MARIA
IRENE FORNES
"In
the work of every American playwright at the end of the twentieth century,
there are only two stages: before she or he has read Maria Irene Fornes
-- and after." Though Paula Vogel’s words are a fitting tribute to this dramatist’s sensitive works, it’s not surprising if Fornes’ name draws a blank. She has rarely been produced outside of New York City, where she has been quietly gaining esteem for decades. Critics who describe her work as "cutting-edge" belong to that privileged clan that lives in the Big Apple and can follow developments in the far reaches of Off-Broadway theater.
Fornes was born in 1931 in Havana, Cuba, immigrating to the United States when she was 15. Abandoning traditional academics early on, she took painting courses at night, supporting herself by typing, translating, and waiting tables.
After briefly studying with Hans Hoffman at the Provincetown School, Fornes moved to Paris, where she spent the next three years cultivating her skills. But Paris proved to be the demise of her painterly ambitions, when the young Fornes was awestruck by a production of Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot.” Though she could not understand a word of the French dialogue, its visual intensity struck a chord.
Upon returning to the United States, she promptly threw out her paintbrush for a pen -- six years later, 1963 saw a production of “Tango Palace.” Soon she was fully entrenched in Off-Broadway, seeing her works produced by the likes of La MaMa, the Judson Poets' Theatre, the Open Theatre, and the New Dramatists, as well as the Actors' Workshop in San Francisco and the Firehouse Theatre in Minneapolis.
As a Cuban and a lesbian, Maria Irene Fornes sends reviewers and critics scrambling to slap her with political labels -- but she refuses to buy in. Though happy to embrace these aspects of her personal identity, she feels that such categorizations of her work are limiting. As she digs and delves into the mechanics of beauty and pain, Fornes writes not about identity politics, but about identity. The results are plays that evoke both the intricate social relationships of Henry James and the dreamy spirituality of Magical Realism.
In “Abingdon Square,” Fornes weaves themes of identity and evolution into the story of a lost young girl who looks for safety in a husband 40 years her senior. Though the play works on a feminist level -- Marion’s awakening desire for independence is met by a world that offers few options for women -- it is a tale that speaks to the universality of desire, personhood, passion, and transcendence.
Fornes’ own artistic transcendence lies in the visual -- who can forget the sight of Marion, standing on her toes, arms held firmly out to the sides, gasping and sweating, gazing upward while reciting Dante's "Purgatorio"? Or the silent dinner guests who form a tableau of impotent sexual tension in the ménage-a-trois drama “Mud”? Inside her often simple plotlines, Fornes leaves room for questions about passion and repercussion. She is a humanist in an era whose intellectuals love cynicism, and some postmodern sensibilities will find her work too obvious. Despite a prolific output (at last count, her plays numbered more than 40), Fornes has never moved onto Broadway, instead sticking to the fringe playhouses that gave her a start in the ‘60s.
Perhaps her greatest achievement is simply the fact that she has managed to make a living on Off-Broadway. But if that’s not enough, she has also garnered a Playwrights USA award, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and eight Obie awards.
In homage to her underground contributions, New York’s Signature Theater hosted a retrospective of three Fornes plays in 1999. This event had an uncomfortable effect on Fornes, who confessed, "[It] makes me feel I am now on the border of mainstream -- not quite in it. To be mainstream frightens me. Then people put claims on you and expect things of you. I've always liked being on the border."
