His exposure to the avant-garde strengthened Lorca’s growing determination to rejuvenate his writing. Even before coming to Madrid, he had begun to distance himself from the florid excesses of his earliest work. But he found it hard to do any actual writing in the capital. At the Residencia he worked intermittently, distractedly. Propped in bed or hunched over a table, he scribbled lines of verse on pieces of paper, which he then carried in his pockets and subsequently lost.
Although he had nothing more than a preliminary draft of the script with which to work, Gregorio Martínez Sierra began rehearsals for Lorca’s unfinished play in early March 1920. The untitled work was a full-length poetic drama about a young male cockroach who dreams of an “impossible” love and dies when he finds it in the guise of a wounded white butterfly. Aesthetically the subject was both out-moded and preposterous. Lorca was sensitive to its shortcomings, but hoped nonetheless to profit from the work. “According to Martínez Sierra’s calculations, if the cockroaches succeed, I’ll earn a respectable sum of money,” he told his parents.
Once rehearsals were underway, Lorca took an active role in the play’s production and made a concerted effort to finish his script. He paid close attention to Martínez Sierra’s work each night, offered frequent suggestions, and submitted fresh revisions of the script by day. He found the business of staging a play compelling work. After years of watching puppet shows and pageants, of attending plays and Mass, and then staging his own versions of these activities at home, he had a sharp, if untutored, sense of the theater and its power to move an audience. He had never forgotten the effect his mother had achieved in his childhood with her dramatic reading of Victor Hugo’s Hernani to the family servants. At the end of Doña Vicenta’s recital the maids had wept, much as Martínez Sierra’s actors had cried after hearing Lorca read his play to them for the first time—or so Lorca boasted. He described his reading as “the greatest success I have had in my short literary life.” To a friend he later confessed, “I have to do theater. In the theater passions are expressed with a strength one cannot find in lyric poetry.”
Victor Hugo was both an indirect and a direct influence on Lorca’s play about cockroaches. Lorca had long subscribed to Hugo’s Franciscan belief in the spiritual superiority of animals and, like the French novelist, wrote movingly of small animals, plants, and insects in his work. In one of his earliest plays, an unfinished “dramatic poem” called “On Love. Animal Theater,” he composed a long dialogue between a dove and a pig.
But if Hugo, and by extension Saint Francis, inspired the subject matter of Lorca’s play for Martínez Sierra, its principal argument—“that love springs forth with equal intensity on all planes of life”—came from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play Lorca once claimed had “poisoned” his soul. In fact, Shakespeare’s comedy nourished his imagination, for it prompted him to see love as a haphazard phenomenon, a conceit that in turn bolstered his dawning suspicion that all kinds of love are valid.
Lorca acknowledged his debt to Shakespeare in the prologue to his play, a long exposition by the work’s “author,” a poet, on the drama’s origins and significance. The “poet” explains to his audience that even the most repulsive of nature’s creatures can experience love—hence the appearance of an ungainly cockroach, Curianito, in the play’s leading role. Curianito displays many of the qualities that marked Lorca as a teenager. He possesses a “yellow mole” on his leg and “a poet’s dreamy eyes.” His fellow cockroaches taunt him. A poet and a visionary, Curianito dreams of love but fails to attain it. He struggles to comprehend the cruelty of a God (“St. Cockroach”) who deliberately wills his creatures to suffer. He longs to return to childhood, to “call my mother as I did when a boy.”
The object of Curianito’s passion is a beautiful white butterfly with a broken wing, whose true identity is revealed during an eerie moonlight soliloquy. “For I am death / and beauty,” she says, plaintively moving her wings. The butterfly’s words confirm what the poet has suggested in the prologue, that “Death disguises itself as Love!”—a concept central both to the play and to Lorca’s vision. By the end of the drama both Curianito and his beloved butterfly have died, proving that love brings only suffering, never joy.
Little actually happens in the play. Written in verse, the work is a protracted investigation of the same themes that dominate Lorca’s adolescent poetry and prose. Occasionally a musical or dance interlude interrupts the dialogue, and the insects’ lavish costumes offer some visual distraction. But the characters speak in one voice, Lorca’s, and there is virtually no conflict, merely suffering. Despite his ripe theatrical imagination, Lorca did not yet know how to compose for the stage. He drew many of his ideas for plot and stagecraft from Maeterlinck, whose lyrical style, use of allegory, and preoccupation with death appealed to his sensibility. But Lorca lacked the means to invoke these devices in any but the most plodding of ways. His trite use of symbolist iconography—moonlight, dusk, stars, dawn, flowers—only heightened the play’s unintentional humor. Although he meant his fable about insect life to express profound human truths, Lorca failed to see how funny it was.
Rehearsals did not go smoothly. Despite the play’s flaws, Lorca’s father had agreed to pay Martínez Sierra’s costs, and the director was keen to rush the script into production. Lorca himself was now ambivalent about the work. Well into rehearsals, he was still unable to come up with a title for the play. The company’s producers complained that without a title they could not advertise the drama.
There were further problems. The first set designs, by Rafael Barradas, were unacceptable, and new ones had to be substituted. Lorca watched with increasing alarm as Martínez Sierra forged ahead with the production, the director’s faith in the troubled play intact. As opening night drew near, Lorca felt what he later described as a “mute anguish” at the thought of his name being plastered across town on posters advertising the work. Eventually he lost all confidence and convened a meeting of his Rinconcillo colleagues to appraise the situation. He told his friends he intended to withdraw the work from production. He had already drafted a letter to his father, asking Don Federico to reimburse Martínez Sierra’s expenses to date. His friends argued against it. If he were to back out now, they advised, he would be hard put to find another producer in the future. Reluctantly, Lorca agreed to persevere. But he declined an offer from Madrid’s La Tribuna to contribute a self-critique of his play to the paper’s theater section.