 an associate professor and chair of the theater department at Boston College. His research on our wonderful playwright, Maria Irene Fornes, began at the Yale School of Drama in the mid-80s, when he interviewed her for Yale's Theater Magazine. He went on to write his dissertation on Fornes, several essays and reviews and a 2012 book on Fornes in the Rattledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatist Series. He's also the author of Remaking American Theater, Charles Me, Anne Bogart and the City Company, 2006, and the co-editor of the Theater of Naomi Wallace, Embodied Dialogues. He holds degrees from the Yale School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan's residential college. We've known each other now 20 years, so I consider him a friend and I'm so pleased he can be here today. He's going to talk for about 30 minutes, a prepared talk and then we have a treat because he's going to show us some footage of a never foreseen documentary in the works about Irene Fornes. And then we'll have some questions following that. He has to leave promptly at 3.30 to get to Boston College for a meeting. We all know that world and he just saw Irene yesterday in New York City. So fresh from seeing Irene. Scott Cummings, thank you so much. Thank you, Maureen, thank you all for coming. I know some people have to leave somewhere before we're done, so that's not a problem. 20 years ago when I moved here to Boston from Pittsburgh, I started working part-time in several institutions around town. And one of them was here at Emerson College in the fall of 94 and the spring of 95, I taught appreciation of the performing arts here at Emerson. So it's all the more exciting for me to come back and talk to Emerson College students again. I assume that virtually everybody in the room here is either going to see Fafu and her friends or is in it. So I don't want to talk too much directly about the play itself. I certainly don't want to explain the play to you. The play offers, as many people know, a rather unique theatrical experience. And I'm hesitant to tell you much about that experience before you have it. But I want to offer a few contextual remarks about Fafu and then offer a more general introduction to the work of Irene Fornes by focusing on perhaps the shortest play she ever wrote. It's a piece called Drowning. It was first produced in 1985. Then we think technology is cooperating. As Maureen mentioned, I have a little video treat for you. I would start off by making the following grandiose and somewhat provocative statement about Fafu and her friends. It's the most important American play written by a woman in the 20th century. Period. These things are all arguable. I think a very, very strong case can be made for somebody who wanted to do it for Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun. Another pioneering work that is much more visible, has had much more of a mainstream success. Susan Glassbell's Trifles, some of you may know, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal. The radically unconventional plays of Gertrude Stein, all made important statements in the early part of the 20th century. All works by women, clearly. Megan Terry and Adrienne Kennedy along with Fornes were major female playwrights during the off-off Broadway movement of the 1960s. And Paula Vogels, the Baltimore Waltz, is in my estimation a landmark play, partly for its imaginative and deeply personal response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. But Fafu and her friends has a unique status, I would argue, mainly for two different reasons. One, it's unusual and experimental structure. And two, the inspiration, both direct and indirect, that its treatment of the subject of women has offered two generations of female playwrights and theater makers. In different ways, these same two factors have contributed to the play's obscurity in mainstream theater circles. The play was never a popular or a commercial success. In part because it's complicated form, as some people here in the room already know, makes it challenging to producers. It's a play not only that asks for more than one performance space, but that cannot really accommodate a very large audience. And that puts some limitations on theaters that depend, to some extent, on ticket revenue at the box office. But its complicated feminism also makes it very challenging to spectators. Now, Maureen and the Emerson Sage crew have confronted the production challenges and you who are waiting to see it will confront its ideological challenges. I look forward to seeing the play very, very much this weekend. But like I said, I don't want to talk about it too much. I want to come at Fafu a little bit indirectly by taking a very close look at a very short play by Irene Forness called Drowning. I've seen two different productions of the play. One directed by Forness and one not. I've read it again and again. I've taught it in classes and I've come to regard it as a real miniature masterpiece in its own right. It offers a paradigm or a window onto Forness's entire body of work. It's a play in three short scenes. It lasts only 15, maybe 20 minutes in production. But it contains characters and themes and techniques that characterize her work as a whole. I consider it a kind of Forness talisman. And what I want to do today is try to rub that talisman a little bit and reveal some of the spirit of Irene's work. So my remarks will fall into six parts. Part one, just a few words about the play's origins. Drowning was written as Forness's contribution to an experiment in commissioning new plays. In 1985, a woman named Anne Catanio, the newly appointed dramaturg for the acting company in New York, wanted to help the play get back to Chekhov. They had done a production of Three Sisters 12 years earlier and also to inject some fresh blood into the acting company's largely classic repertoire. So Anne Catanio read hundreds of Chekhov short stories. She selected a number of them that she thought might lend themselves to theatrical adaptation. I don't think Man in the Case was one of them, was it? I can't remember right now. But students here, everybody will have a chance to see another Chekhov story adapted when Mikhail Bershnikov brings his Man in the Case to Arts Emerson coming up very soon, yes? Very soon. Now, seven of the playwrights, a dozen playwrights were invited by Anne Catanio to write adaptation since seven of them accepted. They were Spaulding Gray, John Guare, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, Michael Weller, Sam Art Williams, and Fornes. They accepted the invitation and went about producing their adaptations. These were then directed by the director Robert Falls, who was at that point the artistic director at the Wisdom Bridge Theater in Chicago, under the collective title Orchards. From September 1985 to April 1986, the acting company performed Orchards in repertory with a production of As You Like It in a grueling tour of 60 cities. They took these two plays all across the country and