Alejandro Casona

• Born: March 23, 1903
• Birthplace: Besullo, Spain
• Died: September 17, 1965
• Place of death: Madrid, Spain

Other Literary Forms

Alejandro Casona began his career as a poet but published only two slim volumes, of no particular distinction. He earned the Premio Nacional de Literatura (national prize for literature) in 1932 for his collection of myths retold for children, Flor de leyendas (1933; flower of legends). Otherwise, aside from some desultory contributions to literary criticism and a few translations, Casona wrote only for the stage and screen. His film credits include versions of several of his own plays, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House, 1880), and original screenplays.

Achievements

Alejandro Casona consistently enjoyed a rare combination of popular success and critical acclaim. His first performed drama, La sirena varada (the stranded mermaid), won for him the Lope de Vega Prize; moreover, Casona answered eighteen curtain calls at the premiere. Nuestra Natacha (our Natacha), a work of less artistic merit, had favorable reviews to go with its unbroken run of more than five hundred performances. Exiled during the Civil War, Casona took Latin America by storm. His old and new works played to packed houses from Havana to Buenos Aires, and he soon established himself as the most important dramatist in Argentina. His contemporaries hailed him for revitalizing the Spanish theater, and subsequent critics have confirmed that judgment. Casona, along with Federico García Lorca, deserves much credit for this dynamic resurgence, which continues to show its strength.

Biography

Alejandro Casona (Alejandro Rodríguez Álvarez) spent his entire life as an educator and a man of the theater. He was born in a tiny, remote village in Northern Spain to parents who taught in the local school. Casona trained for the same profession and worked regularly as a teacher and administrator until his exile. While stationed in the isolated Valle de Aráan, he began experimenting with drama, both as a teaching tool and for its own sake. After much initial frustration, he became an overnight success with the first performance of La sirena varada in 1934. Between 1931 and 1936, Casona combined his two callings as the director of Teatro del Pueblo (people’s theater), an institution dedicated to bringing culture to rural districts. Besides writing several short pieces for performances and handling administrative duties, he took part in several tours. He fled Spain in 1937 and began a triumphant sweep through Latin America, giving lectures and directing productions in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. In 1939, he settled in Buenos Aires, where he continued to compose new plays and began to write screenplays. After a long and productive residence in Argentina, he returned to Spain, where he died in 1965.

Analysis

Alejandro Casona combined, in his best work, an enlightened didacticism with the grace of a born playwright. As a professional man of the theater, he experimented with various kinds of drama. Nuestra Natacha, for example, has its source in Casona’s experience as a teacher and as director of Teatro del Pueblo. It conveys an overt and idealistic message and marks the only occasion on which Casona absolutely subordinated form to an idea. Las tres perfectas casadas (the three perfect wives), by contrast, is an uncharacteristically negative melodrama of betrayal and suicide, complete with an onstage shooting. In Casona’s best work, however, he explored the problem of human unhappiness and examined some of the means commonly adopted to combat that problem.

The three plays to be considered all unfold according to this general pattern: An individual, usually a young man, attempts to find happiness by espousing an artificial system—by creating an institution of sorts—that is designed to shut out the pain and ugliness of life. A young woman, rescued from suicide, enters the picture; she brings about change, ultimately for the better. The system fails as unpleasant reality breaches its walls, but the young man and woman embark on a new, more promising quest for happiness: They acknowledge the potential ugliness of life but transcend it through love. Though Casona repeatedly employed these themes, devices, and characters, he imbued them with a striking freshness in each new version, so that he never seemed to be merely rehashing a formula.

The permutations of a single theme in these three plays should give some idea of Casona’s command of his medium. Obliged by his values as an educator and a thinker to wrestle with the question of human happiness over and over again, he remained consistent without lapsing into monotony. His growth as a playwright kept pace with the increasing subtlety of his perceptions. In one sense, then, Casona’s distinction as a dramatist is related to his integrity. He had the courage to write on any theme (the Fascist regime in Spain banned his writings for years) but the artistic sense not to degenerate into preachment. Perhaps as closely as any playwright of his time, he approached the ideal of dulce et utile: His plays teach ethical lessons, but that ethic includes an abiding love for the beautiful. His protagonists reject falsehood and ugliness in favor of truth and beauty—not as abstractions, but as active principles of life. Casona followed his own teachings; he stood up for truth and sweetened it with some of the most finely crafted plays of the twentieth century.

