The house of Bernarda Alba - Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres

La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba)
was one of the last plays to be written by Lorca, shortly before he
was executed by the Franco regime at the age of 38, in 1936. It
was not performed until 1945 several years after his death. Along
with Blood Wedding and Yerma it forms Lorca's Rural Trilogy. The
play is based around five daughters who live with their fearsome
and tyrannical mother. The daughters have been kept sheltered
from the opposite sex, but the arrival of a suitor after their
father's death catapults the family into a downward spiral of
sexual jealousy and death. The play explores themes of sexual
oppression, passion, and conformity, and examines women's lives
in Spain at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th
century. Bernarda's cruel tyranny over her daughters foreshadows
the stifling nature of Franco's fascist regime, which was to
arrive just a few weeks after Lorca finished writing his play.
The introduction by Eric Southworth addresses the main issues of
the play and the issues involved in translating it.