then ended with a three-week run at the American Place Theater in New York. Fornes was assigned by Anne Catanio a short story called Drowning. And like the other playwrights, on the project, she was given carte blanche to adapt it any way she wished. The story is subtitled A Little Scene. And it's a sketch that presents the tale of a derelict street person who approaches a man waiting by the side of a river and offers to impersonate a drowned man for a small fee. Quote, two rubles for drowning myself with my boots on, one rubble without them. Close quote. This derelict badgers and bargains until the third man comes along and takes the odd fellow up on his offer. Then the would-be impersonator pulls off his boots. He jumps in the cold river, flails about spastically for a moment, sinks, resurfaces, climbs out of the water, collects his fee, and walks off wet and shivering. And that is the end of the story. Fornes admitted to being flummoxed at first by Chekhov's odd tale. In an interview, she said this, I didn't know if such a thing was actually practiced or if it was just an allegory for how far a human being will go to survive. Then I thought, maybe if you live by the water, the danger of the sea becomes more intensified and such acts would be a kind of fun exorcism, a release of anxiety. The modern equivalent might be if a person was walking near a park at night and a gang of kids came by and offered to enact a mugging. But I didn't feel like writing that. And then I thought the man selling his drowning act reminded me of the way writers and actors work so hard and then feel a bit deflated after the show gets done and they have to start all over again. But I didn't want to write yet another play about show business either. So I almost asked for another story, but I began to feel more and more moved by that man and his drowning act. I would think of how he walked away afterward, this large man dripping with water, unwanted, who performed for an audience who didn't even care to see him. The rejection, the loneliness. I didn't read the story again, but that sense of feeling like a monster stayed with me. Now this is often the case in the genesis of a Fornes play, an image that stuck in her head rather than an idea proved to be the starting point for a new creation. Before Fornes had a chance to ask Catania for a different story, she was conducting an exercise in one of her playwriting workshops. And if you don't know, Fornes taught playwriting for a great number of years at the ENTAR workshop in New York at Padua Hills in California and on short-term bases in colleges and universities all over the country. She was doing an exercise in which she instructed her students just to close their eyes and allow the image of a face to come into their minds. Now Fornes always joins her students in these in-class writing exercises. And the open-ended writing she's done in these workshops often provides the seed for a new play. When she did this particular exercise, she saw a blubbery, barely human face, which she associated with the man in the story, who Chekhov describes as a stocky individual with a terribly ravaged, bloated face. The image of the face brought with it the feeling of rejection and loneliness she associated with the story. And never want to question the material that emerges up from her subconscious, Fornes began to forge her adaptation. Now part two. The lights come up on two male figures seated at cafe. The text says probably in Europe. They're well-dressed, one in a beige jacket, the other in a brown suit, but there's something unusual about them. Their heads and their bodies are large and shapeless like potatoes, the script says. At another moment Fornes says that they resemble seals or sea lions. They have warts on their faces and reddish, watery eyes. Quote, their flesh is shiny and oily when they breathe, their bodies sweat. Thus does Fornes begin the play with an ontological conundrum. Who or what are these characters? They seem human and not human at the same time. Their dress and their behavior is civilized, but their physiology is almost amphibian. And the question of their exact natures is underscored underscored by the first lines of dialogue in the play. The one wearing an olive hat stares as if transfixed at something on the table. And he asks his companion what it is and if he can touch it. The one in the brown hat nods yes and says it's a newspaper. It's beautiful, says the first one. And when he reaches out gently and touches the newspaper, the stage directions indicate that quote, a tear rolls down his face. He says in wonder, this must be made by a person. Almost as if a person was a different order of being. So right from the beginning, Fornes in drowning introduces an unusual variation on an archetypal character in her work. A character that I call the innocent. This is a character who lacks knowledge or education but has what I like to call the yarn to learn. An impulse or compulsion to command language in some form as a way of engaging or achieving presence in the larger world. There's something immature and embryonic about the Fornes innocent. And the names of the characters in drowning suggest just this. One of them, the one fascinated by the newspaper is called P and his friend is named Ro. There are many different manifestations of the Fornes innocent and you may have met some of them if you've read other Fornes plays. There's the earnest youth named Leopold in her very early play called Tango Palace. There's the dirt farmer named May in a play called Mud. And there's the child bride Marion in a play from the mid to late 80s called Abington Square. Each one of these Fornes innocence is defined to some degree by the intimation of intelligence. They are naive and unschooled but they're crafted by this vague sort of interior impulse to learn how to think, to gain knowledge. They're caught up in the process of coming to thought. A process that in some instances is tantamount to bringing themselves into being. Now there's no single character I would say in Phefou and her friends that corresponds to the archetype of the Fornes innocent but the play still emphasizes the value of education and the play of thought. The very first line of the play, Phefou says, my husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are. The very first line. And this proves to be a provocation that Phefou explains a moment later is something to think about. It's a thought, just something to think about. A moment later she explains that she loves exciting ideas that even objectionable or revolting ones such as perhaps the notion that women are loathsome. Even repulsive ones give her energy. And Fornes proceeds to fill Phefou and her friends with a number of playful and provocative ideas including the question, my personal favorite, how do people with genitals act? And there's also the question much more serious, how do you know if a person is hit by a bullet? Act three of Phefou begins when the character Cecilia enters in the middle of a conversation