 So I'm very excited about this panel, this is like my fantasy panel, where I was able to bring together all of the directors who I greatly admire, and who, if I frankly have something in common with, because they've all been deeply inspired by the work of Ivy and I feel very strongly that this is an area of Ivy's work that is the least discussed, the least understood, the least recorded, the least analyzed. I think her legacy as a director is extremely important and this panel is hopefully taking the first step towards trying to correct that omission and to create a robust discussion around her legacy as a director. So I'm going to leave it to Julia Jarco, our chair today, to introduce the panelists. You do have their bios in your program, so that we can dive right into a robust conversation. But I will introduce Julia Jarco, who is directly to my right. Julia Jarco is an assistant professor in the English department here at NYU and she graciously agreed to chair today's panel. Julia is one of the very few who is equally fantastic as a scholar and as an artist, which is a rare thing to pull off in this day and age. So she is a scholar just publishing the book, Writing in a Modern Stage, Theater Beyond Drama, which came out in Cambridge University Press. But she's also a playwright. I've seen a number of her works, including The Terrify at Amherst Art Center in 2017. She won an obit for her play, Brimley Handsome. And I think Julia's actually worked with a few of the directors on the panel, but not all of them. So this is also going to be witnessing of these people getting to know each other a little bit, which I think should be their life goals. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to Julia. One final thing is that we are live streaming via HowlRound. So at the end, if you're answering any questions, if you're turning to Q&A, you will need to just speak rather loudly but on your actor voice so that you can be included in the recording for the live stream. All right? Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Wendolin. When Wendolin asked me to do this, to chair this panel, I actually had not known that Irene Fornes was a director. So that was something I was excited to learn about. And so just very briefly, in case, you know, just to sort of catch us all up, it might be interesting in this context to know if you don't already, but she had originally trained as a painter. And then she, in the 60s, had sat in on the Lee Strasberg session in the actor's studio and also opened theater sessions with Joseph Tchaikin as a kind of student of acting but also directing. And starting in 1967, she directed almost all of the premieres of her own plays, all the plays that you guys have been hearing and hearing about and thinking about over the past couple of days. She also directed shows, plays, classics by other writers, including Ibsen and Tchaikin, and so I'm excited to think with this panel of incredible directors about, maybe about Irene Fornes's work as a director, but also the different ways that her work may have influenced their own approach to the computer. So I'll just very briefly kind of introduce each of them. You have their bios, and I won't read through the whole thing since there are so many of us here. But I'll go in order. So Willa Cabrera is a director whose work has been seen all over the world in Europe and South America after End of the USA. Her company is called Intandom Lab, which she's the artistic director, is that right? And just one credit as an example of her clever adaptation of Agamemnon, a drama desk nomination. Then next to her is Tina Satter, who is the writer, director, and artistic director of Half Strattle here in New York, which is an OB winning company that I hope you all have gotten a chance to see. She is the recipient also of the Doris Duke Impact Award, and her work has toured the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Tina also wrote her master's thesis at Read On Fornes, which I do not know that either until recently. Next to Tina is Katie Pearl, who's a director and playwright and teacher. She's the co-artistic director of the company Pearl D'Amore, for which she collaborates with the playwright, Lisa D'Amore. That company also has one in OB, and her work has also gotten grants from the MAP fund, from the NEA, and from Creative Capital. She's the chair of directing at UC San Diego. Next to Katie is Elena Agaus, who is a director whose recent productions include a production of Mud with Boundless, and a really fascinating adaptation of A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds by Metwoman, next to her at the Merit Theater Workshop, which we did that to see. It was pretty fantastic. And then finally, Alice Regan is a director in New York who has engaged extensively also with Fornes's work in various ways, I guess, foremost among them being directing a bunch of her plays. I won't read all of them. She's an associate professor of professional practice and directing at Barnard, and you probably just saw the reading of Forna, which she directed over in the theater space. So each of these people is going to talk for a little while about Fornes and her influence on their work, and then we will maybe talk a little bit amongst ourselves, and then we will very quickly be there after open it up to discussion. Yeah, okay. So, let me start here. So I want to approach Maria Irene Fornes with the spirit of student. I mean, that's the feeling I get as a director when I think about her. As someone who still is in the constant journey of learning a craft with humility, one who recognizes a master in her own right and the pride of the student that is able to recognize that your teacher is a master. When I started working in theater back in the 80s, I was born in Peru, in South America, and when I was born, I lived inside a narrative where women could at best be actresses in theater or maybe poets, but not playwrights, directors. That was not something I could understand as part of my world. And I feel like her work, when I have the chance to meet her work, encountering Maria Irene Fornes' work in my life opened a wider narrative for me. I think that in some way I lived in my body what she does to her characters. Debunkment of history and causal consequences. Consequences, the possibility of closely observing and embodying alternative realities and the capacity of making the familiar, the unfamiliar, and because of that to make the things that I thought were impossible, possible. Sometimes I feel that my biggest enemy and our biggest enemy as women artists can be, it's a mode of seeing the world which thinks it knows in advance what is worth and possible and what is not. Learning about her work and her history plays me in a different landscape. A landscape that what Cantor gave to me and Mushkin has given to me and my work have challenged my notions of the work we do, the way we do it and how I locate inside this inheritance. I in particular feel that for me it was a huge opening to see an artist that could direct and write and that was a painter at the same time. That is something that has always got in my work. I started as an actress, I moved to directing and currently I'm also sort of writing. I will never reach the mastery of the master but I feel that it's very inspiring to have her as a role model. Another thing that for me was very important is that her work is a theater of the flesh. I'm not going to talk about the first time I read one of the plays, I will talk about the first time I put my hands, my body inside one of her texts, inside of her body, her artistic body. Women must write women, said Ellen, excuse in the love of the Medusa. Women's led our kidneys, our unconsciousness, our irrationality, our fluids out and flow in our work, in our body. When I approached Tango Palace that was in 2010 when the Fornes Festival here in New York was at the Cherry Lane, I got in touch with the viscerality of Fornes directly with a woman who sort in her mailness and her mailness. I heard the echo, I found a kindred animal of the pack. I was directing a reading, quite honestly I'm not very interested in directing readings, I only believe what the body can do and cause on stage, in what words, breath and sound can provoke in the soul of our audiences. When we started prepping for the reading Fornes' words carried such muscularity that we had to jump on the stage. I had two actors, two writers, Mead and Adjur Gupta, we started sitting down and reading and all of a sudden there was no way you could read that text without connecting it to the body and I had my actors with the scripts in hand moving all over the place and not only giving their souls to create flesh on the stage and all of a sudden I think Irene imposed her way, it