It takes me a moment to find the tree because of the surrounding tangle of people, traffic, trash cans, and buildings. I am an empty soul,” as the discourse of spirituality addresses her soul “so lovingly” (27). Plays. Fornes's own comments about the play's reception have suggested that many audience members continue to judge how well Fefu and her friends are together through the familiar lens of hom(m)osociality; indeed, many of the post-performance questions about the play often concern neither Fefu nor any of her seven friends, but the few male characters who never even appear.7 We, too, it would seem, are always waiting for the men to arrive. “Maria Irene Fornés.” In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. 130-31. She told the actor, who shells beans during the speech, to squeeze the bean tightly and then press into her finger with a fingernail. 13-31. The mise en scène constantly reminds us of our inability to see all there is to see of these women; while attempting to absorb all that is being performed in one of the scenes, we can always hear echoes of another performance going on elsewhere, in our absence. How do you know when to turn from prose dialogue to song or music? You see, that which is exposed to the exterior … is smooth and dry and clean. *Includes Dr. Kheal, Molly's Dream, Promenade, The Successful Life of 3, Tango Palace, and A Vietnamese Wedding. in Women on the Verge, 203. [In the following essay, O'Malley explores Fornes's representation of women's attitudes toward housework in Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, and The Conduct of Life, concluding that Fornes views housekeeping as a positive, ritualized act of “self-knowledge and love.”]. 16. For there is a sense of heroism in the admission of shame. The difference I just pointed to, and the many problematic underpinnings of the phenomenological and modernist approaches referred to above, indicate that we have taken the suggestiveness of these particular perspectives as far as it will go, and that we need to look elsewhere to account for the specificity of Stein's and Fornes's “return to the body.”, The projects of Stein and Fornes resemble those of modernism, but that is not to say that we must simply return to the language of modernism to speak of them. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. Within this liminal space, three friends from very different worlds attempt to cross the boundaries that separate them and to comfort one another. Deborah R. Geis, “Wordscapes of the Body: Performative Language as Gestus in Maria Irene Fornes's Plays,” Theatre Journal 42.3 (1990): 293. And I should value all those who are near me. Accor... Read more. According to this reading, the most significant bond that exists between the play's all-female cast would seem to be their common interest in making a place for themselves within that structure. The play is at a chronological and thematic crossroads in Fornes' oeuvre, and I believe that discussing it through the lens of the changing scientific paradigms offers new access to the play, both as drama and as theatre. The main playing area downstage represents a sitting area (left) with two salmon pink armchairs and an eating area (right) with a small table and simple wooden chairs. Read more. That is why it is called a starfish. See, for instance, Jacques Lacan's reading of Poe in his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” tr. Those who walk a Life Path with Number 5 have an uncanny ability to understand the deepest esoteric & metaphysical teachings. Suddenly the school uniforms and the bobby sox become ironic masquerade costumes. Ed. Promenade, a musical comedy of manners, contains perhaps Fornes's strongest social criticism to date. Teach me how to look for peace” (128). The scene was so convincing that Fornes feared for his sanity. Give money to the poor. In Nighthawks at the Diner, for example, the bright fluorescent light inside the diner makes it both a sanctuary and a place of defeat against the surrounding dark and empty city streets. Catherine A. Schuler, “Gender Perspectives and Violence in the Plays of Maria Irene Fornes and Sam Shepard,” Modern American Drama: The Female Canon, ed. In such a universe a person must know his or her worth. ), when a character leaves, the others experience his egress with intense anguish. GETTING INSIDE THE WORLD OF FEFU AND HER FRIENDS. But Fornes manages to transform these seemingly chance assemblages into a kind of palimpsest a text which inscribes the history of a culture through a series of accumulations and partial erasures—in effect, a layered record of attempts, individual and collective, to confront the otherness of race and gender and above all the ultimate estrangement of mortality. Sylvie Fisher, the narrator's aunt, is the primary focus of Housekeeping's attention, and through her character, housekeeping is redefined. And as these “founding” performatives and unperformable performatives suggest, there is no “taking it back,” only resignifying. The sibling rivalry between Oscar and Bertha, which has continued to develop and worsen since their childhood, is piqued by their competitive vying for Eve's affection. Emma's speech is an inspirational urging to enlist one's own life forces in order to “awaken life dormant” (32). (New York: Methuen, 1985), 52. But now that situation