Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding is a rural Spanish tragedy built around a wedding that never has a chance of ending happily. The Bride is set to marry the Groom, chosen for her out of duty rather than love — because she has never stopped loving Leonardo, the one man in the play who bears an actual name, and a member of the Félix family responsible for killing the Groom's father and brother years before.
The Groom's Mother, consumed by grief and fear of losing her only remaining son to the same feud, presides over the wedding with dread. When the Bride and Leonardo slip away together on horseback during the celebration, the Mother drives the Groom's family to hunt them down through the forest — and Leonardo and the Groom kill each other in the ensuing confrontation.
Written in 1932 and first staged in Madrid the following year, Blood Wedding is the first play in Lorca's rural tragedy trilogy (with Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba) and one of the towering works of twentieth-century Spanish theatre, built from folk ritual, poetic verse, and an unflinching sense of inevitability.