La sirena varada

La sirena varada, the first of Casona’s plays to be staged, establishes the pattern. Ricardo, the protagonist, falls into a well-intentioned error: He tries to attain happiness by fiat, by founding a republic of “orphans of common sense.” Haunted by memories of an unhappy childhood, he strives for an irresponsible innocence, a life based on fantasy, into which no cold reason can intrude. A sign over the door—which somehow he never finds the time to put up—would read: “Let no one who knows geometry enter here.” He has chosen his companions carefully; besides a tolerant servant and a painter who insists on going about blindfolded, Ricardo has rented a ghost with the house. He has also summoned a circus clown to act as president, and life seems to be going along very well.

For all its charm, Ricardo’s grand scheme is unsound, even diseased. Even discounting the objections of the reasonable outsider, Don Florín, one cannot truly admire this republic: It is, simply, a despotism. Ricardo imposes his fantasy on the others with all the cruelty of youth. What seems at first to be romantic turns out to be merely decadent. Ricardo breakfasts in the middle of the night, as a puerile gesture of rebellion. They have run out of milk, so they subsist on coffee and rum. Rather than give up his rented ghost, the young despot convinces the timorous impostor that he is quite dead—the ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte—and obliges him to observe traditional haunting hours. He shows imagination, but no love.

The advent of Sirena, the putative mermaid, makes matters worse—though her presence will eventually help Ricardo to find a better answer. She delights his fancy with her faithful impersonation of a mermaid, but implicit in that identity is the image of death by drowning. As her role demands, she attempts to lure Ricardo into the depths. According to his own rules, he really ought to join her in her undersea palace. Indeed, to remain constant to his beliefs, he virtually must utter that other retort to unhappiness: suicide.

Fortunately, two factors impede this fatal misstep: the presence of Don Florín and Ricardo’s core of health, intelligence, and goodness. Don Florín, like so many later characters in Casona’s work, suffers the frustration of having found a way to live well without being able to impart it to the young people whom he loves. Despite Ricardo’s gibes, the reader never questions the soundness of Don Florín. Unfortunately, he can only offer advice—much of it unheeded—and watch, as Ricardo blunders toward his own solution. With such help as he accepts, though, Ricardo does make progress: He never shows much enthusiasm for suicide, even under pressure from Sirena, and his subsequent decisions are always based on his love for her rather than allegiance to his system.

As always, when characters in a Casona play lock the front door against reality, it slips in through a side entrance. The circus clown, Papá Samy, finally arrives; he turns out to be Sirena’s father and the bearer of a sorry truth: “Sirena” is quite insane. Ricardo once saved her from drowning—suicide—and she has been obsessed with him ever since. Even without such a tale to tell, Papá Samy would add little merriment to the place: He spends his time alternately getting drunk and reading the Bible.

This grim incursion comes almost as a relief to Ricardo. His love for the mysterious waif had already begun to change his values. Indeed, he had questioned her closely about her background, confessing that “this arbitrary life we’ve made for ourselves is starting to make me sick.” The clown’s revelations provide a pretext for abolishing most of the absurdities—and the cruelties—of the republic: The ghost becomes a gardener, the inhabitants adopt more regular habits, and Ricardo summons Don Florín back to restore Sirena—María—to her right mind.

Casona, however, does not permit Ricardo a facile turnaround. As Don Florín points out, the young dreamer has much to answer for, and merely behaving better does not excuse his earlier excesses. Nor has the falsehood of the establishment been completely exposed: Papá Samy has not told the whole truth, and Daniel, the so-called painter, continues to wear his blindfold. The third act of the play serves to reduce the remainder of Ricardo’s little castle in the air to rubble and to force him to live in the world, not outside it.

Thus far, the truth has been unfortunate but still touching; reality has been saddening, but wanly beautiful. In the third act, there is a drastic turn for the worse. Daniel’s blindfold, torn off at last by Ricardo, has covered eyes that were savaged by an explosion. Papá Samy, in his weakness, has bartered his daughter for beer. Ugliness on two legs enters, in the person of Pipo, circus owner and strongman. He has come to offer to sell Sirena to Ricardo, having had his fill of beating and raping her but reluctant to miss any chance of gouging some money.

This reeking embodiment of all that is sordid serves as a dragon to be routed. Improbably but inevitably, Ricardo puts the strongman to flight with a steely gaze and a calm threat. For all his muscles, Pipo functions primarily as a psychological menace. He leaves behind him the child in Sirena’s womb and the horror of his memory. For a moment, all that has been accomplished seems in danger of crumbling. Ricardo once again turns his back on reality, having begun to comprehend its full potential for ugliness, and urges a return to fantasy, to madness, to anything that will blot out the leering image of Pipo. This relapse sets up the ultimate victory: The poor little madwoman refuses to become a mermaid again, out of love for her unborn child and for Ricardo. He snaps out of his fit, and, as the play ends, “with infinite tenderness,” he calls her by her real name, María. Thus, rather than surrendering to Pipo or fleeing from him, Ricardo and María have transcended him. They will make reality both beautiful and happy through love. The child, though sired by Pipo, will become theirs.

