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Lorca in Texas – Why?

Federico Garc í a Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba has fascinated me since I first saw Nuria Espert's thrilling production at the Lyric Hammersmith almost twenty years ago. Certainly as a perfectly formed ensemble piece Lorca's tragedy would seem to have few rivals, and it's not hard to see why this ‘drama of women' (to use Lorca's own sub-title for the play) is regularly revived professionally – I recently had the good fortune to see Michael John LaChiusa's musical version at the Lincoln Centre, New York.

Bernarda Alba is also frequently performed in theatre schools and university drama departments; the context in which Homestead was conceived.

The unique American Theatre Arts programme at Rose Bruford College , from which the members of the Shady Dolls theatre company graduated, aims in its public productions to stage material that “in some way reflects or interprets an American social and/or political context”. While adhering to this policy, I managed to engineer an opportunity to re-visit Lorca's play – albeit from a rather different perspective. Hence, the transposition of Lorca's story from the rural villages of 1930s Spain to the pan-handle plains of 1950s Texas . I would suggest that the two communities depicted in Bernarda Alba and Homestead share enough characteristics to make such adaptation an intriguing proposition.

Primitive Baptists

First, there is the central theme of religion: Lorca's story begins with a funeral and a ritual period of enforced mourning in which the dead patriarch's daughters must forswear any ‘inappropriate' contact with the outside world, principally men. Homestead dutifully follows Lorca's plot throughout, yet it is not Roman Catholicism that dictates the girls' confinement, but rather the doctrine of the Primitive Baptist Church , which still thrives in pockets throughout the southern United States .

Fate

Central to the theology of Primitive Baptists is an undiluted Calvinist belief in the Pre-destination of the Elected: before God created the world, He had already decided who would be chosen to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and so all those individuals who number among the Elect will be at some point in their natural lives quickened by the Spirit of God, feel His Irresistible Grace. Intriguingly, this means that since every human action or choice is part of His plan, God, and not the Devil, is the author of sin; if people choose to sin, they do so according to God's purpose and not in opposition to it.

It seemed to me that the depiction of an American household steeped in this faith might make a dramatically telling comparison with Lorca's. A young woman assured from birth that her destiny is already mapped out and that God will surely one day ‘quicken her spirit' would either find great comfort in such dogma or perhaps reject it with considerable force. I felt it would be interesting to present such a scenario to the students of the American Theatre Arts programme, who had just spent nine months living in a small town in Texas as part of a year of study abroad.

“Horse and a whip for a man. Needle and thread for a woman.”

Bernarda Alba breeds horses; Homestead 's Lillian Beckman is a cattle-rancher. Both women have earned a small fortune and a local reputation for sheer bloody-mindedness based on their cultivation of land that requires a great deal of labour and resources to keep it (in Lillian's phrase) “half-way civilised .” Lorca's language, rich with vivid references to animals, insects and the merciless weather, is the language of people who wage a constant battle with their environment; rural Texans share this respect for (and awe of) the land and a similarly colourful vocabulary. And in these communities, it is rare for women to challenge the dominant culture of the vaquero or cowboy.

Civil War, Civil Rights

The House of Bernarda Alba was the last play Lorca completed before his murder at the hands of pro-Franco thugs in 1936. While the lives of the women in the play appear not to have changed for a hundred years, the country itself is on the verge of civil war. The illicit passion and murderous jealousy which provoke the domestic crisis in the Alba family clearly reflect Lorca's comprehension of what was at stake as political violence escalated in Madrid and beyond. In Homestead , despite Lillian Beckman's attempts to hold back the tide, Texas , the South, indeed America itself is also beginning to experience a time of violent social upheaval: the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. There is a sense that her daughters' rebellion is somehow in tune with larger forces that will fundamentally challenge the conservative nature of Lillian's ‘pioneer' tradition - even if the expression of this rebellion is at first no more subversive than her daughters' covert dancing to Elvis Presley.

Music

Lorca's play is scored throughout with the ‘folk' music of the village: from the church bells of the opening to the profane offstage chorus of the reapers. With Homestead , we have tried to provide an equally intense soundtrack to the characters' lives: in particular, the fine a capella choral tradition of the Primitive Baptist Church , in which musical instruments are prohibited in accordance with a strict interpretation of the King James' Bible. The hymns, spirituals and sermons you'll hear in our production are from Alan Lomax's extraordinary ‘field' recordings of congregations in Appalachia , Arkansas and Texas in the late fifties. The folk and country music that emanates from the daughters' much loved radio is that which featured on the KDAV Station in Lubbock at the time - the first of its kind in the States and still going strong!

‘Tex-Mex'

Texas history is also the history of the Hispanic population that has lived in the territory since its first exploration by Spanish invaders 400 years ago; and the music, fashion and food of Texas are all heavily influenced by culture brought from South of the Rio Grande. This enabled us to retain the exotic allure of Lorca's central (but unseen) character: the dashing Pepe el Romano - or Antonio Hernandez as we have renamed him.

Individual versus Community

Finally, I feel the closest link between Lorca's original and an American transposition is in the shared recognition of the power of desire. The daughters' sense of themselves is defined essentially in terms of their sexuality and their self-esteem in terms of their freedom to express the desire they feel. This definition of desire as a force of opposition, a passionate, anti-intellectual defiance of oppression, even death, lies at the heart of American drama, in particular in the work of Tennessee Williams. Indeed Gwynne Edwards' analysis of Lorca's work in the introduction to her translation of Bernarda Alba (1998) could be applied equally to Williams, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman or Eugene O'Neill:

“Lorca's concept of tragedy has at its core the notion of aspiration ... characterised by its intensity and single-mindedness. Because different characters have different aspirations, it follows that desires and passions are frequently incompatible with and intolerant of the wishes of others, mutually exclusive, and that, because these passions are also deep-rooted and ineradicable, the characters themselves are inevitably set on a collision course whose outcome will be catastrophic.”

Lorca's characters may express themselves in a manner which strikes us as distinctly un-English, but perhaps in ways that are not entirely un-American. As Tony Kushner in his after word to Angels in America Part II: Perestroika (1993) puts it:

Given the bloody opulence of [America's] great and terrible history, given its newness and its grand improbability, its artists are bound to be tempted towards large gestures and big embraces ... [to] strike inflated, even hysterical, chords on occasion. It's the sound of the Individual ballooning, overreaching. We are all children of ‘Song of Myself'.”

Or in the words of Adele, the youngest daughter, in Homestead :

“You know how the Elders tell it in our prayers and such in church? How God comes to the Chosen like a stirring in your soul. And His Grace is irresistible , cos He picked you out before the world began … How if you are His Chosen, you're Elected and the Quickening'll come, whether what you think you want is Saving Grace or not. And His spirit's overpowering and your body's filled with light … Well, I know I'm not the Chosen now, I don't feel that way about God . But still I know that feeling and it's just as overwhelming and it's calling me tonight!”