Yerma
Written by	Federico García Lorca
Characters	Yerma Juan Victor Maria Dolores Two Sisters-in-law Pagan Old Woman Male Female Boy Shepherd Child Six Washerwomen Two Girls Two Women Two Old Women Three Men Seven Young Girls Children
Date premiered	1934
Genre	Tragedy

Yerma (i.e., "Barren" in Spanish) is a play by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. It was written in 1934, and first performed that same year. Lorca describes the play as "a tragic poem."

Contents 1 Plot 2 Themes 3 Legacy 4 External links

[edit] Plot

The play tells the story of a childless woman living in rural Spain. Her desperate desire for motherhood becomes an obsession that eventually drives her to commit a horrific crime. This desperation is produced by the social norms of her culture, and the work functions as a critique of those norms. Living in a society of women who have children with their husbands as part of a ritual, this hurts Yerma even more. Yerma kills her husband in the end because he is a frugal, economically driven man who has no desire to have children. For him, children are a costly transaction. The ending where she kills him is ironic however because she kills him at "Ermita" which is a religious place with the possibility of fertility.

[edit] Themes

Yerma deals with the themes of isolation, passion and frustration, but also the underlying theme of nature, marriage, jealousy and friendship. Social conventions of the period also play a large part in the play's plot.

[edit] Legacy

Ian Gibson suggests that of all of Lorca's writings, Yerma is the one most directly associated with his assassination in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, because it most blatantly challenges the doctrines of Catholicism and morality of Spanish society.

Paul Bowles composed an opera based on Yerma in 1955. Pilar Távora directed a noteworthy film version of the Lorca play in Spanish starring Aitana Sánchez Gijón in 2001. Her adaptation is marred, however, by its elimination of all ambiguity from the conclusion: to make the play more absolutely feminist, she portrays the husband as attempting to rape Yerma, rather than having the provocation for Yerma's inexplicable act of violence be his first true expression of affection for her as it is in the play.

[edit] External links

• Spanish: El sentido trágico en La casa de Bernarda Alba, y algunas relaciones con Yerma y Bodas de Sangre, de Lorca.

v • d • e The plays of Federico García Lorca The Butterfly's Evil Spell · The Billy-Club Puppets · Mariana Pineda · The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife · The Love of Don Perlimplín · The Public · When Five Years Pass · The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal · Blood Wedding · Yerma · Doña Rosita the Spinster · Play Without a Title · The House of Bernarda Alba

This article on a play from the 1930s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e