showed us a journey a reading for her is a reading that is open to all these possibilities so we ended up scripting in hand without blocking or anything just making it happen as an event and one of the biggest memories of that moment is that they brought Irene to the reading and she was in the back and she was saying some of the words of Tanga Palace she was not talking to anybody at that point and she was just repeating the words and I will never forget the feeling in my heart is theater that isn't the flesh that even when your mind is in some other space you're still there, you're still present you're still reacting to that that experience changed me profoundly there was something in her work that was so hyper real and intense so against the Aristotelian standard for Nes with her work opens doors invite us to walk in a play and play inside and you will never come out the same after living with her inside her body her body of work Tanga Palace was an experimenting writing as she said but also writing myself and the possibility of writing has always been a secret desire of me and I think as a director I feel like we write on stage so from there to writing with words there's a little breath away I feel like there's the distance of a breath that's all I have of what she changed me thank you yeah so I'm going to I'll kind of talk initially a little bit how I came to write my thesis on Maria Irene Fornez because I was in Outread College in a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and I wasn't even really, I had no theater background at that point but I was just starting to get interested in it from my brief stint as being a bad actress and I didn't like being an actress so I was interested by then in theater and this was about 15 years ago but I hadn't studied it I'd been an English undergraduate before grad school and I was taking classes in playwriting and directing while at Read and for my directing class we had to direct a small excerpt or a short play for the final thing and I'm like oh I just want to direct my own writing and the teacher was like oh you don't want to do that it's really hard, you're not supposed to do that I was completely naively confused I was like what do you mean I know exactly how this should go it was really confusing to me that I wouldn't direct what I had written and then he was like alright, alright and then he was like okay here's someone I had never heard of Maria Irene Fornez and it was this really seminal thing so I looked her up and started reading about her and reading her plays and it was immediately clicked in in a huge way and then went on to do the final thesis on her and write and direct my own play as part of that final thesis project and it was on like I sort of wrote something on her idea of theatricalized realism and her plays that theatricalize emotional transactions both inward and outward operate from a core feminist ethos and frame the intangible interior magic of everyday connections have been the most immediate influence on her playwriting director and then I wrote a really short piece a few years ago Maria received the Edwin Booth Award at the CUNY Graduate Center and so I was asked to write a short thing so I'm just going to read that and it's not explicitly on her direction but I find that so fused with her playwriting a bunch of ways so I'll just read this and it's quite short but it's called the kind of theatrical realism an emotional landscape based in the realness a character P my god what is it a character row it's a newspaper P it is beautiful row nods P may I touch it row nods P touches the paper a tear rolls down his face P this must be made by a person row yes many of them they put out a new one each day these opening lines of dialogue are one of my very favorite pieces that Maria Irene Fornes wrote a small play called drowning from a collection called orchards where playwrights wrote short plays in response to checkout short stories P and row are heartbreaking and hilarious as described by Fornes in the first stage direction in the play P and rows heads are large and shapeless like potatoes they have warts on their faces and necks their bodies are also like potatoes and this first tiny section of dialogue from a tiny play encapsulates poetically and perfectly what Maria does with her art the way her writing excavates our senses over and over again the way she holds up a delicate but earthy and honest mirror to our humanity and its reflection casts back micro heart beats and macro intellectual considerations of self-discovery difference, desire and the sadness of our moments girded by an unrelenting hope drawn from our very existences when Fornes renders an odd potato creature move to tears by seeing the object of a newspaper then elevates the context with just eight words they put out a new one each day she imbues language and life with a sense of possibility that is both banal and then holy revelatory to those who are lucky enough to know Fornes' words, ideas and art and many, many more should we get access to what I definitively think art can and should do her plays open up the edges of ourselves and our present moments in ways that are utterly singular to each reader or audience member and then reflect widely on the past, future and present to lead to this tweaking of what we thought we knew which she presents to us. In my thesis on Fornes I wrote, I recall, I called this effect theatricalized realism and what I believe Fornes' dead did since she operated as writer and director was imbue the writing with a director's incisive and highly imaginative use of all the tricks of theatrical thinking to crack open what our other sage master Mack Wellman calls the already known. Thank God we need all the questioning considering and repurposing of the already known we can get from Fefu and her friends with this incredible rendering of a female landscape to the laser intense darkness of mud, to my favorite of her plays the Danube that uses language in the most awesomely simple way to delineate was also deceptively an epic of romance, family and illness I think Fornes is always doing one thing placing words on the page to be animated in performance in order to consider the ways we never stop trying to communicate all kinds of love in some sense it is that simple in which her plays and why her plays which are master pieces also have that simple tight feeling in each one near the end of drowning the character of P says do you know what it is to need someone the feeling is so much deeper than words can ever say do you know what despair is anguish what is that makes someone a link between you and your own life Fornes offers us this intangible link every time we read her work each play that we see her theatrical creations are an ongoing link between ourselves and life. Great so before I start I just want to briefly correct something in my introduction which is that I'm not the chair of directing at UCSD but I did hold the position of the Quinn Martin distinguished guest chair of directing in 2017 and 2018 which was actually where I was able to direct Irene's play what of the night which is the only play of Irene's I've directed fully so I didn't really meet Irene through her work I in 2013 I met and fell in love with the woman who was making a documentary about Irene Fornes and in the process of falling in love with Michelle Michelle was deeply in love with Irene and deeply committed to her and so by extension I began to become deeply in love with Irene and deeply committed to her and I eventually became a producer on the film and so I would say for the past five years Irene has been a huge part of my life both as a learning and meeting her as a mentor and an artist but also spending time with her in Amsterdam house as the person she is today and thinking a lot about both of those things being with the film and also being with Irene has made me think a lot about lineage and how sometimes you can move through life and not realize that you are part of a lineage until suddenly it it is shown and shows up in front of your eyes and the things Michelle's film did for me was help me recognize that I am part of a long time surge of energy and questioning that Irene was was one of the initial drops of stones in the water and we are still feeling her ripples today but however I did meet Irene as a playwright when I was a freshman in college a mentor of mine an amazing director named Kim Rubenstein was directing a play of Irene's called Serita called Serita and I assisted Kim on that production and what I remember about it was feeling almost the only response to it at that time was feeling its foreignness it felt so awkward to me as a play the rhythms of it I couldn't connect to the way the songs kind of came in the language that the characters