A small colony of cockroaches lives in the centre of a flowery meadow. Doña Curiana (Lady Cockroach) is sad: her son, Curianito el Nene (Cockroach Junior) is a daydreaming poet, lost in stargazing. Against his mother’s wishes, who keeps insisting on it, he refuses to marry the coquette Curianita Silvia (Sylvie the Cockroachette). Curiniato does not love her; he is waiting for an ideal Love, a dream “clung to the star that looks like a flower”. Suddenly, Alacrancito el Cortamimbres (Slice-Wicker the Scorpion), an old lumberjack and a drunkard, appears and threatens to eat them all. Then, a group of female Cockroaches from the countryside appears. They are carrying a white butterfly with a broken wing: the Butterfly (or Moth). The Curiana Nigromántica (The (female) Necromancer Cockroach) tends to the wounds of the Butterfly and asks doña Curiana to take her home with her and keep watch over her. Curiniato falls madly in love with the Butterfly, who wakes up during a full moon, and starts beating her wings and dancing, without paying attention to the desperate Curianito’s inflamed declaration of love. The play, the manuscript we have of it being incomplete, stops at this moment and ends with a funeral procession which carries the lifeless body of Curianito away.

Not specified

García Lorca Federico

Spain

Madrid

Printed

Grassland

Insect

Impossible love

Dramatic

Lyrical

Fantasy

Comical

Tragic

Federico García Lorca, drawing for El maleficio de la mariposa, 1920