The Lady of Dawn

The Lady of Dawn, written some ten years later, bears the marks of the playwright’s artistic maturity as well as of his exile. He avoids redundancy by changing the setting and by shifting the focus away from the young lovers. Ricardo founded his republic in a vague seaside house, sometime in the twentieth century. By contrast, The Lady of Dawn is set in Casona’s native Asturias, and he evokes the spirit and the folklore of the region with loving accuracy. The horses, mills, and festivals to which he alludes belong to no specific era: They obey a rhythm of life as old as Christian Spain. In this setting, it seems appropriate that the young couple should share the spotlight with the personification of death. Though Casona will eventually make many of the same points, the presence of the Lady Pilgrim lends the play a profound dignity that is lacking in La sirena varada.

Just as Ricardo imposed fantasy and illogic, so the Mother demands grief, silence, and immobility. She chooses to nurture the memory of her lost daughter by brooding, and she expects the same of everyone else. On this, the fourth anniversary of the disaster, she wants no talking, no playing, no work. Like Ricardo, she bases her existence on an imagination gone astray, turned unhealthy. The Angélica she mourns never was; the memories she strives to preserve are, in a sense, fabrications. Also like Ricardo, she has the force of personality to impose her system on others—if not totally, at least enough to darken the lives of those around her.

Don Florín recurs in duplicate, as the Grandfather and as Telva, the servant. The Grandfather embodies the compassion and selflessness of his precursor. Telva inherits, in enhanced form, the good sense, garrulity, and spry strength of Don Florín. Each remonstrates with the Mother but to no avail; both are wise but unable to change the situation. Like Don Florín, they can accomplish nothing until some outside element disrupts the system.

In the earlier play, Sirena acted as that disruptive factor. Although at first she seemed to aggravate Ricardo’s disease, she eventually drew him back to a real and healthy life. Similarly, Adela feeds the Mother’s obsession by taking Angélica’s place but subsequently cures the obsession by filling the void. Adela also resembles Sirena in her development: Rescued from drowning by her future husband, she makes the transition from would-be suicide to blissful beloved. Like Sirena, she takes over as the motivating force; the other characters discard the artificial and perverse ritual and do whatever they do for her sake.

Although Adela is the key to the plot, there can be no doubt that the Lady Pilgrim dominates the stage. She makes Death seem at once beautiful and tragic, incarnating as she does the tenderness of a woman and the implacability of doom. The Grandfather speaks for the audience in his hostile reception of the Lady Pilgrim and in his doubtful reflections as she begins to shake his prejudices. She has come for a life, as so often before—yet she leaves him wondering whether to resent or welcome her. Despite her role, she inspires compassion, even love. The children have no qualms; they accept her for her beauty and inveigle her into a game. In one of his most exquisite theatrical coups, Casona has her join in, laugh, and fall asleep, thus missing her dark appointment with Adela. Despite the error of the Mother—Casona frequently condemns parents who shut in their children—the power of life and joy persists and pulls off a miracle.

As in La sirena varada, the newcomer brings about a pervading but flawed bliss. Adela replaces Angélica and restores joy for everyone but Martín, the wifeless husband. He, alone, keeps her at a distance and continues to suffer. Eventually he reveals his plight: Angélica did not die, but rather fled with a lover, and so Martín is not free to follow his heart and begin a new life with Adela. He plans to flee the temptation. Not to be outdone in matters of self-sacrifice, she decides to drown herself to spare him this self-exile.

Angélica, oddly enough, functions in much the same way as Pipo. When Martín breaks down and tells the truth about her, the golden legend turns to mud. She compounds the ugliness by appearing in person, as a ragged and bitter floozy who threatens to drag virtually everyone down into the mire. Just as Sirena and Ricardo banished the gargoyle Pipo, however, so Death saves the situation here. Moved by compassion, she persuades Angélica to die in Adela’s stead. Angélica drowns and is washed up with flowers in her hair, in full view of the assembled villagers. Instead of becoming a byword for betrayal, she will remain fixed in local lore as a saint of romance. Adela, Martín, and the Mother are all freed by the sacrifice and can truly begin to live. Death has confirmed the womanly side of her nature; she has replaced ugliness with beauty and has actually enhanced life.

