Myth, Motherhood and Desperation
Last Monday, about forty minutes into the final preview of Yerma at the Park Avenue Armory—Simon Stone’s breathtakingly intense Lorca adaptation from London’s Young Vic—an unhappy thud came out of the dark during a tricky scene change. The house lights rose, the show was paused for a half hour for “technical problems,” and then abruptly cancelled. I’d been rapt when the action stopped, not least because the scene just played was a pretty surprising addendum to a tale famously