About the play: Lorca’s most controversial, audacious and innovative play. This was his last work for the stage, finished only days before his assassination. This daring insight into man’s most intimate feelings and longing for freedom shows how the Andalusian poet was on the brick of the most experimental phase of his creativity –dreamlike, extravagant and brazenly explicit. Lorca himself said: “It is the best I have written for theater”

Notes from the Director: Somewhere on this planet, there does exist the definitive and complete script of El Publico that García Lorca gave to a unnamed typist to put into final form. But that copy still has not been found. What we offer here is the version that Rafael Martínez Nadal salvaged and edited by working from the only retrieved version of the manuscript, one that had the first few pages of the play written on pieces of stationary from the Hotel La Unión in La Havana, Cuba, and that had other pages missing. Lorca finished the play in Spain in August, 1930, but the determined order of the remaining scenes are also a source of speculation.

In his book, Federico García Lorca, A Life, Ian Gibson wrote: “You can’t help but see reflected in El Publico, as you also do in many of his poems in New York, the anguish that overcame the poet when his relationships with Dalí and Aladrén came apart, and his attempt to face his own homosexuality along with the problems of living a double life in public”. Through that train of thought, it isn’t far fetched to see the mirror of his own existence that Lorca used to create the harsh recriminations which the characters hurl at each other, the twisted jealousies that torment them, and the vitriolic explosions of rancor that constantly call into doubt the validity of love.

Foreshadowing Orfeo by Cocteau, El Público is an exceptional and revolutionary work in many senses – for its transcendence of the limits imposed by surrealism, creating a dream-like quality but without giving into the dictates of the unconscious; for its unflinching criticism of  contemporary theater; for its so far-ahead-of-its-time dealing with homoeroticism; and finally, for the almost infinite number of possible interpretations it offers the reader of spectator.

El Público is a cruel work and movingly romantic, erotic, violent, upsetting and unsettling. It is a work that, like our dreams, continually transforms itself, changing its substance and density, maddening us and seducing us, permitting no peace. From my own experience, I can say that it is impossible to be a part of this work and remain unchanged by it.

I have intended this as homage to the courage of a man assassinated by intolerance in the hope that we can fully comprehend the horror of the loss of a poet and the works that he’ll never write.

Yayo Grassi

About the author: Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Spain on June 5, 1898. He arguably is the poet of contemporary Spanish most universally known, his work rivaling Don Quixote by Cervantes in terms of world wide recognition.

Lorca’s inexhaustible and explosive genius created poetry, theater, essays, music, drawings; he directed theater and compiled popular folk treasures. While all that, as captured in his published work, is well-known and admired by the majority of people, much of his private life remained cloaked in a veil of mystery. Speculations about his sexual orientation, for example, still provoke controversy, even in light of exhaustive biographies, such as the one by his personal friend, Rafael Martínez Nadal, or the more recent and respected ones by Ian Gibson.

Gibson examines in extensive detail Lorca’s desperate love for the painter Salvador Dalí, his torturous relations with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo, and towards the end of Lorca’s life, his passion for Rafael Rodriguez Rapún. But they are anecdotes told by third parties. So what better way to truly discover Lorca’s desperation than by turning to what he himself wrote in El Público?

Lorca died in Fuente Grande in 1936.

Cast

First Scene – Director’s room

Servant…………………………………. Nino Guillen

Director…………………………………. Luis Caram

White Horse…………………………….. Alejandro Riesco

Black Horse………………………….…. Joaquin Martinez

Man 1…………………………………… Jaime Florez

Man 2…………………………………… Betto Ortiz

Man 3…………………………………… Carla McKinney

Harlequin……………………………….. Claudia Torres

Poppy Woman…….……………………. Isabel Otero

Helen…………………………………… Elba Laino

Man in Eláter…….……………………... Eduardo Diaz

Second Scene – Roman Ruin

Character in vine leaves……………………. Mauricio Tscherny

Character in Bells……..……………………. Arturo Martínez

Young Boy………………………Iwan Bagus, Tristan del Canto

Centurion…….……………………………... Eduardo Díaz

Emperor………….…………………………. David Bradley

Director, Mar 1, Man 2, Man 3 

Third Scene – Juliet Sepulcher 

Juliet.……………………………………. Carla Nakatani

The Harlequin Costume…………………... Claudia Torres

White Horse, Black Horse, Man 1,

Man 2, Man 3, Director

(?) Scene – Blue Curtain

The Silly Shepherd……………………………. Gerard Ender 

Fifth Scene – Red Nude Scene

Nude…..…………………………………… Betto Ortiz

Male Nurse…………………………………. Luis Caram

Student 1…….…..…………………………. Luis Trujillo

Student 2…………………………………… Arturo Martínez

Student 3…………………………………… Mauricio Tscherny

Student 4……………………………………. Nino Guillen

Student 5...............................Joaquin Andreas

Lady 1.……………………………………… Vera Soltero

Lady 2………………………………………. Elba Laino

Lady 3………………………………………. Isabel Otero 

Sixth Scene – Director’s room

Prestidigitator……………………………….. Gerard Ender

Madam…………………………………….. Vera Soltero

Director, Servant, The Harlequin Costume