Sterility Rite

Yerma means barren in Spanish, and the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater means barren in English. The latest fiasco produced by the team of Herbert Blau and Jules Irving is a work of the late Federico Garcia Lorca, a gifted poet but an inept dramatist. For two hours, without intermission, the heroine Yerma (Gloria Foster) yearns publicly and privately to have a baby. The playgoer comes out of this hot bathos convinced that this Spanish , town could certainly use an adoption agency.

Actually, Yerma is no-barren. It is her husband Juan (Frank Langella) who is sterile -- and doesn't want any babies around the house anyway. An old crone offers her son as an inseminative agent, but Lorca cannot let Yerma commit adultery because he intends the play as a tragic stalemate between honor and instinct. Surrounded by women who take a sensual delight in their fecundity, poor Yerma is reduced to beating her breasts and moaning, "I feel two blows of a hammer here instead of my baby's mouth."

This characteristic infelicity of image and language shows how Poet-Translator W. S. Merwin has diluted Lorca's intense lyricism, which in Spanish almost sustains the play. Having no place to go, the play capsizes into melodrama, with Yerma strangling her husband to death in the last scene.

Director John Hirsch has imposed a death-march pace on the drama, though he has a gift for composing some tableaux that unfold with the dreamy slow-motion grace of an underwater ballet. Smoldering with anger and frustration, Gloria Foster commands the stage but cannot control her part. Her vocal range tends to be loud, louder, loudest, and she has yet to learn that the seat of passion is not the larynx.

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