About the Play:

Yerma is a full-length drama by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Gwynne Edwards. The story of a childless wife in rural Spain grappling with pressures surrounding reproduction and gender roles in relation to her husband. Yerma critiques societies that deny women the ability to choose their life paths – or judge them for their choices.

Yerma (meaning 'Barren' in Spanish) is the compelling and elemental tale of a woman's quest for a child that taps into some of the most universal themes of theatre – love, passion, sexuality, marriage. In a remote Spanish village Yerma, a woman full of life and passion, longs for a child but is unable to conceive. The woman's barrenness becomes a metaphor for her marriage in a traditional society that denies women sexual or social equality. Her Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility drives her to commit a terrible crime at the end of the play. Yerma is one of three tragic plays about peasants and rural life that make up Federico Garcia Lorca's 'rural trilogy'.

This Student Edition is bilingual with the original Spanish on the left hand pages and the English translation on the facing page. It comes complete with a full introduction; plot synopsis; commentary on characters, context and themes; bibliography; chronology, and questions for study.

Yerma premiered in 1934 at the Teatro Espanol in Madrid, to great acclaim, on the eve of the Spanish Civil war.

Cast: 13 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Lorca is one of the few indisputably great dramatists of the twentieth century." — The Observer

About the Playwright:

Federico García Lorca was born in 1898, in Andalusia, Spain. A poet and dramatist, and also a gifted painter and pianist, his early popular ballads earned him the title of 'poet of the gypsies'. In 1930 he turned his attention to theatre, visiting remote villages and playing classic and new works for peasant audiences. In 1936, shortly after the outbreak of Civil War, he was murdered by Nationalist partisans. His body was never found.