The Public & Play Without a Title

by Federico García Lorca, Carlos Bauer (Translator)

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 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.

Genres: Plays

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/d9fkTjija4Y

[Dan Richter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Versuch, den Surrealismus auf die Bühne zu bringen. Auch noch selbstbezüglich. Ein bisschen zu viel gewollt für meinen Geschmack. Aber es lohnt sich wegen der einzelnen Szenen, die dann doch wieder sehr amüsant sind,.

[abeer · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh surrealism.... amazing, brilliant!

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, well researched translation. Also- Play w/o a Title looks like it would be SUCH a cool theatrical experience, even in the brief one act form. Lorca: ily.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Play without a Title could define the early 20th century: an author and his cast attempt to put on a production of Shakespeare, but are interrupted by both the rattled audience and the bombing of a revolutionary war. While the first part seems to be a critique of theater similar to Tieck’s Puss in Boots from 1797 – complete with characters in the audience critiquing the events on stage, as in Tieck’s play – things shift gears dramatically when the bullets start to fly. Unlike Lorca’s The Public, this doesn’t descend into maddening nonsense. The experimentation enhances the work rather than overshadowing it.

[Myriam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I... did not get it. I read the French version of it. It goes from one idea to twenty others in the blink of an eye, I didn't follow the train of thought, I understood very little of what was going on, especially in the first play. The second is not much better, I got the references to Shakespeare and the kind of meta-discourse about what is theater but not much else. There are a lot of discussions around what is love and love between two men and that's impressive for a book written so early but it wasn't enough to keep me hooked, I just didn't get the appeal of these stories.