saying, well we each have our own system of receiving information placing it, responding it. Yet another moment in the play that invokes this notion of thinking and the process of having thoughts. The women in Phefou have gathered in Phefou's living room in order to plan and rehearse a fundraising event to support art as a tool for learning, a surfacing of the educational theme in the play. The centerpiece of that fundraising event will be Emma's oral interpretation of an excerpt from a book called Educational Dramatics. It's not always easy to pick up in performance but that passage is allegorical and describes the effort of something called eternal urge to break through the gateway of senses and unite with its suitor environment. And this abstract allegorical eternal urge is similar in some ways, I would say, to what I'm talking about as the yarn to learn that characterizes several foreign S innocence. Part three. The first scene of drowning affirms Phe's status as one of these foreign S innocence. When Phe opens the newspaper, he gasps and then touches the page tenderly with the palm of his hand. He points to a picture in the paper and asks what it is. Rowe says it is a snow drift. And Phe asks, what is snow? Rowe explains what snow is and then points to a picture of a snowman introducing a compound idea, snow plus man. And this idea bewilders Phe. Phe describes the snowman as quote unquote awkward but it turns out that Phe does not know what the word awkward means and what he really meant to say was strikingly wonderful. He thinks that the snowman quote must be a very nice man. And then he becomes confused when Rowe explains that the snowman is not a real man. Quote, he's an imitation of a man. It is snow that has been made, that has been packed to look like a man. Now this simple notion introduces another one of foreign S's abiding concerns, the act of representation. Representation as an artistic practice that involves the manipulation of physical materials such as snow to create likenesses, however literal or abstract, of what we see and experience in the world around us. But representation also adds a linguistic or a stylistic process that involves the use of language or symbols to refer or point to what we see and hear and experience in the world around us. Phe's difficulty in comprehending what he sees in the newspaper and imitation in the form of a photograph, of an imitation of a man made out of snow is a sign of Fornes' interest in both the politics and the logistics of representation. In a monodrama called Dr. Keele, that Fornes first wrote in the 1960s. Dr. Keele takes the form of a mock lecture by a bombastic professor of everything. And in it, Dr. Keele pontificates on a variety of subjects, including speech, poetry, beauty and love and the nature of truth. Regarding language, Dr. Keele says this, words change the nature of things. A thing not named and the same thing named are two different things. And then regarding truth, Dr. Keele says, truth is not at all the way we understand things to be. Why? The moment you name it, it's gone. One of my favorite instances of a Fornes character grappling with representation occurs in a short play called Hunger. It's the fourth play in a cycle of plays called What of the Night. In this play Hunger, it takes place in the future after a great economic disaster which has caused the destitute and the homeless to spend much of their time waiting in line each day for food and shelter in a dreary warehouse. In the second scene of the play, the character of Ray empties a small sack on the floor containing miscellaneous found objects, a stone, a chunk of wood, a bottle cap, things like that. And then he proposes a new procedure to a character named Charlie who's a dimwitted man who oversees the line. He points to the pieces and moves them about as he speaks. This is what Ray says, object by object. This is someone who came first. This is Reba. This represents her. This is me and this is someone else. Charlie, someone comes first and puts his piece down. And then Reba comes and puts her piece down. She's second. Then I come and I put my piece down. Then someone else puts his piece down. It's clear in what order we came. We don't have to stand in line. We can go somewhere else, sit down someplace or do something we have to do. Then when it's time to come in, we stand in line in the order of our pieces. See, a person may have to go to the toilet. They can go to the toilet and come back because their piece is on the floor in place. When your piece is on the floor, it means you're around and you're coming back. This proposal's rejected when Charlie, who is a bureaucrat who lacks imagination, says that he does not have a form for that. But the idea of representation, of something standing in for something else, of a kind of surrogate is still there. Part four. Back in the cafe with Pee and Roe still in the first scene, Pee's effort at understanding the difference between a man and a snowman is complicated when he sees the picture in the paper of a woman named Jane Spivak. He says that he looks more like the snowman than the woman, but Roe explains that the snowman, quote, when it gets warmer, as it is today, will melt. She will not and you will not because each of them is made of, quote, unquote, human flesh. So it seems for a moment that Pee and Roe are human after all, but this does not dispel the sense that they are a different order of human. They are essentialized humans. They're both raw and abstract specimens of a sort. Now the spare rather minimal story of drowning advances when Pee asks Roe if he can meet the woman whose picture he has seen in the newspaper. He says, she's beautiful. I would like to look at her in the flesh. Roe says that he could introduce Pee to other girls, but Pee does not want to meet anybody else. There's something special about this woman in the newspaper. Quote, she looks so very lovely, he says, even here on this paper, as he touches it with the tenderness that signals the short play's major event. Pee is falling in love with Jane Spivak. Now some of you already know, Fornes is a great sensualist and a romantic at heart. Most of her plays are love plays on one level or another and there's plenty of love in feffu of her friends from the troubled relationships between feffu and her husband and between Paula and Cecilia. To Paula's more playful notion that quote, a love affair lasts seven years and three months and then she proceeds to articulate each stage of that period of time. Love in Fornes's plays is absolute and transformative. It heightens the senses to the point that it changes perception. The first interview that I ever did with Irene Fornes back in 1985, she told me this anecdote. She said, I remember having what became almost an argument with a friend who's very political. It was about my play, Molly's Dream. She said it was romantic and meant it as a criticism and I said yes, isn't it? It meant it as a high compliment. I remember we were in a bar, we were drinking beer and I