(The trailblazing American feminist dramatist came to Calcutta in 1992.)
The first sight of her belies the image one has created from reading her work. Looking like a kindly mater, Maria Irene Fornes seems to deliberately debunk physical stereotyping through her very appearance—as if she has just trapped one more person in the act of assigning human character into neat pigeonholes—for she herself represents creative radicalism, virtually personifying the meaning and spirit of New York’s Off-off-Broadway (the heart of serious, non-commercial, alternative theatre in the USA). On a relatively underpublicized, low-profile USIS visit to India, Fornes conducted a workshop and delivered lectures in Calcutta in the last week of March.
As playwright, director, lyricist and translator, her story is an interesting one. Born in 1930 in Cuba, her family emigrated to the States when she was 15. She was more or less self-taught in the arts, and instead of a purely literary influence, her early inspiration came from movies (hence the cinematic flow of many of her scripts), painting (which she studied in France) and the “profoundly upsetting” original production of Waiting for Godot (in Paris, which set her thinking seriously about theatre). Although bicultural in upbringing, she started writing plays in English. Asked about her approach in American society, she confesses that she has the dual outlook of “an insider as well as an outsider.”
In the last 30 years Fornes has authored roughly an equal number of pieces for the stage—she demurs from calling them conventional “plays” because they are often short, but then so are Beckett’s later works. She has also won as many as seven Obies—annual awards named after the initials of Off-Broadway, marking excellence in that field of theatre—including one for Sustained Achievement presented to her ten years ago.
Her dramas all deal with what she calls our “inner forces”. Beginning in 1964 with Tango Palace, a script for two males (interesting because of her later emphasis on women), she moved on to bittersweet musicals like Promenade and The Successful Life of 3 in 1965, turning more grim on Dr Kheal (1968), a monologue for a solo actor who lectures his class. She made her mark critically with Fefu and Her Friends (1977), a feminist text in which eight women converse about subservient female roles in a masculine society. Her more recent plays express greater violence: The Danube (1984) is on nuclear holocaust; The Conduct of Life (1985) examines torture, particularly of what Susan Sontag calls “that emblem of oppression, the woman servant”.
Fornes has no hesitations in asserting her feminism. Initially latent in her repeated use of triangular romantic situations—which she still employs—her attitude has lately become upfront, the theme of women enslaved by sexual dependence recurring regularly. To quote Sontag once again, “She writes increasingly from a woman’s point of view. Women are doing women’s things—performing unrewarded labour, getting raped and incarnating the human condition as such.“ But Fornes denies depicting a confrontational battle of the sexes. Her motive is “finding what is good and what is evil, what is pure and what is corrupt. It could very well be that the woman is the victimizer. Because I’m a woman, I suppose, the woman sooner or later begins to take over the play. That is really what makes for true, pure feminism . . . and is the key to true revolt.”
She has other contributions, too, besides the feminist perspective. She constantly experiments with form and theatre space. In the second part of Fefu and Her Friends, the director is instructed to separate the audience into four groups, each group watching one of four scenes enacted simultaneously. The groups get to see each of these scenes in turn, one by one, almost like the pattern of simultaneous staging in medieval European theatre. A conscious “anti-realist”, she gives her characters robotic physical movements; she makes them fantasize a lot. She is also known for her humour, which has grown darker, for it now targets cruelty and dread.
Not the least of her activities is her role as a teacher of dramatic writing, mainly to aspiring playwrights in the Hispanic-American community: she strongly believes that people can learn how to compose creatively. An intriguing sidelight is that she starts training them with an hour of yoga, “exercises common to actors. It moves very nicely from the inner stage that yoga puts a person into, gradually to paper . . . to distract that part of the mind which is always trying to make the person do something extraordinary.” Art must come spontaneously, naturally. As for today‘s natural social entertainment, she ruefully concludes, “Theatre has become an unnatural thing, unlike television or film.” We in India can certainly sympathize.
(From The Statesman, 9 May 1992)