A little-known giant of American theater

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.

 

The wildness comes from despair?
… Sometimes it comes because something has changed inside. A light has gone out, … something that makes us feel joy, feel compassion, feel for others.

 

A group of friends are keeping a light alive for each other. They are talking in a lighted room on a winter night, like college students in a dorm or actors in a coffee shop.

In “The Summer at Gossensass,” internationally acclaimed Cuban-American playwright Maria Irene Fornes follows three women fascinated by Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in the months when the play was first written -- as they stand together for the right to create, to define their own experiences and choose their own intimate relationships.

Across the second half of the 20th century and more, Fornes had a profound influence on theater in this country and beyond, said Laura Standley, an associate professor of theater at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Standley considers Fornes one of the most influential playwrights of the last 75 years.

Fornes, who died in 2018, wrote more than 50 plays in her lifetime, and she won high honors -- nine Obie Awards, and her play “What of the Night?” (1990) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. Her plays have been performed around the world, and yet many people in America have never heard her name.

Standley and one of her students, Georgia Dedolph, want to change that. This winter and spring, MCLA has opened a yearlong Fornes Festival in celebration of her life and work, they explained in a discussion on campus on a sunny fall afternoon.

The college’s cultural events program, MOSAIC, and its theater program and fine arts department are joining in a national initiative with the Fornes Institute, an organization dedicated to preserving the playwright’s legacy, offering local performances and events over two semesters.

MCLA will present two of Fornes’ early short plays Dec. 1-3 and “The Summer in Gossensass” from March 29 to April 7, as well as a guest lecture, panel discussion and a screening, on Feb. 9, of “The Rest I Make Up,” a 2018 documentary by the filmmaker Michelle Memran.

 

Pioneering writer and teacher
Standley recalled vividly her first encounter with Fornes’ storytelling. She had the chance to perform in Fornes’ “Fefu and Her Friends” and found herself immersed in a fascinating and powerful exploration of curiosity and friendship. It was unlike any play she had ever encountered.
“I had never read a play that so completely explored my own experience of being a woman in this world,” Standley said.

Though she was studying theater in graduate school then, she had never heard of Fornes and her work — never read or heard about her plays, had them assigned in class or had a chance to see them performed.

“They are diverse, experimental, complex,” she said. “And they center women. … They have been life-changing for many people, including me.”

She explained how Fornes, as a writer, director and teacher, influenced generations of award-winning playwrights, including the Latina writer and activist Cherríe Moraga and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard and Edward Albee.
Many now see Fornes as the mother of contemporary Latinx theater, an LGBTQ+ trailblazer and a genius.

Dedolph, who first made contact with Fornes’ work as a student in Standley’s classroom, said the playwright’s stories continue to feel contemporary and deeply relevant today.

“I’ve never read a play I’ve related to more,” she said. “I read all of her published plays, and when we were talking about a directing project for this fall, we had to do this. It’s necessary.”

She will lead the next step in the celebration, directing two of Fornes’ early short plays, “Tango Palace” (1963) and “Dr. Kheal” (1968), in performances Dec. 1-3.

 

Off-off Broadway leader
Fornes was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1930, and came to New York with her mother and sister when she was 15. She left school early to work, Dedolph said, and she would always be self-taught and driven, with a deep and unceasing curiosity and humor.

She moved to Greenwich Village, Standley said, and absorbed herself in a world of abstract art, jazz, John Cage, and Beat poets reading in the cafes. The Village in the 1950s and ‘60s was a center of artistic expression and experimentation, and Fornes worked with many innovative minds.

She knew the collective of dancers, composers and visual artists at the Judson Church Theater — Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin and Simone Forti.

She became a key figure in the off-off-Broadway movement and explored experimental theater with performers like the circle at Cafe La Mama, which was founded in 1961 by African-American theater director, producer and fashion designer Ellen Stewart.

One of the better-known stories about her, Dedolph said, tells the origin of her first play. By 1961, Fornes was Susan Sontag’s partner. They were sitting together in a cafe, and Sontag was struggling with writer’s block. A friend tried to invite them to a party, and Fornes said, “We’re going to write,” and brought Sontag home.