may be changing. The hope Butler holds for the lesbian phallus would suggest that Fefu and her friends, in becoming together the keepers of Phillip's shotgun, might cease to be the phallus (the embodiment of lack) and come instead to possess it. Weedon, for example, asserts that both realism and deconstructive writing are necessary for a complete feminist representational project.21 Robert Stam and Louise Spence also reject realism as “a style or constellation of strategies aimed at producing an illusionistic ‘reality effect,’” but support “realism as a goal—Brecht's ‘laying bare the causal network.’”22 Diamond agrees that Brecht “never denied referentiality; he aimed rather to expunge the psychologized ahistorical referent.”23 These theorists remind us that Brecht wanted spectators to understand a play, to see its connection with their lives; what he objected to was the mystification involved in realism's masked assertion of one particular, ideologically dominant point of view as truth. Your recent plays are deceptively realistic in style. Regarding each other, they are pure animus, eyeing each other with murderous intent. Or, as Sontag has said, Fornes's theatre is a theatre of heartbreak. When you start manipulating, everything gets brittle and fake. The starfish has five arms like a star. Similarly, by delivering her monologue, as the stage directions make clear, without looking once at Cecilia, Paula performs a kind of “count me out” of the conventional break-up scenario that she enumerates and itemizes earlier in Part Two. That she forces Nena to accept responsibility for the crime reinforces the circulation of power along lines of class as well as gender. In Conduct, both Olimpia and Nena speak of the ritual of simple everyday tasks. Alejo, his friend, a lieutenant commander, is impotent and gendered female in the text; Fornes implies that the more power these men appear to have, the less power they possess in actuality, since the military state ultimately disempowers them. Though the characters are granted moments in which they enter one another's experience in dream or play, the dominant note of the drama is desire: the unappeased longing of these three friends to ease one another's pain, or perhaps even to conceive it fully. Kroetz found his ideal in the work of Marieluise Fleisser, whose plays present characters reduced by language. They're very generous. No table lamps, no wall switches, no candles. Fornes is for people who prefer passion to fashion, who prefer awe to wit. Interpretation moves by accumulation of detail, gestures, phrases, tones of voice, then the text holds back, refuses to tell. Rather than teaching by criticism, Fornés instead turns her classes into periods of intense inner concentration and connection. I wake up and I work. Feminism and Theatre. Like her writing, Fornes's directing is intuitive, born of the moment and of inspiration. The melee signals the happy return to normalcy (and to vitality, perhaps), as the sound of barking dogs is heard growing louder and louder and the up-center French doors magically open to reveal a cloudy horizon at sunset which, Magritte-like, matches exactly the pattern on the upstage walls. Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes was first produced at the Relativity Media Lab (part of the New York Theatre Strategy) on May 5, 1977, and was directed by Fornes herself. When I finish school I'm leaving. … It is advanced. “There is a fragility about her characters,” Coates writes, “a sense that they are perilously close to breaking. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill., 1964), p. 42; hereafter cited in text. The body is a body of knowledge. 4 (autumn 1997): 791-809. Katie: When Irene writes a play, she follows the lead of the characters, and doesn’t plan. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 89. SOURCE: Drukman, Steven. And even though Mae fails to break through the seemingly impenetrable barrier that “mathematics” or “medicine” represent, the freedom suggested by the door to the open blue sky represents the potential to an open future, and in projecting a glimmer of that freedom, Fornes attempts to shape the potential outcome of Mae's struggle for selfhood in a similar manner to that found in Brecht's social plays. At the same time, the characterizations refuse the spectatorial identification that realism urges. Keyssar, Helene. See Belsey, and Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Fornes, like Brecht, withholds the assimilation of the various “enunciators” of the stage into a coherent whole, choosing instead to “suspend the identification between drama and its staging.”31 For the same reason, Fornes refuses to engage the characters in the seamlessness of traditional narrative to the extent “where the characters themselves seem at times too oblivious to the ‘story’ that they are supposed to be in.”32 That so many of her plays in addition to Mud, among them Dr. Kheal, Tango Palace, The Danube and Fefu and Her Friends, to one degree or another deal with the acquisition of language, suggests her consistent interest in the relationship of language to thought to action.33 Ultimately Fornes' theater is a theater about utterance, a metatheater and a theater about the disfavored. Essays & Analysis (26) I Write These Messages That Come (1977) 3,945 words, approx. Gayle Austin. The play itself is the analysis. “‘They are Well Together. What goes on inside this frame is oddly miniaturized and magnified at the same time. Maria Irene Fornes. “Crossing Cultures and Kinds: Maria Irene Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sublime.