were using to speak and the rhythms of that language and also the passion the heights of passion that that play goes to it just I could not connect any of it and so I didn't really understand why people were so excited or why this mentor of mine Kim was so excited about this play and then in production the kind of DIY quality of the set which I know now is very in keeping with Irene's original productions but all of that seemed like quite a mystery and then a few years later in a directing class well why don't I just direct this first scene of Sarita and try to understand it a little bit better so then I took the next step towards as Gisello was saying you get your hands on it and you get inside of it and what I felt once I was on the inside what I found is that from the inside the dialogue wasn't stiff it was urgent and it was economical incredibly economical the lines and words were driven by passions that were clear direct and accessible and not obfuscated by they just like were there they were recognizable and I remember thinking that there wasn't a lot of clutter in the play there wasn't a lot of extra so so now let's fast forward to just three years ago when Michelle took me to the Amsterdam house where I met Irene for the first time and in my mind at that point she was really this grande dame of the theater and her importance had been elevated really high and so I wanted to you know pay my respects and I wanted to sort of sit at the feet of the master and I was going to meet her and I was really nervous I wanted Michelle to think that I was good at being with Irene so there were all sorts of crazy stakes happening and what I encountered who I encountered in that moment was an old lady with really amazing cheekbones in a wheelchair whose hands eyes and mouth were the most present parts of her and the most active parts of her and those three and ears at that point and those aspects of her were where I was able to connect and as many people talk about their experiences being with her especially a few years ago when you are present with her she immediately goes to touch and to stroking and because for those of you who don't know she has been moving through stages of dementia and at that time she was still pretty active and pretty present so I sat with her for about an hour Michelle and we were at the piano and we played a little piano we sang songs and she had a maracas and tambourine but mostly we got into this sort of fugue state where she was just with my hand using my hand all over her face and neck and kissing it and and I realized that I was it was both immensely important that I was myself and also not important at all that I was every woman or person she had ever loved in that moment or cared for or been cared by and she took us directly to where the tactile meets the emotional my notes are on my cell phone flash forward to something even more recently just about a month and a half ago Irene's apartments are which she still has in the West Village are finally being sold and they've never been emptied out they've just been sitting there with all of her stuff in it for many many years so I and a few other people Morgan Janess someone who was her agent for a long time and another friend Yana Landon went to try to help the Guardian figure out what to do with all this stuff and what needs to be saved now when she first left her homes we made sure I wasn't part of that process that moment but many of her papers are already at NYU fails but we knew that there was a lot more in her apartment that needed to be saved and being in her apartment also was revelatory in terms of thinking of her as an outsider artist which she is in that she's always been a little bit or a lot on the outside of the mainstream theater but that quality that I've grown to recognize with outsider artists where they just can't stop creating no matter what is around them becomes art and very specifically Irene was also identified really strongly as a costume designer and so her whole apartment had like mountains of clothes piled up but she also had this huge series of boxes that had shoes of different sizes or little trinkets but they were all she had sewn like a padded cover around each of these shoe boxes and had written very carefully stenciled on them what was in them so even the things that contained the things that helped her make her art were also art and then also recently Michelle and I were curious about whether we could use all the outtakes of her film to create a live performance because there was so much that didn't end up in the film and that's really wonderful of Irene talking to the camera so we took all this footage to Brown University to see if we could make a live performance happen and in preparing for that I did this deep dive of reading probably 90% of her plays and went on this hunt for all of the connective threads that connect all of them and began to see so clearly these obsessions and fascinations that she came back to again and again so the forms of all her plays are different but these topics and obsessions and conversations that characters have show up in every single one like people are constantly talking about work and jobs people are constantly talking about language and the importance of language the negotiation and exchange about love whether it's sexual love or romantic love and how love is used for power how language is used for power all these things that became her personal economic system was really fascinating to me and it taught me that never again can I direct the work of a playwright I don't think without really looking at their whole entire body of work because when I moved into directing What of the Night that knowing what to look for in it was the only way I was able to get inside that play which is huge so when I decided to direct What of the Night I felt this huge sense of responsibility because as a director you're always hearing it is really hard to direct a Maria Irene Fornes play and like nobody can direct Irene Fornes the way Irene can direct it and there is the sense almost of like don't even try because you're going to fail and also Michelle's standards are really high and so I wanted to do her proud but mostly I wanted to do Irene justice because if you're going to direct one of Irene's plays I feel like you have to start asking yourself what does this play require so that Irene's play can be heard because it's so easy for it to collapse under like excessive emotionality or like extra concept added on top of that so I wanted to make something that I felt like Irene would not hate that Irene would be like okay you did you did my play and I can see my play in there I wanted to read the messages that she puts in the dialogue so one thing one anecdote about Irene is that she knew that one of the first things directors or stage managers are taught to do is to cross out all the stage directions and these scripts and so if she wanted something to happen on stage she would make sure that the character said it to each other like if she wanted a toaster she would say have somebody say could you pass me a piece of toast that just popped out of that toaster she would say it better than that and so I wanted to help my actors understand that there was logic and information in the text similarly to how I was trained to access Shakespeare that Shakespeare you can discover what needs to be happening on stage by looking at the actual text I knew that she was so strong in her writing voice and I needed to challenge myself to be her match so one thing Ken Preston-Enzy who's sitting here today said yesterday in fact that when you direct an Irene Fornes play you have to be ready to kick its ass because it is going to kick right back at you and that doesn't mean like I have to be super smart and bring a lot of cleverness on top of it it just means that I have to understand the vision I have to choose amongst all of those obsessions and fascinations that her characters are talking about which one is most important to be heard for me right now or for this time right now and I have to make sure the play is allowed to speak that so her impact on me as a director are the lessons I've taken away from her are that I need to be selfish and fearless about demanding my own vision and I need to trust myself and not start second guessing based on shoulds or based on past precedent there's a scene in the film where she's directing I don't even know if it's her play but she gets up on stage and she shows the sort of large man who's clearly not a very trained actor how to walk across the stage like this and so he's like laughing and sort of embarrassed and then he goes he tries it and she's like no no no no no like you go back and you do it like this and so I always think about that another lesson