Five Plays: Comedies and Tragicomedies Book

I don't remember offhand the date I saw the Hippocket Theater in Fort Worth perform the play, The Butterfly's Evil Spell, but it was one of the better productions they've done. So much passion and heartbreak conveyed through bugs that it squirmed into my heart and created a longing inside me. I wanted to hold the play, read the words for myself, have them to cherish whenever the longing was too strong.

So I searched for a copy of the play, which I found years later in this volume. It's been probably three years since I bought the book yet had not read the works within. The costumes and set designs of the play have stayed with me all this time, so rather than begin on the first pages (including the introduction) I jumped straight to the final play, the one I saw years before. It was a beautiful as I remembered - better, because it was mine to keep.

Let me summarize the story of this play - in a field of beetles where poetry is present yet mocked and still there is love unrequited, an injured butterfly falls to the ground and it attended upon by those benevolent beetles. The hero of the play, Poet Beetle, falls in love with the butterfly, who thinks her life is over because she can no longer fly. The butterfly breaks the heart of this beetle when he tries to express his love for her as she tries to flee - then everything stops!

I remember this scene in at the Hippocket - the Poet Beetle circling the Butterfly as she beat her gossamer wings, frantic to escape, the lights flashing, the drums growing louder, then everything stopping. Try as I may, I cannot remember what happened after that. I am desperate now, you see, because according to the introduction, the original play ending is long gone - lost forever after the murder of Lorca. It's a shame, especially since the other four plays in this collection are nothing in comparison.

The other plays - "The Billy-Club Puppets", "The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife", "The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden", "Dona Rosita, the Spinster" - lacked the charm and innocence of the "Butterfly". Some didn't even make sense to me - like the "Billy-Club Puppets", when Don Cristobita was discovered to be a giant puppet with a wooden head. Or like in the Shoemaker's play - there seems to be jump to a moral that had no lead up; she was mean to him, he was a badgered husband. He leaves her, she suddenly misses him, he returns as a puppeteer to learn her true feelings. "Don Perlimplín" is a rehashing of the "Shoemaker's Wife", and by the time I reached "Dona Rosita" I had completely lost interest. It's a shame, too, because I really did love that production of "El Maleficio de la Mariposa." I would not call it a comedy by any means, not even a tragicomedy.
"In 1936, García Lorca was staying at Callejones de García, his country home, at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was arrested by Franquist soldiers, and on the 17th or 18th of August, after a few days in jail, soldiers took García Lorca to "visit" his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the Socialist ex-mayor of Granada whom the soldiers had murdered and dragged through the streets. When they arrived at the cemetery, the soldiers forced García Lorca from the car. They struck him with the butts of their rifles and riddled his body with bullets. His books were burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Franco's Spain. To this day, no one knows where the body of Federico García Lorca rests." - Poets.org