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9, no. The actress was standing and she said a few lines, looked around, and then she walked and stood behind a chair. Plays. Like Isidore, she attempts to find release by killing her black cat, rather than by feeding him, as Fefu does. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. I hadn't been writing for a few years. As long as your feet are always on the ground, you can go incredible distances. Oscar is, well, stupid. [In the following essay, Kiebuzinska discusses the influence of playwright and dramatist Bertolt Brecht on the feminist elements of Mud. At the playwright's request, we took the ominous clang out. Free María Irene Fornés Essays and Papers. As Bonnie Marranca observes about Fornes's dictatorial practice, “Fornes acknowledges the audience by giving them their own space and time in the productions. It was a weekend and I worked all day Saturday and all day Sunday. María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a self-identified queer Cuban-American playwright and director and leading figure in the avant-garde “off-off-Broadway” theater scene.1 Fornés wrote over forty original plays – many of which she also directed – and was the recipient of nine Off-Broadway Theater (Obie) Awards and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Censuring Fornes for “niggardliness,” for holding back textual information, reviewers complain that the play “teases” and “tantalizes” only to frustrate, leaving one “unsatisfied” and somehow “cheated.” A connection is established, through this critical discourse, between artifice and perversion, between the unnaturalistic and the unnatural. Although the use of nonnutritional liquids problematizes the model of woman as nurturer, the common element of all these actions is the sense of self invested in them and the motive of caring and love behind them. Both plays suggest the relative fluidity between violence and gender in a constructed, inconsistent subjectivity through unstable subject positions. And here I want to locate Fornes' performance of the sublime: in confrontation with the mass-media processes of commodifying mortality. Enter the Night, written and directed by Maria Irene Fornes, received its world premiere 16 April 1993 at Seattle's New City Theater. I like the way the wrinkles come out and things look nice. Catherine Belsey, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, Judith Newton ed. It is therefore possible to project from this condition the contours of an ideal communicative situation, implicitly anticipated in every actual act of dialogue.17 Fornes, I suggest, in drama that evokes not merely individual interchanges but the encompassing discourse of a commercial, global culture, shows us isolation, incomprehension, slick superficialities, the endless precession of simulacra, and inspires a dream of what is not—a Shangri-la. I want to write English and Spanish which I have been doing. But intuition needs all-aroundness, and instinct needs insideness” (Lawrence, “Introduction to These Paintings,” p. 579). So far, my concern in this article has been to indicate certain limits of a modernist approach to form (assumptions which can only appear as naive or as leading into mysticism). The act of learning can be seen as a subset of the repetitive tasks which constitute housekeeping, and is as equally self-affirmative. The title character in the musical Sarita is an adolescent Cuban girl from the South Bronx who harbors a self-destructive, unrequited love for a young man. Ed. Romance is romance. Just how far this is possible, and just how difficult, however, becomes central to the play's momentum of working against—and toward—a feminist performance that matters. They are like live wires … either chattering to keep themselves from making contact, or else, if they don't chatter, they avert their eyes … like Orpheus … as if a god once said “and if they shall recognize each other, the world will be blown apart.” They are always eager for the men to arrive. I am especially grateful to Mala Renganathen for sharing with me the fruits of her Fulbright research. Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor/London: UMI Research Press, 1988) 109. In their inarticulateness and their struggle for expression Fornes' characters from Mud resemble Franz Xavier Kroetz's theater of the inarticulate, and Kroetz's critique of Brechtian discourse may be relevant for discussing Fornes' contributions to theater. I was her baby love—she never nursed you … I drank the milk that was intended for you. Certainly there is little in Fornes's play to suggest a classic Brechtian distanciation between the identifications of character and actor, or between character and audience. … There is a sink on the wall. Leticia's class privilege constructs her as male in relation to the maid Olimpia and Nena, but, at the same time, the unfulfillment of her desire for Orlando maintains her position of feminine passivity. In Part I, she describes her fascination with an overturned stone. 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