said quote, have you ever been with a person when just being with them makes you see everything in a different light? A glass of beer has an amber, a yellow that you've never seen before and it seems to shine in a manner that is, she said yes and I said that is romantic, that is romance and she said, well, in that case. And I said it is more beautiful. It isn't that you want it to be more beautiful or that you are lying to yourself. It is, your senses are sharpened. Romance is romance. Love in Fornes not only makes it possible to see things in a different light, it makes it possible to think things that could not otherwise be thought. To echo Dr. Keele, I would say, love changes the nature of things. A thing not loved and the same thing loved are two different things. Part five, the first scene of drowning ends with a brief exchange in which P suggests to Roe that they should leave. Roe reminds him that they're waiting for their friend Steven. Steven arrives very similar to P and Roe in appearance and they decide to stay a while to give Steven a chance to warm up. The second scene of drowning is only two lines of dialogue long. To give you a little bit more of a feeling for the play, I want to show you a couple production photographs here from two different productions that illustrate this second scene. I don't know whether this will stand here. There's one, and I'll just put one right there. Two different productions, two different design approaches to technically what we would call the mast. One here, a bit more austere. This is a production that Fornes directed at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. A slightly more cartoonish approach here. This is a production that was done at the Signature Theater in New York as part of the Fornes signature season in 1999, 2000. I want to read you, since it's only two lines long, the entire text for the second scene. This is the whole scene. Scene two, a few minutes later after scene one. P's head leans on the table. He sleeps. Roe sits on the left. Stephen stands upstage of the table. Stephen, referring to P, says, he is very kind, and he could not do harm to anyone. Roe says, yes, and I don't want any harm to come to him either because he's good, and the lights fade, and that's the entire scene. As early as Fornes is the successful life of three in 1965, she experimented with composing a play out of a rapid fire sequence, a very short, so telegraphic, fragmented scene. In the 1980s, she took this strategy a bit further by making regular use of a new unit of dramatic construction, a momentary static scene that offers an emotional snapshot or cross-section of a changing dramatic situation. And clearly scene two is an example of that that I'm offering to you. These little scenes, to borrow, check off subtitle for drowning, operate on the pictorial principle of a tableau. They usually last longer than a tableau and have a much more reverberative dimension to them like a pebble that is tossed into a still pond and sending out ripples. These short scenes are always rigorously composed. They're marked by stillness. They have a kind of iconographic feel to them and they pulse with emotion. If there's dialogue, often only one character speaks or then privately, intimately, or in a detached manner as Stephen and Ro do in the one line they have each in this scene. These vignettes can be as brief as a few seconds long. They can last as long as a couple of minutes but each one, as a London theater critic once wrote, quote, is like a gasp. So short, it is over in the time it takes for a blush to go. These miniature scenes are so particular to the way Irene Fornes writes her plays that they ask for their own particular designation. So I have taken to referring to them as emotographs, emotional snapshots, registered as vivid stage images. If any of you know the play Mud, scene eight of Fornes's Mud is an emotograph that captures the romance between two characters named May and Henry. In that scene, this is the entire scene, May is sitting at a table snapping beans when Henry comes up behind her, covers her eyes and places a small package in her hands. She opens it to find a lipstick, something that as a poor woman she never ever would have had before. Henry pushes lipstick up out of the tube and then hands it back to her. She puts on lipstick as he holds up a hand mirror for her to see her face. She puckers her lips, he kisses her and she sighs, oh, Henry. And that's the entire scene in a photograph. Other playwrights might more readily include a sequence like this in a longer scene but Fornes is content to distill the dramatic situation down to its most essential, most evocative details as a condensed, extended image. Now again, here, Feffu is somewhat exceptional in Fornes's body of work. It does not have anything that I would call in a photograph. The play's not written in a series of short fragmented scenes. In fact, acts one and three of Feffu and her friends represent two of the longest uninterrupted scenes in all of Fornes's plays. I think this has a little something to do with the fact that Feffu and her friends was written after a period of not writing very much in 1976 and 77 at a kind of pivotal moment in Fornes's career when she was still finding her more mature, advanced style. Part six. In another interview that I did with Fornes some years ago, she spoke of her fondness for the playwright George Buchner and his proto-expressionist drama, Wojtsek. She said this, I love the way that Buchner doesn't tell you very much. He's so economical. He leaves out the details that are garbage that you don't need. You don't really know what is wrong. Even when Wojtsek is talking to the ground, you can say he's crazy, but is he? He's not painting a picture of a crazy man necessarily. He just depicts a kind of agony almost like a triptych. You have this picture, you have that picture, and you have that picture, and it shows the passion of St. Sebastian. The comparison to the triptych reminds us of Fornes's visual orientation as a playwright. When placed one after another, her scenes, many of them what I'm calling emotographs operate like the panels of a triptych. Each has its own compositional integrity, but when seen in a sequence as it were side by side, a more complex and more evocative picture emerges. The spectator connects the dots, projecting both a narrative and an emotional progression into the gap between the scenes or between the panels of the triptych. Scene three of drowning makes the play a theatrical triptych that might be subtitled The Passion of P. It takes place in the same cafe a month later. P is disheveled and distraught as he sits and talks to Roe about his feelings for the woman he first glimpsed in the newspaper. Somehow, and Fornes does not want or need to provide the narrative details, it just doesn't matter how it happened, but somehow he has made the acquaintance of Jane Spivak and his affections have been rebuffed. He says this, I love her. She is close to my heart. The way only an animal can