Transvestism and Sexual Transgression in García Lorca's The Public

Transvestism and Sexual Transgression in Garda Lorca's The Public CARLOS JEREZ-FARRAN TO DAVID FAIRER Of all Federico Garda Lorca's works, The Public is one of the plays that, in the last two decades, has aroused the widest interest in scholars and the general public, both in Spain and abroad. This interest is ironic given the hostility the play met when Lorca, as was his custom, read the manuscript in 1930 to a group of close friends,' It is even more ironic when one considers the hermetic nature of the play and the structural and thematic difficulties it presents. For the first time in the history of Spanish theatre, a play deals unabashedly, even defiantly, with the subject of homosexuality.' Whether or not its subject matter was the reason that the play was withheld from publication until 1974, the truth of the matter is that the manuscript has come down to us in a fragmented and incomplete form; only Acts Two and Five were published in Lorca's lifetime .3 The play was written during Lorca's stay in New York in 1929-1930 and was finished in 1930 in Havana, where Lorca spent four months on his way back to Spain. It was not staged until the 1986/1987 season in Milan and Madrid, in a co-production involving the Centro Dramatico Nacional, Madrid, and the Piccolo Teatro di Milan, directed by Lluis Pasqual and designed by Fabia Puigserver. Two years later, the play was staged in Paris and London.' The Public begins in the Stage Director's room. The Director is visited first by four White Horses and then by three bearded Men who have come to congratulate him sardonically for his recent success in staging Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Their visit leads to a conversation about what should be considered "good theatre": the theatre that serves as sheer entertainment and uses established moral and aesthetic conventions (his recent production of Shakespeare 's play) or the theatre "beneath the sand" that they urge the Director to inaugurate, characterized by acommitment to portraying the inner truths of the individual. They imply that the Director should liberate himself from the existModern Drama, 44:2 (2001) 188 Lorca's The Public iog oppressive structures that are responsible for his alienation and closeted homosexuality. In this way, they suggest, he would be truer to himself and to the art of his profession. Instead of continuing to sublimate his homosexuality in insincere theatrical fanns, like the conventional theatre he has been directing so far, he should introduce a new kind of theatre that would allow for the expression of human realities hitherto silenced. In other words, this new theatre should be committed to portraying, among other things, the kind ofhomosexual love these three men know the Director to be hiding. The two realities oftheatre as profession and the theatre of the closeted homosexual are inextricably united in Lorca's play, confirming the theories that have been voiced elsewhere about this connection, as when Dennis Altman observes that "[i]t is perhaps not accidental that homosexuals have been associated with the theatre [...Jfor our life is bound up with pretense and reflection, with being-what-we-are-not. Our social experience helps make us mimics. [...JMuch of the tension of gay life results from the knowledge that one is continually acting" (21, 24). The text, as a whole, can be interpreted as a commentary on the dilemma attending homosexuals who have to live in a hostile milieu and 3re caught between two difficult existential choices: on the one hand, the urgent need to assume one's homosexuality and declare it publicly, and, on the other, the inability to face the consequences of public disclosure. What follows in The Public is a psychological dramatization of the fears and desires that the conversation has provoked in the Director: fear both of the repercussions this new theatre would have on his life and of the consequences of facing his own desire. Most of what follows happens almost entirely in the Director's mind: the real and the imaginary are perplexingly mixed. The linearity of the traditional plot is absent, as are the demarcations that...