Lorca's Experimental Theater

Critical and historical discussions of the life and work of Federico García Lorca, Spain's foremost poet and playwright of the twentieth century, often obscure the author's more avant-garde dramatic works. In Lorca's Experimental Theater, Andrew A. Anderson focuses on four of Lorca's most challenging plays Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, El público, Así que pasen cinco años, and El sueño de la vida (previously known as Comedia sin título) and on the surrounding context in which they came to be written and in only one case performed during his lifetime. While none of Lorca's plays can be considered conventional, these four works stand out in his corpus for challenging theatrical conventions most forcefully, both thematically and technically.With discussions of stagecraft, artistic modernism, and the historical avant-garde, Lorca's Experimental Theater provides detailed interpretive readings of the four plays, surveys their textual and performative history, and examines the most important contemporary influences on Lorca's creation of these expressive, innovative works.

Both students and specialists will be grateful for this lucidly written book, an ambitious and insightful rereading and remapping of Federico García Lorca's experimental theater one which guides us masterfully through some of the playwright's most challenging works. - Christopher Maurer, editor of Lorca's Collected Poems and Selected Verse ""Anderson offers readers an insightful account of Lorca's dramatic trajectory and the ways in which his experimental theater often metatheater pushed the boundaries of theatrical convention. Anderson's detailed readings of plays, combined with treatments of Lorca's influences, from Broadway to Expressionism, persuade us both of Lorca's modernity and of his place within the historical avant-garde."" - Federico Bonaddio, author of Federico García Lorca: The Poetry in All Things ""Anderson has written a groundbreaking study of Lorca's avant-garde theater. He convincingly interprets the plays as Expressionist debates on theater and truth, personal identity and political commitment."" - James Valender, professor, Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios, El Colegio de Mexico

Andrew A. Anderson, professor emeritus of Spanish at the University of Virginia, is the author of Configurations of a Cultural Scene: Young Artists and Writers in Madrid, 1918-1930 and many other works. He is the editor of nine critical editions of Lorca's writings, among them the first scholarly edition of the original manuscript of Poeta en Nueva York.