be and as unfathomable. Looking into her eyes is so quiet, like sleep, like a bed, and she is wild, like a tiger. She smells like a lion, and she claws like a lion, and yet in her eyes, she is quiet, like a fish. The stage directions indicate here that P is somewhat frenetic, and at moments he's short of air and makes a sound like snoring. And P's very next line extends the ontological ambiguity of the characters even further. He says, quite oddly, I'm not a person, I'm a bat. Look at my skin, see, it is too smooth and too dark. Touch it, this is not like human skin. And at that moment he gets up, he turns around, he exposes his buttocks to row and he says, look at that, my anus is violet. Put your finger on it, it is rough. Now this gesture would be ridiculous, it would probably be laughable if it was not so pathetic as an expression of P's distress. He's suffering the anguish and the alienation of rejected love. He says, what is it that makes someone a link between you and your own life? I hold her close to me and she pushes me away. She finds me repulsive. The irony is, of course, that in his bloated, oily skin, reptilian way, he is repulsive. But the combination of his innocence, his wonder and sense of beauty, and his absolute love for this woman named James Spivak, they've imbued him with a humanity that belies his outward appearance. Fornus's conceit in drowning over the identity of these characters allows her half human, half beast characters to express raw, extreme feeling in a way that might seem melodramatic or pathetic coming from more ordinary, more recognizable characters. The play winds down as P takes the folded newspaper out of his jacket and says, I thought if I kept her picture next to me, I'd find relief. But I don't find relief. There's no relief in this. Is this why we have come to life? To love like this and hurt like this? And he puts his head down on the table again, the image of despair. After a moment, Stephen waddles on, as he did in scene one, and he and Rose stare at P with compassion. Another key emotion in Fornus's work. Fornus finally, excuse me, Fornus makes the connection to the check-off story and the image of the poor man flailing around about in the water, performing a representation. When Rose says in reference to P, he's drowning, he hurts too much, and the lights fade to black. That's the play. All of this takes place in the span of three scenes in about 15 minutes. The play does not last as long as I have been talking about it. But in that time, Fornus creates a dramatic universe that's as large as life itself. She puts at the heart of that universe a sentient creature in the throes of an unbearable feeling. And she captures that condition of being in images and in actions, both verbal and visual, which resonate with beauty and comforting truthfulness. This is also what she does in Fefu and Her Friends. Julia's persecution by the judges and the constant pain experienced by Fefu amount also to a suffering of feeling, which converge, which come together in the play's final haunting, violent, and mysterious image. I would not dare begin to describe that image for you, for those of you who are going to present it and those of you who are going to experience. But it is the play's final provocation to thought. And I think you'll find it when you see the show to be a rather provocative one. So thank you for your attention. I want to get the video geared up. And I want to introduce, thank you. That was your vegetables. Now here's your dessert. What I want to show you, oh wait a moment for people to clear. I mentioned that in 1999, 2000, the Signature Theater in New York, which is a theater company that devotes, they've expanded from this mission, but their mission for the first 10 years or so was to devote an entire season to the work of one American playwright. And in 1999, 2000, that playwright was Irene Fornes. And part of the signatures procedure was not only to present the New York premiere of already existing work by that playwright, and perhaps to bring back a play that had fallen into neglect, but also to commission a new play by that playwright. And for that season, Irene Fornes wrote a play called Letters from Cuba. And it was based in part on letters that she received from her brother back in Cuba. Fornes, if you don't know her biography, was born in Havana in 1930. She moved to the United States in 1945. And two of her brothers remained in Cuba for the rest of their adult lives. They corresponded all through the Castro era, traveling back and forth very little. And Fornes, when she was commissioned to write a play for the Signature Theater, wanted to do basically a play about home. And Letters from Cuba really features Fornes's two homes, her home in Cuba, her native birthplace, and her home in Greenwich Village in downtown New York, which was really where she came of age as an artist. Around that time, a woman named Michelle Memren became familiar with Fornes's work. And Letters from Cuba actually spurred the idea of Fornes going back to Cuba for a visit with her brother, and the making of a documentary film around that visit. And so this woman named Michelle began work on a documentary film about Fornes, particularly in terms of her Cuban heritage and identity. But it so happened that at this point, 14 years ago now, Irene Fornes was already showing signs of what has become, as of now, a fairly advanced case of Alzheimer's. She was beginning to show some of the early signs of dementia. And as I've said, they are quite far advanced. Maureen, I think mentioned, I was in New York the past couple of days, just in the morning, I went to see Irene in the nursing home where she lives now. And I feel like I can still feel her spirit ticking away, but in any way that we would recognize, she's not very much with us anymore. And the gradual decline in her health made it very difficult for this woman, Michelle, to figure out what her documentary was going to be. And so it's been in a kind of perpetual process of evolution off and on for the last 10 years. And for a meeting last October, November in New York City, Michelle put together sort of 15 minute reel of some of the things in the documentary in the making. And she's given me permission to show that to you. And we're going to look at that right now. The piece is called The Rest I Make Up. Okay, I'm going to sit down. I'm going to ask, who should like a place where it's a kind of day, morning, afternoon, be an apartment building, if you are waiting for someone. Who is that person? Irene, it's Michelle. Does this visit come because the visitor wants something or because the visitor brings something? I don't know, really. I'm right here. Who's our lady for this? Who are you? I don't know if this is this person. She is, she is, she is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she is the dancing like a robot. There's nothing next to her. She is the glorious dancer in the whole world, in China, in South Africa, in the Amazon, in all of Paris. Paris, we don't know anything about anything. But when it comes to aliens dancing, it is incredible. This is the intro. They come saying, If you don't know anything, put your cheek on it. Is it? Yes, it is. