The Trouble with Lorca

THE TROUBLE WITH LORCA "THE TROUBLE WITH LORCA" is an irritating phrase--at least it is to me and for a variety of reasons: its use is ever more and more frequent , it is generally a statement prompted by an undefined bias and, finally but not least, I strongly suspect that I became aware of the phrase as it issued from my own mouth. Whatever this trouble is I have found myself reluctant to consider it. My admiration for Lorca's plays has been so strong as to have a connotation of indenture. I have studied his plays, translated them, acted in them, directed them, and criticized them favorably in print. I have been loath, therefore, to venture into any strongly negative criticism of a play- .wright whose works have given me such pleasure and whose influence upon my own theater practice has been so pronounced. It is almost as though I were reluctant to admit flaws in Lorca for fear of admitting my own mistaken judgments. However, there is no escaping the persistent fact of my own dissatisfaction with Lorca's plays any more than I can escape hearing the recurrent critical gambit, "The trouble with Lorca is..•." I recognize the signs of this trouble in the lukewarm and ritualistic reception of Lorca's plays both here, abroad, and in Spain. I hear this trouble in the voices of directors as they endeavor to explain why their productions did not come up to expectations. I sense this trouble in the enthusiasm for Lorca of the adolescent freshman and the insouciance of the more mature and hardheaded student. My own war cry of old that Lorca suffered in translation from language to language and culture to culture has not proved a successful prophylactiC -the disease of disenchantment has reached me. In spite of my enthusiasm , my favorable critical appraisals of Lorca's plays and, finally, in spite of my efforts to ward off my doubts by critical incantations of partial truth, I have succumbed and ventured into the ranks of the jaundiced. I would like now to plunge directly into a negative critique of Lorca's work, but I must not give the impression that Lorca was something less than a great genius and an excellent playwright. Whatever the trouble is with Lorca it does not in any way reflect upon his personal genius and the brilliance of his craftsmanship. In fact it is necessary to formulate a clear picture of Lorca's dramatic genius in order properly to evaluate the importance and extent of Lorca's theatrical deficiencies. 2 1964 THE TROUBLE WITH LORCA 3 In New York Lorca gained the assurance of a man who had dis-; covered more or less what to say and more or less how to say it-the patterns of his writing good and bad then became clear and traceable. And now that his life is fixed in death, it is quite possible and fitting for us to "characterize" Lorca the playwright-and to do so without sentimentality. The strongest virtue of Lorca's dramaturgy is his ability to plot. These plots are the most daring and compelling force of his plays. Lorca understood Aristotle's assertion about "the soul of tragedy" as few modern playwrights. The construction of great plots is not a scientific process though it does resort to a good deal of empirical thought. Constructing a great plot is a form of alchemy in which themes, events, places, persons, all come into a total and violent reaction with the emotions, ideas, and predilections of a great artist. The result of this reaction is finally distilled or, rather, sublimated into a clear line of action. Another way to think of this process is to see it as a sort of fretting or worrying of a rough subject into a vigorous form-imagine a sculptor facing a large stone. He has no finished ideas, he has only his tools, and an almost kinesthetic response to the stone. The sculptor looks at the rock, touches it, walks around it, and then begins to project himself into the stone. He frets at it with tentative taps of the mallet; he stops to sketch out...