Freedman elaborates on the theme of passion in Lorca's dramatic work, examining the conflict between individual character's emotions and the morals of the society portrayed.

With Lorca we enter an altogether different landscape in the modern drama, the landscape of passion. His three great tragedies—Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernardo. Alba—are stripped nearly bare of the details of setting and time, that sense of locale we need for Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, or O'Casey. Yet we do not leave the area of reality, as we do with some of Strmdberg and of Pirandello. Lorca empties his drama of nearly all forces but passion. Even his settings always seem nearly barren, simply all whites or all blacks, so that only the colors emerge that are evoked by the action and the characters. The motivation and energy for plot are in passion; the definition of...