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. But the feeling of your eyes, of your throat, am I so fascinating that you feel I don't need a script and need a rehearsal. So I just do myself. I want to be so interesting. People say, who is that? Who is that? Very true. Meticulous, political, honest, precise. Director, designer, writer, arguer, teacher. Do-it-it, visionary. One of the most original voices in the American theater, the playwright and director, Maria Irene Fornes. Irene, welcome. Thank you for being here. I think I was writing a play because I was going to be a playwright. I didn't think that playwright would be put on. I just had this compulsion to write it. What do you do? I don't know of any playwright or two of this. I'm reminded of taking stuff from the unconscious and letting that create form. I don't know about the person who was the one I was writing because I didn't know how to write a play. I didn't know how to do something. It's very hard to edit it in a very simple way. The very first attempt at writing a play, I was totally fascinated with the process. My most vivid memory of prom and I, and that was certainly not first. I was so enchanted by that show that I learned all of the lyrics. To walk down the street with a mean look in my face, a cigarette in my right hand, a toothpick in my left. Alternate between the cigarette and the toothpick. Ah, that's right. I mean, you know, you just... They're in your head forever. Alternate between the cigarette and the toothpick. Ah, that's why, yes. So I created a game with cards where I wrote things in different cards and then I shuffled them and then I picked them at random and whatever the card said, then I would go off in that direction. And I wrote it in two or three days. After that, I knew immediately that in order to write, I had to play games and get myself into writing obliquely, rather than head on. Because every time I would say what I'm going to write on the play now, I would look at the empty page of paper, a blank paper and I would be just completely paralyzed. I had no idea what that first word that you put down should be. It's about to be free. I read and read, I had dyslexic, so it takes me forever to read something. How about all these incredible layers? Look how many layers. Don't tell me I'm not the champion of layers because it's one, two, three, four, five, six and seven. Am I not the champion of layers? No, you're not. You say it's just a chance, it is not a chance. Good, break the wall, please. You just go and find these objects and thrift stores and these things and one thing would give her the whole scene. She was just always open to the imagination. Everything was food for her work, every moment. She said, oh, this needs, this will be part of the play here, all this tree, all this bridge. You hear people say things, you should write it down. Going with that impulse, whatever that was, the organizing principle of each play world became radically different. Each scene was in a different mood and the audience walked around. I think I went to the kitchen first. Mr. Giver is based on a letter from her brother. She knew there was a play in there but she wasn't sure what the health form was going to develop. And we just found this diary in that store that we naturally have a housekeeper. Full diary was just my main entries, wash the floor, make bread. There was something in the, looking at all pictures, that was very inspiring for me and that people, even if they're posing, there was something more softer and something a little more alive. I will wait for you because honey, my love for you is secret and it has to stay that way. How was that? I just improvised a song. Isn't it right? Made that up? I made it up? Manly words. To me, it's not a way of earning anything but it is a way of earning a life. Who cares about what's done? Who cares about whether they like it or not? The function of the artist is to tell the truth and to tell truths that are too embarrassing, too awkward, too simple, not popular enough, too complicated. Truths that the culture is not going to hear otherwise. She's done that for her entire career and of course it's not like, what riches have been produced. And she never stopped. She just went on to the next one and then she just went on to the next one and then the next one. There's no excuse in her life that seemed to me for not going forward. Los is a... L-O-S-A. S-A. Los is water. Isn't this how you spell Los? Thank you very much. Do you know Los? I don't remember it, but I don't remember it. I think it's because there is a Los. A Los. Okay. How long have I had this problem? Oh! How long have I had this problem? I don't know. It's been about four years. Four by... Four years in a very intense way, you know? Yeah. Has it been that long? That I've been out? Yes. Any thoughts of the loving? The moment is a little bit confusing. But on the other hand, I think I have a good loving hands, poor hands, two loving hands to the right, and two loving hands to the left. And a kind of interesting ending. Is this part of your story? Actually, if I mind that this is being recorded, and therefore there might be a moment when I don't want whatever is a result of these tests and things that I prefer to have reserved not to go around advertising, I would feel generally that even if I feel, oh, don't tell anybody. I prefer that everything we are on there often. I prefer not to hide anything. I haven't told you as well, Slavish, but I haven't seen her in about four years. There's probably some loss, if you're getting one like that. I thought, is she hiding? Is it this thing no more place? I don't know if you can put it in a book or not. I'd like to get out. But for an artist like me, that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is her capacity to be mindful and her interest in the present. Have you ever made your own Don't get on with it, don't ignore it. That's life, when it has such close distance to itself. Don't be afraid. You are receiving the word. Nothing. At Seattle Repertory Theatre. There's gonna be one at the theater. Now, it's probably the trial of the other one. And it's always imposing. The first one? If you're gonna go out and finish it, you turn the lights out and you say the end. And maybe you'll think that was... They would end just because their feelings about the end. So maybe that's how we should have in this movie. I should start in here? Start in here? Yeah. It has started? Yes. No, let's see this end with a happy note. So I'd be happy to have a little bit of a dialogue if there's questions I might answer. I can't tell you everything about the documentary and the making, but there's some things I noticed in there that are pretty special. Yeah. Pretty astonishing. Questions anyone? Anybody? As to why she's not better known? That's a good question. I