Casona’s nostalgia, as in the case of so many expatriates, lends a new depth of feeling to his work. Though he treats the same themes in both plays, The Lady of Dawn is the more moving and convincing. It depends on magic and ritual rather than whim and coincidence; it is anchored in the timeless reality of Asturias, not the private traumas of two little people. In short, the promise of La sirena varada is fulfilled in The Lady of Dawn: The brash innovator becomes an original craftsman, and Death enters to enrich the vision of life.

The Boat Without a Fisherman

In The Boat Without a Fisherman, Casona reworks his recurring themes into a starkly simple tale of sin and redemption. Ricardo Jordán, financier, speculator, and habitual exploiter of the widow and the orphan, has staked his happiness on success in the game of big business. As the scene opens, he is fuming dyspeptically in his office, with ruin staring him in the face. Right on cue, the Devil enters, resplendent in a business suit, to offer him a deal: Can he kill an unknown man, half a world away, with no risk of discovery? If so, his fortunes will be saved. Though already damned thrice over, Jordán hesitates; at last, simply by writing his name, he presumably kills Peter Anderson. To make his little experiment more interesting, however, the Devil lets Jordán hear Mrs. Anderson’s scream of bereavement—perhaps the only thing capable of reaching Jordán’s atrophied heart.

In this case, the playwright has chosen an artificial system known to all—the game of high finance. In consequence, he can dispose of it in the first act, without much ado. The wheeling and dealing that Jordán attempts to substitute for the natural activities of life has, at least on the stage, scant appeal. The underlings who scuttle in to fawn on Jordán after his Devil-aided coup serve to drive home an already obvious point: This is no way to live.

Estela Anderson, however, finds no better alternative. Like the Mother in The Lady of Dawn, she has allowed grief to take over; she clings to a grimly heroic pride and rules out the possibility of ever laughing or loving again. Even the presence of her mother—one of the most talkative, lively, and altogether delightful characters ever to grace a stage—cannot lighten the gloom she weaves about herself. To complicate matters, she suspects her sister’s husband of the murder, which cuts off a major source of financial help and emotional support. There is no hope of change from within; only a wind from the outside world can clear the air.

Renewed light and joy come from an unlikely but obvious quarter. Estela has the remembered glimpse of her husband being pushed into the sea; Jordán has never stopped hearing the echoes of her scream. His advent will enable both to lay their ghosts to rest. The sun, with its flawless sense of timing, begins to shine. Jordán becomes the talk of the town, a precocious fisherman and tireless helper; everyone dreads his departure. As usual, the first change is not enough. Estela still clings to her suspicion, and Jordán to his secret. The change will remain superficial until each has dealt with the canker within.

From this point, coincidence—thematically justified—takes over. Just as Jordán gathers the resolve to confess, Estela’s sister rushes in with the news that Cristián, the man whom Estela suspects, is dying. After some wavering, Estela goes to see him, accepts his confession, and forgives him, thus freeing herself from the burden of hatred. Jordán, meanwhile, learns that he has sinned only by intent; absolved of blood-guilt, he finds a loophole in his contract and foils the Devil by naming a new victim: the ruthless financier of the first act. By introducing Jordán to Estela, and thereby to love, the Devil has unwittingly set him on the road to salvation. The play ends with the reunion of Estela and Jordán, and the prospect of a hard-earned chance at happiness.

This play differs from Casona’s earlier treatments of the same theme in several respects. First, he makes use of a wholesale change of scene: Ricardo has his office, Estela her net-festooned cottage. The synthesis is evident in the stage directions: The house remains the same, but Ricardo has brought the sun from the south to change its aspect. This in turn points up another difference: Unlike the homeless waifs of the earlier plays, Estela stays at home and devises her own system; the man comes to her. He saves her from drowning only in a metaphorical sense; her despair and her suicide are subtle and require more than expert swimming for their cure. Ricardo Jordán has no leering Pipo to combat, only himself; Estela’s enemy is her own hatred, not the murderer. The self-defeating work of the Devil saves them both and gives yet another twist to the same enduring theme.

Bibliography

Díaz Castañón, Carmen. Alejandro Casona. Oviedo, Spain: Caja de Ahorros de Asturias, 1990. A biography of Casona, covering his writings and life. In Spanish.

Lima, Robert. Dark Prisms: Occultism in Hispanic Drama. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. In his discussion of the demonic pact in Spanish drama, Lima examines Casona’s plays Otra vez el diablo and The Boat Without a Fisherman.

Maio, Eugene A. “Mythopoesis in Casona’s La dama del alba.” Romance Notes 22 (1981): 132-138. An examination of Casona’s The Lady of Dawn.

Moon, Harold K. Alejandro Casona. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A basic biography of Casona that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.