push it farther another lesson is that real and surreal are two parts of the same moment it's not about choosing one or the other I've found that her plays or at least the one I worked on really came alive when I was able to try to find that balance between both and that speaking in terms of tempo rather than psychology is a really practical tool I've been talking for a while so I'll stop with that thank you Hi my name is Elena Araus and I have only met Fornes through her work I've never met her in person I really don't know very much about her as a person only what you can read in academic journals and papers and through friends of hers but I was introduced to her in graduate school to her work and I thought wow this is really late in my life having made it to graduate school to be learning about and learning the body of work of somebody who's such an important American playwright and then in graduate school I found at a used bookstore this copy of Mud and it was not the copy that sold within the anthology it was just the script itself and it was typed and I bought it for $3 and I read it and I'm obsessed with it completely because I think the thing about that play and about so many of her plays is that it affirmed a style and aesthetic that I have loved but have not been able to find much in the American theater and I've found it in other places I've found it in Belgian theater with Gael de Road I found it in Italian theater with Commedia dell'Arte I found it in French theater with I find it in Balinese theater with their dance drama and I find it in Latin American literature certainly Borges and novelists and short story writers and playwrights like him but there's something about her and her style which I found completely unique and as I've been now starting to direct her work what I think about her style and this is just my observation and maybe not how she would discuss or talk about her own work but I think what she gives us is a stark and honest portrayal of humans acting on their most honest and most horrible animal instincts bordering on the grotesque and without landish humor and so I've realized where this comes from because I wonder why do I like this so much and I grew up on a whole bunch of really dark spooky fairy tales with a lot of action and adventure movies and a lot of episodic storytelling and I think when I combine that with then my acting training which is all in classical theater so very language based and I became very obsessed with every piece of punctuation and every consonant and every vowel and the action that's behind those things and then to go on to study Delarte as a performer and physicality of that action and the humor that comes with it all of those things I found rolled up in a fornes and I think she balances the grotesque and the comedic in a way that nobody else does so the other thing that the other reason I think I was also really attracted to her work and continued to be attracted to her work is that I feel like she writes about poverty in an organic way which I don't think I also see as often in the American theater it's a for the most part and I'm being general here it's there's a privilege to be able to be a theater artist right and many theater artists and certainly many people who go to the theater don't really understand poverty really understand poverty and I think whether Fornes understood it from any kind of personal experience or not I think that there's something in her place where she's able to express what poverty is from understanding it from the inside as opposed to speaking from above it and looking down on it and that's something just from my my perspective that I really appreciate and I also think that because from my understanding that she is all kinds of writing and directing techniques to disrupt her own thought process to be more inventive and to silence any kind of voice in her head which told her how it had to be done that what you get in these plays are these massive surprises and that as much as it disrupted her it also disrupts the audience and these 180 degree turns and these shifts and these characters are so exciting to me and what I've become more and more aware of is because of these mad tangential sometimes seemingly tangential shifts what are the 10 thoughts that get you from point A to point B and I've come to realize for myself that I think these characters I'm starting to find these characters and helping actors find these characters by what is not said more so than what is said so what is said gets you so far and then what are those 10 thoughts in between how do they get from one place to the other and in that silence is the fear and when you understand the fear of these characters and you understand their desperate animalistic need for survival then I think that's when you get to something really exciting I'm always looking for the animal in these characters and of course you know in all of her plays as you know she talks about most of her characters as animals and allides them with animals and then the other thing is in those shifts all of her characters even those who are completely illiterate are funny and they're witty and their language is precise and their punctuation is perfect so when I'm directing Fornes I'm scouring the play for every joke and there's so many of them they're hysterically funny I make it a practice that when I approach a tragedy I approach it like a comedy because I believe that when you fall in love with characters you fall in love with them because you're either laughing with them or at them and when you can laugh with them or at them you can see yourselves in them and you can see your own foibles in them and then you can cheer for them I so the first play of hers that I've worked on and the only play that I've done to complete full production so far is Mud and when I was asked to do Mud by a boundless theater company here which is based in New York and in Puerto Rico and is the artistic director is Maria Cristina Puste she as soon as she had this idea I said yes absolutely I want to do Mud and then I thought okay I'm sure Fornes has already done this play perfectly why am I doing this play why do we need another production of it and as I re-read the play I thought this is what's so sad about Fornes's work is that it never goes out of style she's writing about it never is not relevant she's writing about you know poverty, abuse, domestic abuse sexual abuse, systemic oppression dictatorships fascism and it never seems dated her plays are never dated and that's what's a testament to her writing but also how sad our world is and so I decided to be brave and to not do any research on how she had done the play and to not look at any photos of what she had done in the design and working with her designers and to just approach it as why this play for this audience at this time and why this play for a New York audience at this time and so I had at it and I decided just like I would treat any other great writer that all the clues would be in the text and so the clues that really stuck out to me and well first off the title mud and yet the stage direction so clearly implied that the set is incredibly dry and there's no mud on the set so immediately I understood that for myself to mean that mud is a metaphorical mud that these characters are stuck in a mud of situations that have either been forced upon them or that they've created themselves and then the other big clue for me was this brilliant blue sky that's outside the window that you can see through the door and so you've got this, these characters stuck in the mud and yet there's this brilliant blue sky and I thought wow that's the center of hope and the center of ambition and the center of potential for the future that they can't reach not only can they not reach it but they never seem to see it yet and the audience always sees it and I thought okay that's what this play is it's those days when your life feels so down and you're so stuck in the mud and if you just went outside and looked up maybe you'd feel a little bit better of course their circumstances are much more difficult than just feeling lazy on a Sunday and then the other thing that I thought was really interesting is the eight second freezes that she has between each scene and I thought why, why are these eight second freezes and why are they so specific as eight seconds and then I thought oh of course right this is the kind of stage direction you put into the play after you've directed it for the first time or after you've workshopped it and I thought okay she must have not been able to get a blackout she must have not been able to make a transition in the way that the audience could understand a transition so if you freeze them and everybody knows okay that scene's done