body language when the two share the stage is understated to just the right degree.

But there are other elements in Yerma which make the play luminous. One of them is Garcia Lorca's astonishingly beautiful poetry itself; its delicate images and startling metaphors are rendered effectively by a cast which, with few exceptions, is capable of delivering the words without succumbing either to melodrama nor to the temptation to suffocate the lyricism out of embarrassment.

One of the elements which dominate both within the play's language and as a theme of the play itself is the sheer sensuality of emotion: passion, feelings, abstract thoughts, are conveyed in Garcia Lorca's poetry as physical, bodily experiences; the experiences of the heart and mind are mapped out onto the body. The dichotomy becomes visible when Yerma rages against the fact that her desire for a baby cannot be forced to translate itself to her body. "Wanting something in your head is one thing," she says, "but it's something else when your body--damn the body!--won't respond."

The idea of blood becomes a linking metaphor, a image that can be used to mean both the spirit and soul, and the body itself. Some of Garcia Lorca's most beautiful images derive from this juxtaposition. For instance, trying to describe the sensations she's experiencing, the newly pregnant Maria says to Yerma, "Have you ever held a live bird, tight, in your hand? Well, it's the same, but in your blood."

The sensuality of the play's poetry is brought to life in intriguing ways by its physical construction; light designer Ryan McGee '98 and set designers Mike DeCleene '98 and Dave Levy '00 have done interesting and creative work in a sparse setting. Lighting changes mark shifts in the movement from Yerma's inner world to the social world in which she lives: a cooler, bluer air surrounds her interactions in the social world. The outside world is marked from the world inside Yerma and Juan's house, and a warm orange light for her beautiful dreams of children. reminiscent of the dreamlike color and warmth of the womb, or the "blood-stream."

A simple but effective set, too, works toward making concrete the unifying themes of the text: the village's washer-women are provided with a river, via the simple expedient of a roll of blue fabric, making visible the torrent of water that infiltrates areas of the play as a symbol of fertility and female power. Inside Yerma's house, the furniture is sparse--a rocking chair, a table, jugs for water--and the dominating element is the starkest one of all: a doorway, erected against the air, marking the boundary between the house to which Yerma is expected to keep--in her unbearable loneliness--and the outside world, which calls her but offers still no solutions.

Equally vital is the musical element of the production. Garcia Lorca's text for the play makes occasional use of sung elements, and frequent use of monologues framed explicitly in the meters of lyrical poetry, rather than prose. The music used in Spanish-language productions of the play is usually based on traditional Spanish folk tunes, but setting the English translation to those melodies would have been difficult. Instead, Bar-Hillel worked with John Baxindine '00, a concentrator in English and Music, to compose an entirely new score for the play.

Working with a recent English translation by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata, Baxindine has designed a languid, hauntingly lovely set of melodies to which several of the characters sing their poetry--Yerma's dream-monologues, a shepherd song by Victor, a complex six-part song by the village washerwomen--as well as incidental music. Exquisitely performed by Baxindine on piano and Marianne McPherson '01 on flute (filling in for regular Lori Sonderegger), the music fills the space of Old Library and combines with the delicate shifting of the light and the dreamlike lyricism of the poetry to create an atmosphere of dreamlike and rare beauty.

Yerma is an admirable and intriguing example of Garcia Lorca's attempts to revitalize the tradition of Spanish drama. Its themes are simultaneously fundamental and extremely complex and manifold--the ancient theme of the cyclicality of nature and of female fertility is beaten into the viewer like a hammer. But at the same time the play presents us with a vision of one in whom that cycle is broken--"blocked up," as many of the play's characters repeat of Yerma--and asked to try to understand, with Yerma, the meaning of this arresting of the natural cycle in terms of "fate" and of morality.

The fact that "God," evidently arbitrarily, refuses to help Yerma calls sharply into question the idea of a just and merciful God; the notion that Yerma ought to accept her "fate" as a childless woman is caught up in her husband's insistence that she accept her "woman's place" within the walls of her house, never straying outside to the wild world that tempts her mysteriously. Garcia Lorca's complaints against the oppression of women come through sharply in some of the ideas which Yerma herself embodies: when Juan suggests that she resign herself to being childless, she reproaches him, saying, "Men have another life--their flocks, their orchards, their conversations! Women only have their children and caring for their children."

Similarly, the suggestion that Yerma try to have a child with a man other than her husband is rebuffed by her with the insistence that she must maintain her family's "honor": "It is a burden that all [families] must bear." This is the very same "honor" which Juan feels is threatened by the very notion of women not being "shut up inside their houses."

All these elements--the questioning of traditional Spanish social patriarchy, of the established Church, of conventional morals--are the elements that caused suspicion and silencing to fall upon the play's author, and caused the decades-long censorship of his works. It is valuable to have these ideas spoken aloud again. After all, that's one of the themes of Yerma--naming the unspeakable. As Yerma herself says: "There are things locked up behind the walls that can never change, because nobody hears them! But if they suddenly exploded, they would shake the world."

At the same time, there is a certain uncertainty which surrounds all of Garcia Lorca's work: however lucid the image, the atmosphere remains more beautiful than the real, somehow symbolic, like a beautiful dream. We never know exactly why Yerma does not become pregnant. Moriarity's old woman would have it that Juan is infertile; the traditional wisdom of the village gossips suggests that Yerma is infertile because she somehow doesn't really want or deserve a child; Yerma herself rages against the "fate" whichs eems to have condemned her. Depending on which system of values the viewer uses to read the play--the rational, the magical, the spiritual and pre-ordained--the meaning is different, the mystery has a different solution.

And this, too, is part of Lorca's aesthetic goal. As the poet once wrote, "Only mystery makes us live." Combining the lucid with the ambiguoius, the symbolic with the earthy, the beautiful with the terrible, Lorca's vision is onw which deserves to be more widely performed and appreciated. As we approach the centennial anniversary of his death, and as his native country gears up for a massive celebration of his literary legacy, it's appropriate that such fine performances of his drama be performed in other languages--celebrating a poignant delicacy of speech which maintains its painful beauty, even in translation