Audience and Authority in the Modernist Theater of Federico Garcia Lorca

In Audience and Authority, Christopher Soufas offers a view of the Lorcan dramatic corpus as an evolving body of work. Opposing the majority of literary criticism, Soufas views the dramas in relation to the struggles for artistic authority that constitute the Modernist movement. Authority is a vital component of theatrical representation, for the audience must be compelled, by some portion of the theatrical experience, to view that representation.

According to Soufas, Lorca’s first plays show a lack of awareness of the necessity to create a theatrical scenario in which the poetic content of dramatic works will be received by the public. As Lorca’s career progressed, he became more aware not only of the need to think of the audience when crafting his dramatic works, but also of the authority that the Madrid audiences of the 1920’s exercised over theatrical productions. Lorca’s theater throughout the 1920’s showed concern about the terms of reception of artistic expression. In the aftermath of the experimental plays of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Lorca became concerned with consolidating the authority of poetic function and directorial authority in the face of potentially hostile audience expectations. The role of the Magician in The Public marks a recognition of the need to create dramatic scenarios that have a certain “subversive expediency”; that is, dramatic situations that allow the author to command the audience’s attention while hinting at an unrepresentable agenda located in an offstage space (85). The later plays (the “rural trilogy”; Doña Rosita, the Spinster; and the incomplete Play Without a Title) represent a consolidation of the understandings about theatrical authority gained by Lorca in the experimental plays; they represent challenges to audience authority and vision.

Audience and Authority is organized chronologically, as is befitting its theoretical focus. Except for the introduction, each of the seven chapters considers a particular phase of Lorca’s dramatic production (e.g., the early theater); a particular genre (the farces); or individual plays. The study is quite balanced in its consideration of Lorca’s oeuvre. Audience and Authority gives due weight to both the plays in which Lorca’s understanding of theatrical authority began its development (from The Butterfly’s Evil Spell to The Public), and those that consolidate Lorca’s understandings of theatrical authority (from Blood Wedding to Play Without a Title). Its various analyses are based on themes common to the work as a whole, such as concern for the terms of reception of artistic works, and the expression of “unstageable” agendas. Chapters Two, Four, and Seven contain brief interludes—perhaps too brief—on the relationships between Lorcan and Brechtian, Pirandellian, and Artaudian theatrical theory, respectively. These apartados are fully integrated with the analyses that bracket them, and help flesh out the larger European context of Lorca’s dramatic evolution.

While Audience and Authority traces the development in Lorcan dramatic production, most of the readings in Soufas’ study may be approached on an individual basis. His reading of Blood Wedding stands out in this regard: Soufas’ analysis of Lorca’s granting, and then depriving, his audience of visual and imaginative authority over the terms of the representation of Blood Wedding is very persuasively argued. Somewhat less convincing is the analysis of Yerma, precisely because Soufas’ interest in Lorca’s consolidation of his authority over theatrical audiences, and their reception of his work, is less easily explained with reference to Yerma than it is to Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba, and The Public, among others.

Audience and Authority has much to recommend it to those interested in Lorcan drama. Soufas’ effort to find a commonality in the Lorcan dramatic oeuvre is well-founded; his readings are, in most cases, compelling. However, there are several methodological questions that are somewhat underdeveloped. The question of “the audience” is central to Soufas’ claims in Audience and Authority, yet one feels as if Lorca...