Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding)

Mauricio Lasansky

This image was influenced by the Spanish author Federico Garcia Lorca's tragedy 'Bodas de sangre' of 1932 which was performed in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the early 1930s.

Theatre critics often group 'Blood Wedding' with Lorca's 'Yerma' and 'The House of Bernarda Alba' as the "rural trilogy". Lorca's planned "trilogy of the Spanish earth" remained unfinished at the time of his death, as he did not include 'The House of Bernarda Alba' in this group of works.

The protagonists of Blood Wedding are ordinary women confronting their own passionate natures and rebelling against the constraints of Spanish society. The unnamed bride in Blood Wedding runs away from her wedding reception with her former suitor, Leonardo, who is married. Death, in the person of a beggar, leads the frustrated bridegroom to the guilty couple. The men kill each other, leaving the bereaved women—Leonardo’s wife, the bridegroom’s mother, and the bride—to bewail their losses.