Play Without a Title (Lorca)
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Play Without a Title, or Untitled Play (Comedia sin título), is an unfinished experimental play by the Spanish twentieth-century modernist playwright Federico García Lorca. Lorca conceived the work as a three-act drama and had referred to it by the title The Dream of Life [1] (echoing, perhaps, Calderón's classic Golden-Age comedy Life is a Dream), but he completed only the first act. Lorca's play was probably written in 1935, but remained unpublished until 1978; it received its Spanish-language première in 1989 at the Teatro Maía Guerrero in Madrid, in a production directed by Lluís Pascual.[2]
Gwynne Edwards, the English-language translator of the play, argues that it differs in important respects from many of Lorca's other works, insofar as it attempts a series of transgressions of the traditional boundary separating stage from auditorium. The play tackles "issues of class and ideological division, of intolerance and hatred, all of them acted out in a theatre where the actors are as much the audience as the audience the actors."[3] Lorca's experiments in this direction echo the work of Pirandello (whose Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) attempted to stage a similar transgression), though Lorca develops the effect in a far more politically-orientated, almost Brechtian direction.
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[edit] Works cited
- Edwards, Gwynne. 1994. Introduction. In Plays: Three by Federico García Lorca. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413652408. p.xi-xxxv.
- García Lorca, Federico. 1994. Play Without a Title. In Plays: Three. Trans. Gwynne Edwards. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413652408. p.105-124.
