When Federico García Lorca was only eight years old, he began eavesdropping on neighbors’ conversations from the shared well that served his aunt Matilde’s home in Valderubbio, Spain. There, the curious and voyeuristic child gathered fragments of conversation between a domineering widow, Frasquita Alba, and her forlorn, enigmatic daughters. Unknowable to him at the time, these overheard exchanges would later inspire the character Bernarda Alba—the formidable matriarch in his most acclaimed play, La Casa de Bernarda Alba, a cornerstone of 20th-century Spanish theatre.
Next month, Ballroom Marfa will present La Casa de Bernarda Alba, directed by Richard Maxwell of New York City Players, at the Bull Room on April 10–11.
Lorca’s last play tells the story of Bernarda, an unbending mother obsessed with appearances, who, after the death of her second husband, imposes eight years of mourning on her five daughters and confines them within their home in a small Spanish village. Though set in a time and place where men boldly reign, they are never seen on stage; the play explores love, familial ties and control as an all-female cast transforms the home into a pressure chamber of power, longing and surveillance.
New York City Players is a nonprofit New York City-based experimental theatre company founded in 1999 by Maxwell to present his work. Since its founding, the company has produced around 30 new plays in New York and has toured in more than 20 countries worldwide.
The show was developed in collaboration with the New York City Players’ Incoming Theater Division, a program originally launched by Maxwell’s partner, Tory Vazquez, at Liberty High School Academy, a Manhattan school serving new immigrants. The ITD is currently led by Katiana Gonçales Rangel. Both Rangel and Vazquez, who also plays Bernarda, are committed to creating space for newcomers to develop their performance skills.
Presented entirely in Spanish, the production features both members of New York City Players and locally-cast performers, curated by Carolyn Pfeiffer and Fatima Anaza.
Maxwell, born in Fargo, North Dakota, and a New York resident for over two decades, was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2018. During his time in Marfa, he presented two works: Ads, a performance featuring approximately 30 local community members in an unoccupied section of Chinati’s Ice Plant building during Chinati Weekend; later that year, he directed his musical theater piece Ode to the Man Who Kneels, staged on the slab of an old fort building on the Chinati grounds.
“Every year my visits to Marfa got longer and longer,” says Maxwell, who owns a home in town and returned this past July to scout the Bull Room for the performance—one of the most exciting aspects of the production. “It’s a rural story, and Spanish language is a part of that story, very obviously … So to do this play in Marfa—in a former bull barn, when there’s mention of ‘the corral’ in the play … The correspondences are hard to deny.”
The production speaks to West Texas’ deep-rooted Spanish-speaking and Latinx communities, affirming the importance of seeing one’s own language and culture reflected on stage. While the production’s arrival in the U.S./Mexican borderlands feels timely, Maxwell emphasises that his desire to bring the play to Far West Texas is personal. “I keep going back to how much I loved doing theatre in Marfa—in a way it’s a dream come true to have a collaboration with our New York production and local people.”
Maxwell cites Vance Knowles’ enthusiasm for the show and his “intention to preserve the essential character of the Bull Room as they convert it into a performance venue” as key in making the production possible. “I’m proud to continue and contribute to this experiment.”
Maxwell likewise attributes part of this story to Christopher Wool, whom he met during his first trip to Marfa in 2016. Wool later approached him about creating a play to accompany his exhibition See Stop Run, which opened in a vacant, raw office building at 101 Greenwich in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in March 2024. Ultimately, Wool’s show was staged on the 19th floor, and the production premiered on the ground floor that June, selling out for three consecutive weeks during its month-long run. The performance was staged alongside two of Wool’s tangled barbed wire sculptures, and his work will also be featured in the Marfa production. “A lot of strands in this story are coming together in a really meaningful way,” Maxwell says.
Federico García Lorca wrote La Casa de Bernarda Alba on the eve of the Spanish Civil War and never saw it produced; two months after completing the play, he was assassinated by Nationalist forces in the conflict’s early weeks. Though he never witnessed a public staging, he specifies white walls in his stage directions, perhaps intuiting how powerfully the black mourning dresses would register with an audience—their light-absorbing intensity forming a stark contrast with the bright, bare walls.
Smitten with Lorca’s characters, Maxwell wrote a sequel to La Casa entitled Galicia, which was translated into Ukrainian and premiered at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater in Kyiv in August 2025. “I began to wonder what would happen the day after this tragic play ends,” Maxwell says. The production featured a Ukrainian cast drawn both from Maxwell’s Theater for Beginners workshop—held in Kyiv earlier that year—and through street casting.
“Theatre is off the hook—really popular there,” he says. “And since the full-scale invasion, other art forms aren’t like that, really … I like to think it’s because people want to be together during this time of war. The show sold out in minutes. I think it’s a testament to the value of live theatre.”
Galicia has been translated into Spanish, and Maxwell hopes to present it alongside La Casa as a double bill in the near future.
With respect to La Casa, one might readily note correspondences between its themes of surveillance and contemporary events, or the timeliness of staging a rural Spanish play within the context of the U.S./Mexican borderlands. “I’m interested in what happens to human behavior when it meets that kind of oppression. Not just oppression within the house but also a kind of societal pressure,” Maxwell says, regarding his enduring fascination in telling Lorca’s story. “And you can draw all kinds of parallels, which I’m reluctant to do, because I really prefer that the audience find them themselves.”
La Casa de Bernarda Alba will run two performances, Friday, April 10, and Saturday, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. at the Bull Room. The show is to be performed in Spanish with English supertitles. This program is free to attend. Tickets are required and available at Ballroom Marfa’s website.