The Public And Play Without A Title

Federico Garcia Lorca called The Public "the best thing I've written for the theater." Yet, he acknowledged, "this is for the theater years from now." Now, half a century later, The Public and another of Lorca's most daring works, Play without a Title, are available in English translation for the first time. Surrealism, folk theater, poetry, vivid costumes, black humor--in the The Public, dramatic traditions are ransacked to develop themes as timely in the 1980s as they were taboo when Lorca was writing: if Romeo were a man of thirty and Juliet a boy of fifteen, would their passion be any less authentic? No, says a young observer of the play within the play, "I who climb the mountain twice each day and, when I finish studying, tend an enormous herd of bulls that I've got to struggle with and overpower at every instant, I don't have time to think about whether Juliet's a man or a woman or a child, but only to observe that I like her with such a joyous desire." In both The Public and Play without a Title, the player himself is of as much consequence as the role he plays. The fierce, stark Play without a Title, with its cast of Author, Prompter, Stagehand in the wings, and hecklers in the gallery, clearly heralds developments in today's avant-garde theater. It also reflects the violence of the times in which it was written. As Carlos Bauer notes in his introduction, neither of the plays in this volume was complete in 1936, when Lorca was assassinated by Franco's forces. Still, both have here the unity and grace of finished tours de force.

Lorca, Public & Play w/o Title. Greatest thing I have written for theater - Lorca.

"Lorca is one of the few indisputably great dramatists of the twentieth century" Observer Mariana Pineda achieved immediate critical success on its first performance in Barcelona in 1927. The Public is a powerful and uncompromising demand for sexual, and specifically homosexual, freedom - as predicted it was never performed in Lorca's time - it was first performed in this country by Theatre Royal Stratford East in the 80s. Play Without a Title, an unfinished Lorca rarity, realises his wish 'to do something different, including modern plays on the age we live in'.

Never before translated into English, the Manimekhalai is one of the great classics of Indian culture. A second-century Tamil verse epic, it is a sequel to the Shilappadikaram (New Directions, 1965), which was also masterfully translated into prose by the acclaimed musician and scholar of Hinduism, Alain Daniélou. Rich with details of the period's arts, customs, and religions, the Manimekhalai provides an extraordinary picture of an age that suddenly comes back to life. It is the story of a beautiful young dancer who decides to forego her looming career as a courtesan in order to dedicate her life (with the aid of gods, demigods, and a magic bowl called the Cow of Abundance) to charity and to attaining the "bright light of knowledge."

The magic of Andalusia is crystallized in Federico Garcia Lorca's first major work, Poem of the Deep Song, written in 1921 when the poet was twenty-three years old, and published a decade later. In this group of poems, based on saetas, soleares, and siguiriyas, Lorca captures the passionate flamenco cosmos of Andalusia's Gypsies, ""those mysterious wandering folk who gave deep song its definitive form. Cante jondo, deep song, comes from a musical tradition that developed among peoples who fled into the mountains in the 15th century to escape the Spanish Inquisition. With roots in Arabic instruments, Sephardic ritual, Byzantine liturgy, native folk songs, and, above all, the rhythms of Gypsy life, deep song is characterized by intense and profound emotion. Fearing that the priceless heritage of deep song might vanish from Spain, Lorca, along with Manuel de Falla and other young artists, hoped to preserve ""the artistic treasure of an entire race."" In Poem of the Deep Song, the poet's own lyric genius gives cante jondo a special kind of immortality. Carlos Baur is the translator of Garcia Lorca's The Public and Play Without a Title: Two Posthumous Plays, and of Cries from a Wounded Madrid: Poetry of the Spanish Civil War. He has also translated the work of Henry Miller and other contemporary American writers into Spanish.