Working with a recent English translation by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata, Baxindine has designed a languid, hauntingly lovely set of melodies to which several of the characters sing their poetry--Yerma's dream-monologues, a shepherd song by Victor, a complex six-part song by the village washerwomen--as well as incidental music. Exquisitely performed by Baxindine on piano and Marianne McPherson '01 on flute (filling in for regular Lori Sonderegger), the music fills the space of Old Library and combines with the delicate shifting of the light and the dreamlike lyricism of the poetry to create an atmosphere of dreamlike and rare beauty.

Yerma is an admirable and intriguing example of Garcia Lorca's attempts to revitalize the tradition of Spanish drama. Its themes are simultaneously fundamental and extremely complex and manifold--the ancient theme of the cyclicality of nature and of female fertility is beaten into the viewer like a hammer. But at the same time the play presents us with a vision of one in whom that cycle is broken--"blocked up," as many of the play's characters repeat of Yerma--and asked to try to understand, with Yerma, the meaning of this arresting of the natural cycle in terms of "fate" and of morality.

The fact that "God," evidently arbitrarily, refuses to help Yerma calls sharply into question the idea of a just and merciful God; the notion that Yerma ought to accept her "fate" as a childless woman is caught up in her husband's insistence that she accept her "woman's place" within the walls of her house, never straying outside to the wild world that tempts her mysteriously. Garcia Lorca's complaints against the oppression of women come through sharply in some of the ideas which Yerma herself embodies: when Juan suggests that she resign herself to being childless, she reproaches him, saying, "Men have another life--their flocks, their orchards, their conversations! Women only have their children and caring for their children."

Similarly, the suggestion that Yerma try to have a child with a man other than her husband is rebuffed by her with the insistence that she must maintain her family's "honor": "It is a burden that all [families] must bear." This is the very same "honor" which Juan feels is threatened by the very notion of women not being "shut up inside their houses."

All these elements--the questioning of traditional Spanish social patriarchy, of the established Church, of conventional morals--are the elements that caused suspicion and silencing to fall upon the play's author, and caused the decades-long censorship of his works. It is valuable to have these ideas spoken aloud again. After all, that's one of the themes of Yerma--naming the unspeakable. As Yerma herself says: "There are things locked up behind the walls that can never change, because nobody hears them! But if they suddenly exploded, they would shake the world."

At the same time, there is a certain uncertainty which surrounds all of Garcia Lorca's work: however lucid the image, the atmosphere remains more beautiful than the real, somehow symbolic, like a beautiful dream. We never know exactly why Yerma does not become pregnant. Moriarity's old woman would have it that Juan is infertile; the traditional wisdom of the village gossips suggests that Yerma is infertile because she somehow doesn't really want or deserve a child; Yerma herself rages against the "fate" whichs eems to have condemned her. Depending on which system of values the viewer uses to read the play--the rational, the magical, the spiritual and pre-ordained--the meaning is different, the mystery has a different solution.

And this, too, is part of Lorca's aesthetic goal. As the poet once wrote, "Only mystery makes us live." Combining the lucid with the ambiguoius, the symbolic with the earthy, the beautiful with the terrible, Lorca's vision is onw which deserves to be more widely performed and appreciated. As we approach the centennial anniversary of his death, and as his native country gears up for a massive celebration of his literary legacy, it's appropriate that such fine performances of his drama be performed in other languages--celebrating a poignant delicacy of speech which maintains its painful beauty, even in translation