Five Plays: Comedies and Tragicomedies by Federico García Lorca (review)

1966 BOOK REVIEWS 451 Baldwin. Thus, at the same time that he examines the drama of the thirties, Mr. Rabkin indirectly assists us toward a better understanding of the drama of the sixties. MALCOLM GoLDSTEIN Queens College of the City University of New YO.rk FIVE PLAYS: COMEDIES AND TRAGICOMEDIES, by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by James Graham-Lujan and Richard L. O'Connell, New Directions, New York, 1964. 246 pp. Price $4.95. Three of these plays. The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife. The Love of Don Perlimplin, and Dona Rosita the Spinster, appeared in From Lorca's Theatre (Scribner's. 1941). The translations have been revised and read well. Two short plays are added: a slight, fanciful piece, The Butterfly's Evil Spell (Lorca's first experiment in the theatre), and the lively puppet comedy of Don Crist6bal and Rosita, here entitled The Billy-Club Puppets. There is an introduction by Francisco Garcia Lorca. The finest of the plays is unmistakably Don PerlimpUn. The classical situation of the young woman and her old husband Lorca had handled already in The Billy-Club Puppets and treated again in The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife. The puppet play has the dexterity of farce, The Shoemakers Prodigious Wife the vividness and moral simplicity of ballet. (Lorca himself later arranged it as a ballet.) Don Perlimplin owes its strength to the shadows that deepen and complicate the scene. The prevailing tone is still comic. with erotic energy at its most naive and delightful in Belisa. What is original and strange is the gradual, very sensitive tilting of the balance from comedy into seriousness, as the harmless and absurd old Perlimplin, who had seemed a child in Belisa's hands, becomes her instructor in the meaning of love and gives her handsome body the beginnings of a soul. The inventiveness and economy of the structure, the deft simplification of the characters here, are masterly. Dona Rosita, 'a poem of 1900 Granada: is a good deal less successful. For all its period charm, it is diffuse as a poem. As a play, it swings uneasily between middle-class naturalism and an Arabic-Andalusian lyric style that is only briefly and intermittently pulled into focus by the central image, the rose whose flowering and fading parallels the life of the forsaken girl. The theme of time passing is not impracticable in the theatre-witness Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orcha,rd. But it was perhaps too remote from Lorca's deepest intuitions to waken the dramatic instincts that are realised so strikingly in the rural tragedies and in Don PerlimpUn. RONALD GASKELL University of Bristol A NEW THEATRE, by Tyrone Guthrie, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1964, 188 pp. Price $5.00. A New Theatre by Tyrone Guthrie is, with digressions, a narrative account of the conception, planning. organization, and first season of the Tyrone Guthrie Repertory Theatre in Minneapolis. It is a popular rather than a scholarly book and seems to be written specifically for the intelligent adult who is not a close student of the theater but who would profit from information on the subject. ...