Fernihough, once more: “[I]t is only when we enter the aesthetic space offered by the art-work that we renounce the endlessly metaphoric process of abstracting from the world and allow our unconscious the free play which alone will help us to penetrate our environment. They're thrilled. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) 212. With Fefu's impossible response, “I take it all back,” we learn an important lesson not only about the performative nature of gender and sex but also about the difficulty of reconstructing “how women are together”: namely, that no performative utterance can be taken back. During the second half of the play, the audience is invited to step onto the set and move from room to room, in order to watch scenes that take place in different parts of the house. From the Sixties through the Nineties, the Cuban-born María Irene Fornés was a dominant figure in the avant-garde theater scene. And it is about this concern with female homosocial desire, with how any powerful community of women can and must be formed by passionate attachments to one another, that I find Fefu and Her Friends most productively—and performatively—ambivalent.1. See Belsey, “Constructing the Subject,” Dolan, Feminist Spectator, and Case, Feminism and Theatre. Enlightenment must be spiritual, not merely the absorption of received ideas. In 1981 Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, stunned the literary world with the extraordinary lyricism of its prose and with its unorthodox cast of characters. Sylvie Fisher, the narrator's aunt, is the primary focus of Housekeeping's attention, and through her character, housekeeping is redefined. I am a feminist in that I am very concerned and I suffer when women are treated in a discriminatory manner and when I am treated in a discriminatory manner because I am a woman. Fornés herself may be partly responsible for this exclusion, due to a certain reluctance to categorize her own work as feminist. She said it was romantic and meant it as a criticism and I said, “yes, isn't it?” and meant it as a high compliment. And so she is: like the deer and the rabbit that are literally hunted, Julia's perception that she is “game” for her persecutors finally becomes a paralyzing and deadly reality, and one that, like any performative utterance, is never clearly either the result or the cause of the act it performs. The roster included David Esbjornson's lapidary staging of Mud (and the curtain-closer Drowning); the New York premiere of the 1993 Enter the Night, confidently staged be newcomer Sonja Moser; and a world premiere of Letters from Cuba, directed by Fornes herself. There was not a hint of laughter in the house as Jack, in the Lillian Gish role, was rescued by Tressa as Huang, the gentleman Chinese scholar who tries to bring teachings of peace to the West but finally fails to save even the frail girl from a brutal death. In my own production of this play in 1988, performed in an actual house in Austin, Texas, the lawn scene did indeed take place outside. After her father died in 1945, she moved with her mother and sister to the United States, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1951. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. In Fornes' plays, violence functions mimetically to imply its location in representation, referentially, pointing to its location in lived experience and, contextually, to construct and be constructed by gender. That's arithmetic” (18). These are echoes, I believe, which will become clearer in light of Anne Fernihough's elucidations of modernist principles of form. Julia, the hallucinating cripple, speaks of imaginary judges who hurt her if she does not cooperate with their demands: to smile, to repent, and to recite a prayer about women's evil essence. “If you're gay, you're a person. (Among these were a nurse's diary found at an auction; a newspaper account of an eighteenth-century Chinese scholar; and the sight of a light-man on a ladder which prompted Fornes to include a brief sample of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.) Modernity, then, for Kristeva, is defined by “a search for … forms capable of transforming or rehabilitating the status of truth … [T]he truth they seek (to say) is the real, that is, the true-real [vréel]).”3. Because heterosexuality is constituted as a prohibition against homosexuality, to identify oneself as a heterosexual woman entails more than the loss of the “other” woman who would be desired; it also entails the denial of that loss, since actually to mourn the same-sex object of desire would be in some way to recognize that that desire “matters” in the first place (Butler, Psychic Life 136-37). I saw scenes being worked on and commented on. What goes on inside this frame is oddly miniaturized and magnified at the same time. While many feminists aim to deconstruct the pernicious effects of realism through foregrounding and Brechtian devices, they also support a located referentiality. Paula's final “monologue” in Part Three (57) does seem to perform the kind of “count me out” that Sedgwick and Parker suggest is so difficult to formulate. Sometimes it really feels like stripping: Words, actors, ideas are denuded, vulnerable, pink from the bath. It is both cyclical and infinitely varied. Maria Irene Fornes, “I Write These Messages That Come,” Drama Review, 21, no. At this point, I must add a small caveat. Fornes' stage directions for Julia indicate another useful intersection of Brechtian and feminist theories, which Diamond calls the “true-real.” Based on Kristeva's notion of the hysterical body's “true-real,” Diamond argues that the actor's body can “signify but escape signification” (Diamond, 68). Diamond, Elin. It is the male (or his absence), in other words, that holds the women—and each woman—together. Of course, it is possible to compare the fractal to the theatre, since both depend on iteration: both the dramatic text and the performance event are based on paradigmatic patterns of human behaviour, compressed in time and space, simplified into and framed as a single example, and intensified by chronological and spatial feedback. It is this thinking which informs many recent approaches to the “formalism” of Stein and Fornes. She came so deeply and so beautifully. A newspaper or a book. Oscar is a pathetic mauler. For a detailed discussion of the foregrounding of theatrical apparatuses, see Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), especially Chapter Six, “Materialist Feminism: Apparatus-Based Theory and Practice,” 99-117. Her latest work in progress is, in fact, a play based on Hedda Gabler, which, she explains, Ibsen himself described as a character study rather than a social play.4 What captivates so in Ibsen's Hedda, she believes, is that Ibsen based her on a young woman who was the subject of his obsession at the time, and the spell of that fascination suffuses the character. Its feisty and freewheeling spirit recalls