This month students in the Berkeley Carroll Spanish IV class had the opportunity for the words they’ve analyzed and discussed in the classroom to come alive as real voices, bodies, and a story. Suddenly a play they’ve only read on the page, exists in front of them on stage at Repertorio Español.

The class attended a live performance of La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca at Repertorio Español, one of New York City's premier theater companies and a dedicated home for Spanish-language works from Latin America, Spain, and the Hispanic-American community. It was the culmination of a third-quarter unit in which students read and analyzed the play in its original Spanish, and the performance brought everything they had studied into vivid, powerful focus.

La casa de Bernarda Alba is not an easy play. It is a work of simmering tension and devastating clarity, exploring themes of oppression, societal expectation, and the constrained lives of women in early 20th-century Spain. In the classroom, students examined these themes through the lens of literary analysis. On the stage at Repertorio Español, they felt them in the staging, in the silences, in the weight of every line delivered in the language they have spent years learning to understand and inhabit.

What makes this field trip so valuable is what happens in that gap between reading and seeing. When students watch actors make choices about tone, movement, and character interpretation, they are asked to think about the play in an entirely new dimension, not just what Lorca wrote, but what he meant, and how meaning is made and remade every time the curtain rises.

One of the most powerful moments is observing students’ reactions to the universality of the play; despite being written nearly a century ago, it resonates strongly with contemporary issues, particularly the struggles of marginalized groups. 

Rafael Moyano

Upper School World Languages Teacher

Watching students make those connections in real time, in a Spanish-language theater in the heart of New York City, is one of the most rewarding experiences the classroom can offer.

It is another great example of the way Berkeley Carroll makes the city a classroom.