Blood wedding

Federico García Lorca

Blood Wedding

(Bodas de sangre)

1933

A tragedy in three acts and seven scenes

Act I


A. S. Kline © 2007 All Rights Reserved
This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose. Permission to perform this version of the play, on stage or film, by amateur or professional companies, and forcommercial purposes, should be requested from the translator,
mailto:tonykline@yahoo.com.





Contents

Cast List (in order of appearance) 4
Act I Scene 1 5
Act I Scene 2 13
Act I Scene 3 21
Act II Scene 1 32
Act II Scene 2 46
Act III Scene 1 62
Act III Scene 2 75

Cast List (in order of appearance)


Bridegroom
Mother of the Bridegroom
Neighbour
Mother-in-law ofLeonardo
Wife of Leonardo
Leonardo
Young Girl
Maid to the Bride
Father of the Bride
Bride
Wedding Guests
Woodcutters
Moon
Death, as a Beggar-woman
Girls from the village
Women in mourning

Act I Scene 1


(A room painted yellow)

BRIDEGROOM: (entering) Mother.

MOTHER: What?

BRIDEGROOM: I’m off.

MOTHER: Where to?

BRIDEGROOM: To the vineyard (He makes as if to leave)MOTHER: Wait.

BRIDEGROOM: What is it?

MOTHER: Your lunch, my son.

BRIDEGROOM: Never mind. I’ll eat grapes. Give me a knife.

MOTHER: And why?

BRIDEGROOM: To cut them

MOTHER: (muttering) Knives, knives…Curse them all, and the wretch who invented them…

BRIDEGROOM: Let’s change the subject.

MOTHER: And shotguns, and pistols, and little razors, and even hoes and winnowing hooks.BRIDEGROOM: Fine.

MOTHER: Whatever can cut through a man’s body, a lovely man, in the flower of his life, who is off to the vines or the olives, because they are his, his family’s….

BRIDEGROOM: (Lowering his head) You’ve missed the point.

MOTHER: …and he doesn’t return. Or if he does return it’s so we can lay a palm leaf or a big plate of salt on him so the body won’t swell. I don’tknow how you can carry a knife about you, or why I have these serpent’s teeth in my kitchen.

BRIDEGROOM: Are you done yet?

MOTHER: If I lived a hundred years I could speak of nothing else. First, your father, who brought me the scent of carnations, and enjoyed me three short years, and then, your brother…is it right, is it possible that so small a thing as a pistol or a knife can do for a man,a bull of a man? I’ll never be quiet. The months pass and pain still pricks my eyes, to the very roots of my hair.

BRIDEGROOM: Are we finished?

MOTHER: No. We are not finished. Can anyone give me back your father or your brother? And they talk about prison. What is prison? They still eat there, they smoke; they play their instruments! My dead push up the grass, silently turning to dust; twowho were like flowers….the killers, in prison, coolly gazing at the mountains…

BRIDEGROOM: Do you want me to kill them?

MOTHER: No…if you want to know, it’s this…How can I not speak when you go through that door? It’s this…I don’t like you carrying a knife. It’s this…I wish you wouldn’t go to the fields.

BRIDEGROOM: (Laughing) Come now!

MOTHER: I wish you were a woman. You’d not go tothe river now, and we would sit and sew.

BRIDEGROOM: (Taking his mother’s arm and laughing) Mother, what if I took you with me to the vineyard?

MOTHER: What use is an old woman in a vineyard? Are you going to lay me down under the vines?

BRIDEGROOM: (Taking her in his arms) Old, so old, so very old.

MOTHER: Your father would take me along. He was of the true race. Good blood. Yourgrandfather left offspring everywhere. That’s what I love. Man, man, harvest, harvest.

BRIDEGROOM: And I, mother?

MOTHER: You, what?

BRIDEGROOM: Must I say it again?

MOTHER: (Seriously) Ah!

BRIDEGROOM: You think it’s wrong?

MOTHER: No

BRIDEGROOM: Then…?

MOTHER: I just don’t know. Suddenly, like this, it always takes me by surprise. I know she’s a good girl. It’s true isn’t...