do. And I've done a lot of research on her work and one of the things I haven't done is to try to test those theories with some more empirical research. I think it has something to do with the fact that she is what I might call a miniaturist. The plays, they're very intimate and they're best suited for small audiences. And so theaters around the country that have larger houses to fill may think that the play is not well suited for that space. Another sense of their miniaturiness or smallness is, Feffu is a full length play, but it's rare in that regard. Most of Irene's plays are one act plays. So if you're gonna present an evening of theater, you either have to put some of her work on a bill with something else or do a series of works. And generally speaking, producers aren't particularly drawn to producing evenings of one act. I think one of the theories that I would wanna test is that one of the things I did not mention is that starting in the late 1960s, early 70s, Irene began to insist on being the original director for every play she wrote. She was a naive. She wasn't innocent herself. She wasn't trained in the theater. And to her, the distinction between a director and a playwright was a false distinction. And so after a couple of uncomfortable or unpleasant experiences with other people directing her work, she insisted on directing the first time out. And she would finish creating a play in the process of rehearsal. So she would often direct the first and even the second production. And again, I don't know for sure, but that may have prevented her from forming certain partnerships with directors who would help her to advance her work. One of the curious things about FFU, part of the issue there is the second act of the play. And she was frustrated by the fact that many places couldn't do FFU because they couldn't accommodate the special nature of the second act. So she actually did an adaptation of FFU to be set entirely in the living room and recalibrated the second act scenes to have them take place in the living room. And that was only done once at Davidson College, I believe. She never finished that adaptation. It was never published. It was never shown around to larger theaters that might have wanted to do it. I'm kind of uncomfortable with that notion because of the special nature of the second act. But those are a couple ideas about. Maybe you could tell us just because people haven't seen it, I don't think it proves it, but how did that second act come to, we're moving around, they know that. How did that second act come to be? You talked about it a little bit on the phone and the cast members, so that was just for the people there. It has to do, well, it has to do with the special value that the found had for Irene. Her works, in directing her own plays, there's a quote from Kelly Stewart there who was the stage manager on Mud, and Mud was a play where, when she first started rehearsal for a workshop performance of it, she hadn't written much beyond the first scene. But Irene always loved to go shopping at flea markets and garage sales and whatnot, and pick up odd things. And she would use that to get ideas. And so a lot of what happened in Mud was formed by some farm utensils that she found at a yard sale. And Fefu was similar. She had not yet finished the play in 1977 when she was looking around for spaces to do it. And she was shown a loft space at something on the Bowery on the Lower East Side that was called the Relativity Media Lab at that point. And she was shown the stage and then they were walking her around and saying, well, here's an office, this is an office, if you need an office, you can come in here and this space could be a green room. And as she went to these series of other spaces around that facility, she said, oh, this could actually be a bedroom in Fefu's house. And oh, here's this kitchen area for the green room. Maybe we could just have a scene in the kitchen. And that really ignited her imagination and she finished writing the play with that in mind. So the first production did that. Within six months, it moved, she remounted the play at the American Place Theater uptown and has a very tight space. So the library seen in the second act had to take place in the living room. Otherwise, they were able to move around to three other spaces that time. Yes. It was not, she was a teenager. It was largely at the instigation of her mother. I mean, it was in 1945. So this was during the Batista regime in Cuba. There was, at that point, much more traffic back and forth between Cuba and the United States than when I was growing up in the through the 50s and 60s and into the 70s. So it was, I wouldn't say that they were an economic refugee, but her mother wanted to move to the States and her father had resisted it. Her father died of a heart attack in 1945. And six months later, Irene, her mother and two sisters moved to the United States and the brothers stayed behind in Cuba. They moved to New York. You saw a shot of Irene's apartment building. First couple in late 50s, early 60s, actually, Irene took an apartment in a building at one shared and square. And she lived there for the next 40 years. I still don't even know what the status of that apartment is. As mentioned, she bought it. She bought the apartment next door. She connected the two. She spent more of her life in Granite's Village than in Cuba. And she worked in a Capizio factory and all that. She was a translator for a little bit. Then when she was 19 or so, she got interested in painting. And she studied painting actually quite seriously. And then she went to Paris and she saw Waiting for Good Hope. And it was life-altering for her. Yes. Did she work explicitly in English or did she write out a book in Spanish? Interesting. She wrote overwhelmingly in English, but oftentimes mixing Spanish in. Part of this interest in The Found is her plays often incorporate found documents. And her very first piece of theater, technically I don't count it as her first play, was a series of letters from a great, great grandmother that were in Spanish that she adapted, sort of edited and adapted into a kind of monologue piece. And then letters from Cuba uses the letters in Spanish. But she really wrote in English, but in English, not as her native language, do you know? Yes. Did she tend to use, do you know, the same, not the same, but a pool of actors that she would kind of draw from as she was putting up her plays one right after another during that period? Or did she kind of start all over again with you? I don't know. It seems to me that she would, I don't know, using the same kind of pool of people would lend itself to her. There was a few. I wouldn't ever say that there was something that we would call sort of Fornes Repertory Company that joined with her a lot. There's a woman we saw, well, there's two people we saw in footage here. The little piece from Mudd had a woman in an actor named Patricia Maddock. She's been in three, four or five of Irene's plays. The cut from the piece Serita, if that's in your mind right now, showed an actor named Sheila Dapney who was in several pieces. So she would kind of fall in love with individual actors. But she worked much more consistently with a trio of designers, a man named Donald Eastman who actually was quoted here, a lighting designer named Ann Militello and a costume designer named Gabrielle Berry. And actually I was, in New York yesterday I was at the opening night of Carol Churchill's Love and Information and Gabrielle Berry did the costumes for that. So that was more of her sustained partnership. She has sustained partnerships with theater companies, with the Women's Project in New York, with Intar, with Padua Hills Playwrights Conference in Southern California. Right here. Yeah, hi. Yeah, on the subject of language again, I know that Irene was very particular about the way that she wrote and sort of like the grappling with the thought process. