As early as 1933, the year after he wrote Blood Wedding, Lorca announced his intention to write a trilogy of “the Spanish earth,” of which Blood Wedding was the first part. The second play, Yerma (1934), was immensely successful staged, and continues to enjoy success worldwide. In 1935, the year before his death, Lorca claimed to be close to finishing the final play in the trilogy, but Francoists murdered him before he completed the work. Other than fragments, the manuscript of the final play, The Destruction of Sodom, has never been found. Since his death, theater critics have included Lorca’s final play, The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), in the trilogy. Despite its thematic relationship to the two previous plays, Lorca never intended it as the conclusion.

Lorca calls Yerma “a tragic poem.” It focuses on its titular character’s obsession with becoming a mother. In an inversion of Blood Wedding, the happily conventional marriage is unsettled by a woman’s desire for what would make it even more conventional. Yerma’s husband is uninterested in children. Despite his wife’s constant requests for a child, he doesn’t reveal his intention to remain childless until they are on a pilgrimage to a mountain-top shrine reputed to make women pregnant.