Overlooked No More: Margarita Xirgu, Theater Radical Who Staged Lorca’s Plays

When Margarita Xirgu met Federico García Lorca in the summer of 1926 at a bar in Madrid, he was a fledgling playwright on whom no director would take a chance.

But Xirgu, a Catalan actress and director who was also a lesbian and a political radical, was known for her willingness to take risks. She accepted the challenge, and staged Lorca’s “Mariana Pineda” in Barcelona the next year, with costumes by artist Salvador Dalí.

The play was a hit, and it cemented a friendship between Lorca and Xirgu, who became instrumental in staging and exporting his work in the early years of the 20th century. Lorca went on to become one of Spain’s most admired writers.

“She took a big chance on him,” said Christopher Maurer, a Lorca scholar at Boston University. “He wasn’t a playwright; he was a poet.” Because of her left-leaning views, he said, “people called her ‘Margarita La Roja’ ” — Margarita the Red, a communist threat to Gen. Francisco Franco’s right-wing dictatorship.

Besides being close friends, Lorca and Xirgu “were part of this gay demimonde, and were as ‘out’ as you could be in that era,” said Andrea Weiss, whose latest documentary, “Bones of Contention,” explores lesbian and gay repression in Franco’s Spain. “It was one of those well-known secrets.”

In Spain, “they made an icon out of Lorca, but this lesbian who was out there supporting him and encouraging him — he became so famous, he eclipsed her,” Weiss said.

Margarita Xirgu i Subirà was born on June 18, 1888, in Molíns de Rey, in the Catalan region of Spain. She began her theater career in Barcelona in 1906 and then joined the Teatro Principal in 1911, eventually becoming its director. Her presence on stage was electric, according to biographers, although she had to contend with casual misogyny and politically motivated disdain. César González-Ruano in Arriba, a fascist newspaper in Spain, called her acting style “pretentious, insufferable and monotonous.” Dalí likened her voice to “a wasp’s nest.”

But for Lorca she was a captivating actress who “threw handfuls of fire or pitchers of cold water at her audience,” Maurer said.

In publicity photos, her dark hair was a corona; parted on the side and presenting wild waves down to the nape of her neck. Her mouth was painted, her eyebrows were tweezed and her eyes were smoky — the look of silent film stars of that era.

By the 1930s she was one of the most revered Catalan actresses in history, playing long-suffering characters like Salomé, Joan of Arc and Medea onstage.

She also gained notoriety for playing the Virgin Mary in Rafael Alberti’s “Fermín Galán,” a 1931 leftist and Republican production in which she delivered the line “¡Abajo la monarquía!” (“Down with the monarchy!”).

By then the authoritarian regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera had fallen, in 1930, and a window of freedom had opened briefly under the Second Republic, as it was known, giving women the right to work, vote, divorce and obtain an abortion. During this time the country was led by a chaotic coalition government of leftists who opposed the rigid Catholicism of the Spanish ruling classes. Then the pendulum swung right, then left again in February 1936, when the Popular Front came to power. Five months later, the Spanish Civil War erupted, when fascist forces led by Franco revolted against the democratically elected Republican government.

Xirgu was in Latin America when the war broke out, acting in and producing Lorca’s plays. He planned to join her in Mexico, but he was in the middle of writing “La Casa de Bernarda Alba,” his tragic masterwork, and he was pining over his lover Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. So he decided to stay in Spain. That month, Franco’s soldiers found him in Granada, dragged him into a field and shot him to death.

Xirgu learned of Lorca’s death before a staging of “Yerma” (“Barren”), his play about a woman who is so desperate to have children that she kills her husband in anger. Grief-stricken, Xirgu changed the woman’s lament from “I myself have killed my son” to “They have murdered my son.”

Xirgu was living in Argentina when Franco took power in 1939. As a leftist and a lesbian, she could not return home and expect to survive the dictatorship. While in exile, she created theater companies in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.

“She left everything in Spain and forged a different life where she had political agency,” said Maria Delgado, a theater and film scholar in London.

As was the case for many lesbians at the time, marriage to a man was a common means of insuring financial and cultural survival. Xirgu married twice, the first time to Josep Arnall, the son of a well-to-do family, who died in 1936, and five years later to Miguel Ortín, an actor who became the manager of her company. In between husbands, she had a relationship with Irene Polo, a Catalan journalist and leftist who accompanied her on tour. Polo killed herself in 1942. Xirgu had no children.

In Buenos Aires, Xirgu’s staging of Albert Camus’ play “Le Malentendu” (“Cross Purpose”) was cut short during the Perón dictatorship, purportedly because of its “distressing bleakness.” But that did not stop her from continuing to mount bold, experimental productions.

She went on to Uruguay to direct the National Comedy in Montevideo; the Municipal School of Dramatic Art there is named after her.

“She’s recognized as a godmother of the craft of acting in Latin America,” Delgado said.

Walter Vidarte, a Uruguayan actor who worked with Xirgu, said of her impact, “When her poetry joined with Lorca’s, it turned into something huge, exceptional, that paralyzed people.”

Xirgu proposed returning to Spain in 1949, but she remained a political pariah there, and when the Francoist press heard of her plan, it attacked the idea. She died in Montevideo on April 25, 1969, and her remains were shipped to her hometown in Molins de Rei in 1988, more than a decade after Franco’s death. Before she died, she reportedly said that the ancient Greeks had been right: Exile was the worst punishment.