Cover
Alternate Cover
The main idea for the set
Green-House with stained glass
Green-House without stained glass
I decided to portray Bernarda Alba’s house, as a green-house. The idea grew out of Lorca’s repeated allusions to heat. Heat functions as a multi-dimensional symbol in the play. It symbolizes Bernarda’s oppressive character and dominating nature, her fury and ferocity towards her daughters, but also the women’s pent-up sexual desire and consequent frustration - which take physical form in the fan and lemonade. Just like plant-life in a green-house, this isolated, ‘hot and humid’ psychic environment is conducive for cultivating divergent, strange and extreme, personalities, behaviors and relations.
After her husband’s death Bernarda imposes strict measures of mourning on herself and her daughters. The addition of the stained glass, serves as an allusion to this religious dimension. The austere, controlled and mournful interior of Bernarda Alba’s green-house is juxtaposed to the wild-vegetation, seen outside the greenhouse panels, engulfing it. This ‘wild, natural garden’ growing in the yard, is where sexual desire roams freely in the form of Pepe Romano.
The color-palette used is based on Lorca’s own choices: white, black and green, with my own addition of purple. Black symbolizes oppression, isolation and death. White serves as a visual representation of sterility, purity and austerity. Green portrays passion, sexual desire/lust (quite often in Hispanic culture), jealousy but also death in much of Lorca’s poetry. Purple is mostly used to symbolize mourning.
Bernarda and her daughters are mostly clad in black, with some touches of purple. Later on Adela rebels and dons a green dress. Her rebellion and love affair have transformed her into both a passionate subject and an object of jealousy. She is also the only one to die. Bernarda Alba’s ‘green’-house, mostly consists of white or off-white and semi-transparent textures, with black beams giving it structure. The only ‘green’ wall appears in the back, colored by the outside world of sexual and emotional freedom. Spirituality is visually embodied in the stained glass, with purple as its primary color.
After her husband’s death Bernarda imposes strict measures of mourning on herself and her daughters. The addition of the stained glass, serves as an allusion to this religious dimension. The austere, controlled and mournful interior of Bernarda Alba’s green-house is juxtaposed to the wild-vegetation, seen outside the greenhouse panels, engulfing it. This ‘wild, natural garden’ growing in the yard, is where sexual desire roams freely in the form of Pepe Romano.
The color-palette used is based on Lorca’s own choices: white, black and green, with my own addition of purple. Black symbolizes oppression, isolation and death. White serves as a visual representation of sterility, purity and austerity. Green portrays passion, sexual desire/lust (quite often in Hispanic culture), jealousy but also death in much of Lorca’s poetry. Purple is mostly used to symbolize mourning.
Bernarda and her daughters are mostly clad in black, with some touches of purple. Later on Adela rebels and dons a green dress. Her rebellion and love affair have transformed her into both a passionate subject and an object of jealousy. She is also the only one to die. Bernarda Alba’s ‘green’-house, mostly consists of white or off-white and semi-transparent textures, with black beams giving it structure. The only ‘green’ wall appears in the back, colored by the outside world of sexual and emotional freedom. Spirituality is visually embodied in the stained glass, with purple as its primary color.
Costumes