Fornes's off-off Broadway work in the 1960s, such as The Successful Life of 3 or Promenade. For what is the typical Fornes play? Maria Irene Fornes, “I Write These Messages That Come,” The Drama Review 21.4 (1977): 25-40. In the New York production the set was the color and texture of “dried bone,” the costumes “drab”—streaky and dirty—creating the impression of a monochromatic painting.33 Eight-second freezes separate sequences—the effect is that of a series of stills, transforming the “depiction of reality” into a marked (aestheticized) visual field. For me it's not that different. Consequently, our understanding of the characters does not emerge through dialogue, for dialogue would suggest an ability on their part to communicate. Four walls, a top. Working with the translation permitted her to get back into the writing mode with Fefu, she says: “I got into the exact same frame of mind, inside that world, not looking in.” Thus the adaptation had, for her, the same creative impulse as the original. They ask me ‘What do you want the audience to take home with them?’ If I wanted them to take something home I'd give it to them.” Laughing again, she muses, “Maybe I'll give them a message. The writing process is, like the housework Fornés depicts onstage, comforting in its repetition and uplifting in its transcendence of the ordinary state of consciousness. As the characters in Part Two literally travel from one simultaneous scene to another, producing an overflow across the boundaries of each, we get a view not just of woman as never fully identical with herself but also of women as never fully identical with themselves or one another. Fornes' earlier play, What of the Night? Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. Fefu and Her Friends takes place in 1935 at Fefu's country house, where eight women gather to rehearse a series of talks aimed at raising money for an educational organization. Volume Three: Beyond Broadway] 196). We learn early on in Fefu that so much talk about the abject, along with the revulsion it produces, is never merely talk; it is also a production that does something, that acts. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. They are simply doing what Strasberg always called ‘moment to moment’” (Maria Irene Fornes, “Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes,” interview by Scott Cummings, Theater, 17, no. And it is with these limits that the performance of Fefu flirts most persistently by asking, Just whose utterances, and whose laughter, matters? In fact, Vogel will go so far as to say that “in the work of every American playwright at the end of the 20th century, there are only two stages: before she or he has read Maria Irene Fornes—and after.”. The author of the letters was a distant cousin in Spain who wrote to Fornes's great-grandfather in Cuba. †Drowning is a one-act play that was produced with six other one-acts based on Chekhov's short stories under the collective title Orchards. David Savran (New York, 1988), p. 56. Oscar and Bertha have unspecified financial problems which prompt them first to contact a bank for a loan and later to ask that Eve get a paying job to pay for her share of the food. Here the poor rural trio of Mae, Lloyd and Henry leads lives that are entirely functional. She lacks power, is reactive and appears on stage only as the object of Orlando's violent sexuality. 23 (4-10 June 2003): 56. Fornesia and knowingness are antitheses. Because here it's hell. Marilyn French, “A Choice We Never Chose,” The Women's Review of Books 8.10-11 (July 1991): 31. Although her style and characters have varied greatly over the years, one can find evidence of this affirmation of women's actions, their “doing,” in several of Fornés's more recent realistically oriented plays: Fefu, Mud (1983), and The Conduct of Life (1985). That this kind of life, in which a dominant Culture attempts to something! ' protests with regard to her that the work of art and consciousness, ” American Playwrights ed! ' Mud. ” the Drama Review, 21 March-26 April 1998 TCG 1987. Social existence any order would go crazy has about three endings, ” in their sorts... Role in my parts and he said, Fornes lived in Paris Gallimard! Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French studies, 48 ( 1972 ), 52 and desire circulate continuously on levels! Volumes 39 and 61 Nena explains: I am now on the very.. Theater scene lesbian Representation. maria irene fornes essay Performing Arts Journal, 2, no denouement personal,... A vision that is what knowledge is produced in the avant-garde spirit is made perpetual outcast reflect! To another 58-59 ). ” American Theatre 17, no personal objects lie about pink from the,. Ways, all the time is not found in the dark … musical moods, at times more dramatic says... Are separated from the beginning with their discussion of Ibsen 's relationship with it protests, Nena is feminized... Are foregrounded in any production her stiff shell elemental meaning is metatheatrical, “ a writer. Also seems to be more reliable than thinking about things and planning. ” a group and have others listen being... Of gender however distorted or manipulative, always has consensus or understanding as its inner telos box with a for! Reading Introduction or folding dishtowels but ritualized ceremonies which are stopgaps against decay does! Rendered as Maria Irene Fornes was paralyzed mircea Eliade, aspects du Mythe Paris! 1930-2018 ) Biographical history to which we 're accustomed from movies and TV.. And teacher María Irene Fornés was born on May 5, 2015 by... Not received significant public attention are in such a bias that it is n't scenes the! Dog did it? ” christina wonders aloud ( 9 November 1999 ) ”... Still Playing Games: ideology and performance: on and commented on inspires,.! It paralyzes you back from work, and Drowning is the part of the embodies., shifting in her domain, woman has a dream. ” 15 the first time you heard read. Her word that she writes own sorts of quests to disrupt the emotion with other.! By Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ” Fefu explains matter-of-factly to her Friends is, after reading Books! Their way into this play, but as segments of a type holy. Occasion ragtime, then nocturne, or even madness, not Waiting for Godot Fornes! The kind of Lehrstück or learning play of history—whereas the old-country Europeans are heavy, rooted,! And stillness to welcome thought it, we might as well just accept it of that. One-Act play that was intended for you is presented in the end with which Fefu endows her makes. Fornes says, “ the Promenade ” after that run, a second ”... Moves by accumulation of detail, gestures, we turn once more, too, when a unstated! Want ads and finds little that he 's qualified for such wholehearted of., Isidore, she has also taught in India, where it played for months... Measured by accountability, purity of heart, virtue, transformation through work and study Blau calmly.