and when I start again the next scene's coming up and then I actually found out that that might be true it was in your class that you told me that yeah and so I decided well then do I need these eight second things why are they there I'll just get rid of them and I thought no no no I'm gonna lean into this she kept them in the script for a reason and so we leaned ourselves into these these eight seconds we made them eight seconds which really is a really long time and what I came to find what's amazing about those moments was the portrait the little picture the photograph that the playwright leaves you with at the most intense moment of the play and what is it that you have to remember of that scene to then take into the next scene and so how does the play then spiral out of control so those are the things that I just sort of those are the clues that's all I had and I was like now I'm gonna jump in and the other thing that so then I took that and I've been now workshopping Conduct of Life with Wilma Theater with their Hot House Actors cohort and it's been pretty astounding because I feel I feel so much of the same thing the language does at all the play is all about the humor if you can get the humor and you can get the jokes both physical and and you know verbal then you have fallen in love with these characters and then when you start to really figure out what is not said you start to get the real fear of even characters like Orlando and there's nothing nothing worse and more scary in this world than a fearful man with a temper and a weapon and that's when I thought okay this is what this play really is you know this is why this play is so terrifying this is where dictatorship comes from is fearful men with a temper and too many weapons and and so I've just been leaning into that and then suddenly Orlando becomes not just a stock character but a real person and then I think for me at least I started to understand what she was saying about dictatorship what she was saying about abuses of power what she was saying about oppression of women and systemic oppression of women and certainly how we hold wives down and how we hold our you know people were torturing down so that's what I've been my way in and what I have found pretty amazingly is that Fornes continues to stay with me as I direct everything else and the tools and lessons that I'm learning from working on her plays have stuck with me so for example this is just a very small example the next show that I'm doing is Romeo and Juliet with Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis and I've been thinking a lot about Romeo and a lot about Juliet and I've decided the plays really about Romeo and not about Juliet but the thing about Juliet I'm like what is Juliet what is Juliet and I've been talking to the costume designer what does Juliet look like how are we going to portray Juliet what is she going to wear you know and I feel like okay Fornes never went for the cliche choice and so what is the idea behind the idea and I could put her in white and tell everybody really quickly she's a virgin I could put her in pink and tell everybody she's a she's young and I thought no you know Juliet is hope Juliet is hope in the play she's the brilliant blue sky that's outside of the window in mud she's the hope and the potential for the future when Romeo sees her she says you are the sun you are the light that gets me wants to get me out of my dark night and sort of perpetual melancholy and for the friar she's the hope that if the two marry the war the civil war between these two families might actually stop and so suddenly I'm like oh I'm doing a Fornes play this is awesome and so we're putting her in blue this bright bright brilliant blue and I just realized that Fornes is seeping into everything because of that amazing ability to that that obsession I have with that the funny and the tragedy and the tragic and the funny and the grotesque with the comedic and and if we can get both of those things in every play that's what I'm most excited about I'm really full right now um it's to you my name is Alice Regan I want to say thank you for one lunch for all of the games um I feel like I don't know when I read a Fornes play and I know I'm not the only one but I feel like I understand her rhythms I feel like I understand her words her textures and that everything she writes is true and weird and sexy and I want and I'm all down for that um when I'm directing a Fornes play I think it's the best play um I feel vulnerable and I feel strong cause I feel like she's stripping away what's been said she strips away social nicety and she gets some of the heart of what people want and so we're dealing with a desire in every scene and I told him to that and I didn't know she said that she couldn't compare her character to animals I thought I came up with that but I still feel smart cause I've heard people reminding me of animals and when I'm directing a play I feel like an animal too I feel really fierce and really single-minded and hungry and crafty and I feel like that's what you have to bring your best stuff to her cause like we'll keep you back it's so true um like the other one here I discovered Fornes at college I think it's really depressing that none of us discovered Fornes as my senior perfection by somebody else at regional theater um I grew up Catholic and there's a lot of focus in my life on sin and how to avoid it so at the time when I admitted to puberty I was looking for models of women who were morally corrupt cause they wanted to be or morally corrupt and damaged and I was just like that was the thing I was looking for and I found Fornes her place was full of those kind of women who say fuck it they want when they want they're going to go after it and sometimes they're damaged by that sometimes they win and I think that's become my whole project as a director is people in the center of my play is always a woman who is going after what she wants a woman who thinks consciously about her own desires it's sexual, it's intellectual which Fornes is great for that it's spiritual um I think the way that Fornes has impacted me as a director are as follows um uh I'm getting this from interviews and from talking with her designers I talked to some of the other designers um a couple years ago and one thing I took away that I wanted that I try to take up is to meet people where they are that means the actors, designers and the characters in the plays um to use who people are and what they're bringing to the table whether they're used or young or wrong that people you're working with are going to bring somebody to the table and it feels like she met her collaboration with such an open mind and open heart and got the best out of them she didn't try to change anybody um and I think she worked with a lot of different kinds of people and made her plays her plays were better for it just to realize that people are a lot better than they are and that you yourself are enough and the second thing that I try to learn from Corners is not to talk down to the audience um that no one needs to be led by the nose through a story no one in the audience needs to be taught to kind of understand the play um the audience is as smart as you are um and no one even even has to like what you do they don't have to like it or agree with it and I think the artist I admire most in addition to Corners if you're to this it's not about the audience which is a little bit heretical to say right now because I feel like every theater maker is like it's the audience, it's the community it's what, you know, who's coming in the door how do we get diffused in the door and I don't think one is really worried about that I think she made this place for herself um just to throw some other names out there people who I think do through this is Robert Woodruff, Geronicalitis Julia Jarco, Dr. Kennedy Machnette Wallman these are artists who, you know, make the work for themselves because they like it and the third, this leads to number three which is lesson from Corners is drill down, drill down to what you like this is what you said, okay, right it's like what's important to you go after that get all the crap out of the way and go after what you want and then the play will be good um and the fourth and last thing the pleasure as well as darkness is part of life and usually they're in the same moment actually first I want to ask you guys if you have questions or thoughts for each other I just, that last concept about Fornes not caring about the audience is super fascinating and I feel a relationship to that that I started to when I realized this last year that I didn't care about the audience I said it out loud at this thing and I was like holy shit that's crazy but anyways but I, that's I just, hearing