Once Five Years Pass is both the most intimate and most ambitious play by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), the Spanish poet and playwright whose impact on world poetry and theatre has been immense. Begun in New York in 1929 and finished in Lorca's home town of Granada on August 19, 1931, it is the fruit of his quest to write the "theatre of tomorrow" (strangely, he was shot to death near Granada on August 19, 1936, once precisely five years had passed). Though it was condensed into a ballet (with music by Paul Bowles, for Merce Cunningham) in 1943 and was a great success as a radio play in France, only now is the theatre coming to claim this remarkable work for its own.
The plot outline is as archetypal as a fairy tale's: a Young Man goes to claim his young bride. He had agreed--or demanded--to wait five years to marry her, and at last the time is up. He arrives at her house only to find that she has [fallen in love] with a large and brutal Football Player, who does nothing but squeeze her and blow cigar smoke in her face. Heartbroken, the Young Man wanders home through a forest and a circus, taunted on his way by a Clown, a Harlequin and a girl.
Lorca once called the work "a mystery play about time, in prose and verse." The structure is circular, beginning and ending in the Young Man's library. Echoes double voices and clock chimes, but it is clear that no time has passed during the entire course of the play's action, making all that has transpired take on the character of the Young Man's dream.
(From the Introduction to Lorca: Once Five Years Pass, by William Bryant Logan and Angel Gil Orrios)