YERMA [Dramatic
Revival/Spanish Language] A: Federico Garcia Lorca; D: Victor Garcia; S/C:
Victor Garcia, Fabian Puigserver; L: Polo Villasenor; P: Brooklyn Academy of
Music ad Nino T. Karlweis in the Nuria Exert Company Production; T: Brooklyn
Academy of Music (OB); 10/17/72-10/29/72 (16)
Nuria Espert (left), Jose Luis Pellicena.
Victor Garcia, a renowned Spanish director, achieved a universally acclaimed masterpiece of
theatrical innovation in this Spanish-language production of Lorca’s tragedy starring
Nuria Espert of the Madrid company that bore her name. It came to BAM following
its great success with Madrid and London critics. Simultaneous translations
were available with rented headsets.
Lorca’s poetic study
of a barren village woman and her frustration at being unable to bear her
husband children, normally staged in a realistically designed setting, was here
put forth on a giant trampoline that could, by the attachment of ropes to
eyelets by actor-stagehands, be converted at need into a myriad of highly
imaginative locales. It was as much an actor as anyone in the play as it took
shape as a cave, a floor, a wall, a female breast, hills, the sky, a plain, and
so forth. The ritualistically choreographic staging, employing actors both on
the trampoline and on platforms running around and beneath the canvas,
established visual metaphors that brilliantly suggested the internal images
Garcia discerned in Lorca’s people and situations.
Nothing about the
staging was literal or illusionistic—all the techniques were exposed, not
hidden—yet the emotional and intellectual impact of the production had an
overwhelming effect, even on those with no Spanish. Striking sensuality was
evident in several scenes, including those employing nudity and sexual
embraces, to underline the longing of the central figure after whom the play is
named (Yerma means “barren”).
Henry Hewes said the
drama’s story “now emerges not only as the tragedy of a wife doomed to accept
her marriage to a man who cannot and does not wish to make her pregnant, but
also as a poetic and surrealistic metaphor of the needs and frustration of the
female condition.” Clive Barnes saw the conception as on a level with Greek
tragedy in the intensity of its power. Harold Clurman considered this Yerma “one of the outstanding successes
in the effort during the last decade to enlarge the scope of the contemporary
theatre.” A surprising factor was that Garcia, apparently, had accomplished his
goals without “distortion of the text.”
Garcia and Fabian
Puigserver won a Drama Desk Award for their scenic design.
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an
unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was
72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New
York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can
find these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: You Never Know.