that said is super interesting especially in this moment for the reasons you said but I was thinking of this thing that I that I had read about her when I was doing my work and I think is true that she's kind of late to starting to be a theater maker she's in her late 20s when she starts to believe she's in France and she sees a play of waiting for Godot and she did not speak French and she writes or said I knew I couldn't understand one word that was happening but I was like I have to do this and I, so that feels tied to me so much to then being a director who's like making these texts that need and to maybe this concept that yes she's making this thing and it's if she wasn't sitting there like they're oh someone's going to be audience what if they don't speak French or what if this is being made as the way I'm a maker making it and then you're there and that's the exchange and it's less tending to the superficialities of an audience's needs and somehow that of her actually having that experience of a thing that she literally on the verbal level couldn't understand but would totally change her whole life feels really an important part sort of the texture of her trajectory yeah hearing all of these great thoughts that there are you know that you can talk about Farnese's work in a way that sort of points up its continuities with the theater work the dramatic work that we kind of already know how to value or you can talk about it in a way that emphasizes its difference and its strangeness and obviously I think everyone has done a little bit of both but I guess I'm curious what you all think about about kind of if you I know several of you are teachers probably we all apply ourselves teaching at some point and I'm sort of curious like what you would most want either students or younger artists what you would most want to help them see in Farnese what you would want to show them you know even though we know we're not supposed to want that kind of thing for our students they're supposed to get it for themselves but like secretly your desire what would you want I think that I teach too I teach at Princeton University I teach acting and directing and I think the thing that I'm always talking to my students about is how can we work with abandon how can we know the work so well do the homework whatever and then work with abandon and I feel in just reading her work that she works with both abandon and rebelliousness and that's the kind of artist I hope to one day be is to be able to work with that level of abandon and that level of just rebelling because that's exciting to watch I just think her plays are so important for students to read because there's like this deep feminist bedrock in them that it just vibrates off them that we don't get in very many other plays that are frequently taught and it's just it's less even about the craft or exactly what she's doing but just within them not from the outside they are about this female character and space and I I don't know if that operates on every student but to me it's really important that that gets in front of their brains and hearts that they at least see an example of her plays and I because I can't think of many other writers you're taught even at the college level that just crack in and I think for all of us it sounds like that's what happened and to me it's I mean there's a lot of things I could talk specifically about and everyone here definitely could more than me but like the tangibility to what she is up to that is so important to me and she's it's not because I think it's not even like she's like I'm showing female characters she's just showing characters and then there they're in her world they're the female like I you know what I mean there and I that is so singular that what she's doing and I yeah just think it's important that we continue to shove that in people's faces actually I am I completely I couldn't agree with you more especially about even though I don't believe from what I've heard because again I haven't met her that she wouldn't call herself a feminist so certainly it is right the work is so feminist what I'm particularly fascinated by right now and this is just getting to I think why Fornes and her work continues to be silenced is so I'm I'm pretty obsessed with doing conduct of life right now and two theater companies who have asked for Fornes work that I've spoken to have said no to it because of the portrayal of sexual violence against women and as much as I argue well until sexual violence goes away we need to keep showing it so we can keep talking about it that doesn't seem to be a strong enough argument for them and what's interesting is this idea of if we continue to that showing a woman in that position is actually not feminism it's anti-feminism and so by propagating these ideas we're somehow doing a disservice and so I'm just particularly interested in the two sides of people you know the theater makers who are like we need to show this we need to be talking about this again her plays are still relevant these problems have not gone away she's talking about deep problems that society is still scared to talk about and then other people who are like no we don't talk about those things and we certainly don't show them in the theater and we certainly don't make money by showing them in the theater so it's particularly fascinating time to talk about her feminist bent and those female characters who are all victims I know because to your point that was also interesting about how timeless this stuff is because she doesn't situate it like she wasn't making a topical play about a female she was writing this experience out like theatrically writing it out but when does she write Conduct of Life is that in the 70s or 80s okay yeah it's I mean that plays so intense I almost couldn't read it the first time I read it I'm thinking of it in 2018 I don't know it's fascinating and that you're running up against that I think that going back to your question about what I would like to give the students I think to my acting students which I'm planning to give some of her material is to understand that there are different ways of connecting the spirit of a character that there is not only the Aristotelian traditional way that asking the questions of where I am what is my journey inside doesn't have necessarily one narrative which is something that we've been let for me mistakenly to believe that there are different points of view I mean even when you are tackling different plays there are different she connects things in a different way and the fun and the playfulness for a performer to follow those traces that I think in terms of acting it's very interesting to start thinking about and for my directing students would be how when we step out and look at the big picture there is always the rhythm and by rhythm I don't only mean the music I mean the bodies on stage the words the objects she uses I feel like her work I know she did only one musical I believe but I would say her plays are filled with music and you know that is an amazing tool for a directing student to serve tune the year to that so going back to your question that would be what I secretly would like to sneak in to them I loved what you said about theatrical realism and I loved what you talked about writing the other part of the play because I think the thing that I also talk to my students a lot about is as I say this isn't realism as soon as you approach it as soon as you dwindle it down to realism as soon as you dwindle it down to anything mundane then you're just losing the power of it and the animal underneath it the engine of it the rhythm of it and so I think it's actually you said a great tool for acting students because it's you just like gotta get to your animal self and just have at it and yet be really specific with the language and get all the punctuation and get the joke and everything else yeah that real surreal thing you said is because that's why you make theater because it's not real actually I'm not just showing you a hospital room like it's real surreal she's doing the whole thing I'm glad that people are talking about playfulness too because I think my what I encounter when I teach a lot and I encountered it in myself and had to really combat it as I was becoming myself as an artist is this pressure to be right and to make a correct choice or do something the right way the right way the right way and she's such a good example of I mean she as in the film you can watch part of an interview where she says you know when I started writing plays I didn't know how to write a play and so it's like being in a city without your map and you have to kind of get lost and discover it every step of the way every time and and her way forward her plays can be so dark