Fornes pulled a cookbook off a shelf, picked out sentences that intrigued her and wrote the opening of a dialogue. She often turned to and taught writing using this kind of collage technique.
“Her writing has a magic, gritty and rebellious quality,” Dedolph said.

Fornes later would found the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory in New York City. There, from 1981 to 1992, she taught a series of award-winning and widely produced Latinx playwrights.

She encouraged her students to find ideas anywhere -- in photographs, newspapers, artifacts, overheard conversations. In one case she drew inspiration from a set of records for learning Hungarian. She encouraged writers to interview people and let those conversations offer starting points.

Fornes wrote the conversations she wanted to write, Standley said. She took on pressures to conform (and uncountable harsh reactions from critics) and forged on with the courage to speak with passion and honesty.

“She belongs to a group of playwrights disappeared by critics,” Standley said, “because the critics didn’t understand her. Her plays were not published or staged. That’s the argument that has kept her out of the history books.”

 

Absurdist comedy to intense realism
Many of Fornes’ characters struggle with confinement and an intense drive to change their lives. They fight for a need to express their curiosity about the world, Standley said, even when their attempts to learn and explore are thwarted. They are finding life and beauty even when they are stuck in desperate and terrible circumstances and are afraid their desires will never be fulfilled.
In her early work, Fornes often turned to satire and parody. In Paris, she had the chance to see “Waiting for Godot,” Standley said.

“I didn’t understand a word of it,” she wrote, “but I understood the world where it had taken place.”

She drew influences from absurdists like Ionesco and from abstract art, playing with space, composition and texture, puppets and masks. She created characters with intensity, Standley said, and plays that create parallel worlds. Theater-makers have compared her to the deep color in Frida Kahlo’s paintings or the works of Vermeer or Zubaran.

In “Tango Palace,” Dedolph said, a vicious clown is living in a room filled with objects that represent “the acme of artistic expression,” trying to force their worldview onto an earnest young artist, and the artist struggles with pressure to compromise his passion and integrity, fighting for the strength to break free.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Fornes began directing her own plays, because she felt other directors were diluting and denying their energy.

“She became dissatisfied with the comedies she had been writing,” Standley said. “She felt they were inadequate ways of confronting the world.”

She began to feel that she was hiding behind comedy because showing her feelings and ideas more clearly left her feeling exposed. And so her plays begin to shift toward a kind of intense reality. In the spring, Standley will direct one of her later and longer works, “The Summer at Gossensass.”

The drama, set in the 1890s, focuses on women who are excited by a new play — Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” — as the first whispers reach London about the play opening in Munich.
Fornes became intrigued by the experiences of three real people, women who heard about Ibsen’s play as a revolutionary exploration of the lives of women and want to perform it in their own city, in their own language.

They are plotting together, deeply excited: Elizabeth Robbins, an actor, playwright and essayist, novelist and suffragist; Marion Lea, an actor; and Lady Florence Bell, a journalist, essayist and lover of arts. They pore through newspapers by kerosene lamplight as keenly as contemporary friends scrolling on their phones.

The three women were central players in the theater scene in their lifetime, as friends and colleagues of the famous actors and writers Edwin Booth, Oscar Wilde, Henry James and James O’Neill (the father of Eugene O’Neill).

And they were taking on no small an adventure, Standley said. It was impossible enough that women in the 1890s would want to produce, direct and perform a play at all, but these three were already having to hide their writing and creative work — even to the extent of burning their own notes. To perform a play about women who are strong, outspoken and complex would expose them to outrage.

But when only a dozen copies of Ibsen’s play exist, all in Norwegian, the stakes grow quickly higher. The woman who had the British rights to perform “Hedda Gabler” was the mistress of the prince of Wales. The rights to English translations went to a man who knew no Norwegian, and the early translations left out, blunted, censored and misrepresented the original work.

Elizabeth, Marion and Lady Bell are fighting passionately even to see the script, sneaking backstage for a glimpse of a few pages. They are risking violent backlash and charging into an international battle over censorship — and all to feed and grow their delight in theater, their passionate need to create and understand and be heard, and to illuminate one another’s minds.
“A play needs a listener, a respondent, a witness, an advocate,” Standley said, invoking Fornes’ thoughts. “Find a way to let art be generous and kind.”