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 – well, for a son – 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 madness and desperate action. Yerma is Federico Garcia Lorca's masterpiece.

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:

"What is the point of a woman if she is not, and cannot, be a mother?... It sounds grim... but Lorca is a genius, and, as layer upon layer of meaning, beauty, poetry unfolds, the stakes never diminish, but the, what, intellectual engagement, nourishes us as perhaps no writer bar Chekhov can deliver." — Broadway World

About the Playwright:

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a celebrated Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. 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 a fascist death squad, becoming perhaps the most prominent victim of Spain's three-year civil war. His body has never been found.