and so violent but her spirit as she writes them is equally playful and a lot of the darkest most extreme theatrical moments in her plays arrived there by accident you know like an accident will happen in rehearsal and she can say yes to that and so that as as a valid means of as a valid form of intelligence playfulness and and accident seems like a something I'm really invested in imbuing my students with yeah and by the little I know of how you know some of the plays were written you know this idea of getting for example the first words in a cooking which is a very surreal be one way to start playing how can we connect that to the work of the actors for example with that randomness that trusting in and and that made me think also something Alice was talking about not take correct me if I'm wrong like not paint too much attention about what about the audience I think it's about pleasing the audience because when I hear her plays when I read them I am touch I am thought of so I think it has to do with let's play and let's play wild here and then who's not gonna dive into that yeah right so it's not that I am here to be correct and to do the right things to please you and so you can clap for me right it's something there's a sickness in life yeah and thank God we're all against table and she's in the first ones I feel that is saying you know let's go wild yeah because playfulness doesn't necessarily mean nice like it can also be cruel like tango palace is like the coolest game ever but it is pure game I think so the other thing because this is something I'm always so I think there's two I always feel like making theater in any kind of ways about balance right it's just one big balancing act you know public solitude in itself is a balancing act you know you're playing for a public but you got to pretend you're on stage by yourself unless you're breaking the fourth wall or doing something different but this idea of playfulness which of course but I feel like there's so much specificity in her work and that's that's the key I think to you know great acting training any kind of training is for the theater is that you work with abandon you work with playfulness but then there's so much specificity the example you gave of no you walk this way no that doesn't work you walk like this you walk like this and it's true it's that's why I tend to think about directing is often sculpting but your your tools are often people's bodies and their voices and their imaginations and how is it that you can help sculpt out of them the performance that makes sense within the whole piece and there's one way the joke works and there's a thousand way it doesn't and there's one way that the audience will feel affected in that moment and there's a thousand way it doesn't and I think from looking at the specificity and you said efficiency of language it was you that said efficiency of language that she demands a sort of attention to that kind of detail or at least her work does and I think she did in real life too from what I hear having not met her I mean there's this great moment in the film where she's seeing the elevator and she's saying she doesn't trust experts right she doesn't trust experts but somebody who has faith in their own artistic she goes like this yeah their own artistic is all on my side of the artistic road I love that and it's so like just from that scene you can tell like she loves the specificity of language and her word choices are made for a reason and so to direct the play and not ask the actors to pay attention to the words or the way they're arranged on the page or the alliteration or just simply the word choice every word that a character says is worth is you have to give it the energy that the love that she wrote it with I think research is good yes and I've directed for Nez and I usually assume that the actors won't know everything that I know about her and so we start beginning and we talk about not only everybody at work but also I think that's important as we stand for trajectory as an artist and where whatever play it is all about trajectory because her work went through periods coming out is a very different kind of life but they're connected right I think it's very important and it's good for you to be irritated it's fine I tend to have the opposite it's not that I don't want them to know I want everyone to know about for Nez and like do her plays everywhere and they should be all over the place but I we never talked about her in rehearsal we talked about the play and her where we see a playwright's choices in the play and because for me not knowing her I would be making all kinds of assumptions I think it would be different if I knew her and I think for me I look for more actors who have particular skills which are much related to my interest, language, humor ability to play ability to put it all out there because you certainly have to and that animalistic drive then I'm interested in them knowing anything about her I started using the film to show to casts who are working on the play and for me it's become a really important way that actors can stop being scared of the play because she's such a not scary figure in the film and it's a way for them to feel comfortable like taking their gloves off and really diving in and I tend to only I've referred to her constantly during rehearsal always as Irene never as Fornes because I want them to feel that she's this real person who was going for something when she was writing and she says like plays are meant plays are like meals you don't cook a meal just because you want to cook it you cook it so it will be eaten and the same is true with the play it requires the actors and the performers and so it's a collaboration and I want cast to feel themselves in collaboration with her You know not seeing her in that detective way but in this sense and I think you have this idea of an ur feminism that vibrates and I think you know one wouldn't do writing up knowing at the theater without knowing a philosophical bedrock and I do nothing of like her teaching pedagogy and I feel like when I did mud I feel like damn I wish I had had some of that because I do think I do think that that's important and I'm just wondering so for me I was like what is that ur for me almost ur feminism but it transcends that and in the same way that practice for me it's this ur it's this drilling down to justice you know like okay it's not just about being good to women but like if we are good to a poor woman of color then we know the whole world is going to be okay because they're kind of on the lowest of the total I mean that's why I'm feeling what I think about both so what are your thoughts about that about the way in which people think about Brexburg very much as an auteur you know and knowing that there's a philosophical piece that you need to understand with it are you seeing that that's something that people should be thinking about as they're working on for us you know what is the philosophical underpinnings and knowing how much of an auteur she was do you feel like that is where we need to be moving I feel like it's really helpful to understand how she wrote the plays and in terms of letting the characters lead so if there's any dominant philosophy that I understand about how she went about making theater it's that you don't set out you don't choose a story you want to tell and then write a play to illustrate that story you enter an imaginary zone you let a space most often I think she would frequently start with a space certainly her writing exercises often start with imagining a space and you let a character appear you might give them a sentence that is pulled totally arbitrarily from whatever book you're reading they say something somebody else does something back and then you follow the lead at least in the early drafts and then you go back and hone and craft and you know understand the bones and I think that that suddenly the word that flashed flash into my mind is anthropocentrism like so I wonder if it's connected to the moment that we're in in terms of like always placing ourselves in the center of how we perceive the world around us or you know the end that we're that we need as a global community to move outside of anthropocentrism if we're ever going to be able to deal with what's happening with climate and and everything but she was able to to put herself over here and let the characters lead the way yeah because I think she was like interested in the molecular level of humanness like she is framing moment by moment like not even just femaleness but the molecular level of humanness as it moves through emotional connections and that's what she's trying to dramatize which is incredible to try to dramatize and really different right the systems already