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the way she chooses her words, what it is to get those thoughts across and also the moments of silence in her place because I know that frequently there are all our day directions where it's, there's a moment and there's listening and how those things happen sort of in the process. Well I think the best answer to your question is in your question because it has to do with the silence. I think it has a lot to do with taking words away. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that as her own primary director, she went into any rehearsal period not necessarily needing the play on the page to tell everybody who needed to know something, what they needed to know in order to do the play because she was going to do it and she was there to tell them. And it actually, I think it has created some issues with the publication of her plays because she can never stop working on a play. I mean any time she did a play, she would make adjustments. The printed copy of Fefo and her friends that I've been working from has some, I wouldn't say overwhelmingly significant differences but there's some things in the original text that was published in Performing Arts Journal in 1977 that are no longer in what she made the kind of final version. So I think it has something to do with the fact that for her the work was never done. And it certainly was, the script was not done until the play went up. And as part of my research I had the privilege of sitting in on several rehearsal periods including an extended a two week workshop at Milwaukee Repertory Theater for the piece that became known as What of the Night. And she would have rehearsal for six or seven hours and she would go home and write. And things got so cramped, there was one occasion where I was always wanting to do something to help for the privilege of being able there to watch where I was actually typing up scenes for her because every time she saw the work she wanted to make an adjustment. Yes. A little bit about the work Connecting a Life that was sort of a reflection on her theater pieces. Could we use that in the... I think, and it's a loaded statement for me to make. I think it's probably the single best book about Irene and I've written one myself. Because it presents Irene from so many different angles. I think it's a book while it has some of the pluses and minuses of a series of tributes. A lot of the comments there are pretty penetrating in their analysis. There's two women who put it together, Maria Delgado and the playwright Carrie Dot-Switch. Carrie Dot-Switch had studied with Irene in the 1980s at the Intar workshop. Was one of sort of a new generation of Hispanic, Latino, and Latina American playwrights that kind of took hold coming out of that workshop. And just the huge number of contributors to that volume. I think it was a real testament to this paradox about Irene is that in the theater world she's extremely well known and I think well respected whether people love her plays or not. There's an acknowledgement of the contributions she's made on various levels. And the sort of panoply of people that are in that book are a reminder to me about that when I start to worry about, you know, her legacy. I mean, those of us who put a lot of time and energy into studying her work are concerned about legacy because the plays aren't widely done. But it's always important to remember that, you know, like anybody that we eventually lose, the legacy is gonna live on in the influence that they've had on other people. Yeah. Could you speak a little bit about Scott? I'm paraphrasing a dramaturgical quote from the email that invited us to this talk. Yeah. It basically said something like there's pre-pornets and post-pornets and that's the specific point and why, how? Well, that's a quote from Paula Vogel which was part of her tribute that basically saying that for a playwright in particular, there's something about a genuine encounter with her work that changes the perspective. And I don't know exactly what Paula Vogel meant by that but what I would guess or what it would mean to me is going back to the quote from Edward Albee in Michelle's documentary that Irene did not question the ideas and images however inchoate coming out of her own subconscious. She just trusted the truthfulness of the unconscious world and her playwriting exercises are all focused on getting playwrights to relax and listen to the voices in their head. And to me that's the before and after is the, I mean it's an overused word but the empowerment of the playwright to trust his or her own internal mechanism, that there's something, well I mean it connects a little bit with the image in the first act of a fefu about turning over the stone that on the dark underside of the stone there is this teeming life that when we're walking down the street we don't think much about it. We're focused on the surface of things. Just the way much of the time we're focused on our surface consciousness but when that stone is turned over other things are revealed that are just as true and just as real as our everyday world. For me that's the before and after part. Yes. I was wondering, she said something about, she said who cares if they like it or not and I was wondering if you knew, had some insight about what did give her validation when she put on place. I don't have a comfortable answer to that question but I think it would have to do with the composition of an image. Just looking at something and in seeing a combination of sights and sounds, a gesture or tone of voice, a song and that feeling that that's just exactly the way it should be. I think that would be my guess is what would be the greatest satisfaction for her. She also, as you can see, I mean from this film she loves attention. She loves attention and she got a lot of attention, a lot of satisfaction out of some of the attention that her work brought her. I mean, when she got an award she was like, give me my award. Yeah. Scott, you need to go. I need to go. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Wake up early! Thank you!