working inside us yeah I also think that with brecht there's a clear I think right he has a clear message he wants to get across and I think that even though there's so much politics and social politics in for instance play I don't believe and I could be wrong that she's starting from a place of I'm going to talk about a play about a dictator and so there is a message of her but I think also and this is probably going to offend half the people here is that the only way her plays will stay alive well past her is if we don't try to do them the way she wanted them to be done the way she would do them and what I mean by that is why would well how can there be ten productions of mud here for all trying to do the same production of mud and I think just as much as she put herself as a director on top of the play that she then she wrote I think she I believe that she would ask every director to come with their own playfulness and as if they are in living in this place of theatricalized realism realism as we know our idea of what realism is on stage has changed throughout the decades right you look at like videos of check off and you're like what that's not realism people never walked and talked like that right and what does realism look like in the 50's what does realism on stage look like today what is it going to look like 30 years from now 50 years from now and as realism changes and as our world changes I think her plays are going to change and we should be approaching her work in the same way that we approach Shakespeare's work if you don't understand the rhythm then it falls apart if you don't understand the comedy then it falls apart so it's the same thing with her if you don't understand the rhythm if you don't understand the comedy if you don't understand the poverty if you don't understand all those basic things it's going to fall apart but all of us would do a different play a different version of the same play and I think that that's what's so exciting how you approach a career and you're like you know but I feel like I'm constantly balancing actually just being as right as I were and I wanted to go outside and like rip my clothes off and do everything and you know and I wonder has people actually been closer to my contest of the world and the people that she is than she was how does she affect people and it's so different and you know and she described how they would get together and do work is that you know seven or eight or nine months ago by and I mean would gather through to right play she would gather the money she would find the space and they would do it seven or eight or nine months ago by same thing and then you get the call to say I've got a script let's talk is to me a story about career and to me that is very inspiring and it's a model that I which is just keep breaking up and putting one foot in front of the other and get the money and find the space under the show and the story he told wasn't about Irene was at the mama and then she wanted to be at your workshop and then she wasn't climbing in that way she wasn't coming up she was moving forward that's why I don't know if that's a question but one thing Irene says is writing plays was not a way of earning a living but it is a way of earning a life and and also I mean I think what Alice is saying is really true but those steps sometimes weren't like just seven months apart like there were seven years between I don't know which play and fefu tango palace and fefu because she was running her own theater company and was doing administration that whole time so also I think her quest to live as her artist self in the world honed in to writing plays and like to the end like she knew herself as a playwright when everything around her was in her memory coming off she asserts I am a playwright that's who I am that's what I do but it doesn't mean that she got on that train with her first play in her early thirties or whenever it was and like kept going there's lots of variation so I think I learned that too like our urges and our impulses can take lots of different forms as we're moving on our path which is going to look totally different for a person moving through this career oh molly stream I want to ask you a question but I feel like my stream won't sense so I have to still figuring out how to ask this so bear with me I love that we talked about kind of how she as an artist wasn't necessarily making work for the audience and was more making it for herself I think that's a really intriguing notion I'm also intrigued by the political and social relevance we've talked about that is able to be seen in her work right now it's so fashionable in the theater industry to do socially political work that I'm really I feel like there's kind of when you have an artist who is making the work for themselves not for the audience so much to speak basically my question is why do we need artists who are making work for themselves and not necessarily pioneering for the audience why is that so important for us as theater makers I have to say one thing I don't think she was making I think it would be unfair to say that she was making work for herself only that sounds like the idea of the egotistic artist talking about you it's all about me and my work and me and my mother you know and I don't think she was into that honestly I feel that maybe for herself and obviously people who have done more research than me may know this but when you read the material when you read the plays it's more that she's honoring herself which is very different when you honor who you are what attracts you what inspires you whether you're going to build or if you're going to be successful or not producer or not I feel that when Katie was saying even until the ancient man she saw herself a playwright maybe nobody put her on Broadway ever it has not happened it failed for whatever reason it was it failed not for the quality and that I don't think questions what is the what kind of artist she is and how much of the work I feel that a lot of people get extremely connected to it so I don't know if we can talk about more than it feels unfair to say that she was doing the work for herself but to address oh sorry maybe it's useful to distinguish between doing work for an audience and doing work to an audience that's a nice way to put it but your question that you're asking I think a little bit Irene is like yeah an artist is asking questions that then they're trying to figure out out loud a theater artist in the process and that's what's going to answer these questions so some top down mandate that's not an organic question you're asking as an artist I just don't know it has the same integrity she was total integrity at figuring out these questions about life I'm just being talking generally through making these projects that's why they're timeless that's how it answers these things and I think that has to be the internal mandate as artists often is answering these questions for ourselves personally and having the guts to say them out loud and it doesn't mean we always should and they're always going to answer anything for ourselves or anyone else but that's the whole effort and that's what becomes shared work that's in social spaces is our internal impulse and so that I think is my response to that my guess of this idea about you know making work not for the audience I think from my perspective what that means is that as a director say you're not saying well what's going to please the biggest audience right now like how can I all 300 people in this audience like this one moments and how am I going to make it funny for them as opposed to I think it's funny like that I don't think it's funny like that I'm going to go with my instinct and then and my instinct I hope will make people happy and if they don't well you know we don't have the same instincts and then I also think that what's interesting is she wrote these incredibly politicized and political plays not from coming from trying to make a political play and I think what that teaches us is that we're all political beings we all walk in the world in a different way so we have so much politics and thinking about the world and if we allow ourselves to tap into those animal instincts those things are connected to our means of survival how we try to survive the world how we try to make good in the world how we try to raise ourselves up in this world and she by making it most personal deeply really really like personal like tapping deep into the imagination and deep into the deepest part of the memory I think she created some of the most political work we've seen and that's actually why it's so terrifying to theater companies because they're so politicized so I offer that so we have a big dinner together yeah or all like yeah or all like