I Write These Messages That Come (1977)

SOURCE: "I Write These Messages That Come," in The Drama Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 1977, pp. 25-40

[In the following, Fornes discusses her writing methods.]

Thoughts come to my mind at any point, anywhere—I could be on the subway—and if I am alert enough and I have a pencil and paper, I write these messages that come. It might be just a thought, like a statement about something, an insight, or it could be a line of dialog. It could be something that someone says in my head.

I have a box filled with these scribbles. Some of them are on paper napkins or the backs of envelopes. These things are often the beginning of a play. Most of the lyrics of the songs that I write are based on these notes—as opposed to a play, which, once it starts, / make. I usually gather a number of those things that have some relation—again, I do not even know why I consider that they are related—and I put them together. I compose something around those messages using a number of lines that have come into my head.

Now sometimes I am trying to get myself organized, and I am sharpening pencils and doing all those things. So I go to that pile of notes—it's a mess because it is scribblings. Sometimes I cannot read what I wrote because often I make notes in dark theatres when I am sitting through a play. (A lot of thoughts come into my mind when I am watching a play, especially a play that I am not at all absorbed by.) I start typing through some of these things and very often I find things I cannot imagine why in the world I thought they were anything special. They are the most mundane thoughts or phrases. Sometimes I think, "There is some value here that I do not recognize now, but at some point I thought, 'this is a message.' It must be that it is, but I have lost the thought." When that happens I often type it out and leave it, even though it is without any faith at all. I leave it because at some point I did have this faith.

The feeling I have about these messages is very different from what I have about what I am writing when it is / writing. I might write something that I like, and it feels good. But the feeling I have about those other things is really as if it is a message that comes in an indivisible unit. I feel if a word is changed, then it is lost. A thought comes—sometimes I do not have a pencil with me—I try to repeat it in my head until I get to a pencil. I know I must remember the exact construction of the sentence. I might be wrong, you see. It could be that it does not matter more or less how it is said. But still I feel that it is a block and that is how it should look, whether it is a page of dialog that comes in the message or three pages or one line.

That dialog then could become a play. When I am to write a work, I never start from a blank page. I only start from one of these things that I do, that I receive. Sometimes I start a play from one line of dialog. It has to be something that has the makings of a play.

The only play that I started from an idea—and it was an idea that was very clear in my head—and that I sat down and wrote was Tango Palace. I think it is quite clear that that is how it is written because the play has a very strong, central idea. None of my other plays does. They are not Idea Plays. My plays do not present a thesis, or at least, let us say, they do not present a formulated thesis. One can make a thesis about anything (I could or anyone could formulate one), but I do not present ideas except in Tango Palace. I lost interest in that way of working.

The play writes itself. The first draft writes itself anyway. Then I look at it and I find out what is in it. I find out where I have overextended it and what things need to be cut. I see where I have not found the scene. I see what I have to do for the character to exist fully. Then I rewrite. And of course in the rewrite there is a great deal of thought and sober analysis.

One day I was talking to Rochelle Owens, and I was telling her how when I start working on a play the words are just on paper. Perhaps I will see some things or I hear something. I feel the presence of a character or person. But then there is a point when the characters become crystallized. When that happens, I have an image in full color, technicolor. And that happens! I do not remember it happening, but I get it like click! At some point I see a picture of the set with the characters in it—let us say a picture related to the set, not necessarily the exact set.

The colors for me are very, very important. And the colors of the clothes the people wear. When it finally happens, the play exists; it has taken its own life. And then I just listen to it. I move along with it. I let it write itself.

I have reached that point in plays at times. I have put scripts away then and picked them up three years later, and, reading them, suddenly I see that same picture with the same colors. The color never goes away. It could be ten years later. The play exists even if I have not finished writing it. Even if it is only fifteen pages. It is like an embryo that is already alive and it is there waiting.

I am always amazed how an audience knows when a play is finished. That is something that I have always found very beautiful. Sometimes when I go to the theatre when it is not written in the program that there is going to be an intermission, and when it is quite clear that something has ended, people say, "Is it over?" But they say it with surprise. The actors have left the stage, but it does not look over. People know. And then when it is really over, there is that immediate knowledge that it has ended, and people applaud. In that same way, I know when a script has completed itself. I sense the last note of the play.

One play of mine has about three endings. It looks like it has ended, but then there is another ending, and then there is another ending. These are almost-endings, and they do not have that total satisfaction of a real ending. It could have been that I could have left it. But probably people would have been asking, "Is it over?" "Oh, it's over."

The characters: they talk. And when it talks, a character starts developing itself. I never try to reproduce a real character. I did, in fact, try to reproduce real people that I knew in one play. The Office. I got into trouble because the characters in the situation were from real life, and I changed a lot of things in the play. I felt that I lacked the objectivity to make the play really sharp and for me to be sure exactly what I was doing. Since I started with a reality of what happened, it was the event that was important. And that event would not work for the play.

I know a lot of people write either about a real person or else they put a familiar character into an invented situation. I find that it just confuses me, that I do not see that as useful for me in any way.

In that same conversation with Rochelle Owens, I told her about my colors. She found it very interesting. And I said, "You mean you don't see color when you write? I thought everybody saw color!" But she does not. I asked what happens to her, and she said she hears voices. She hears the sound of what the play is saying. Sometimes she is writing and she knows that a sentence should be bah-bah-bah-bah, but the words do not come immediately. Rather than stopping, she goes on and she leaves that blank space. She goes on because the other words are coming. She knows how it has to sound, and she goes back to it. It comes in exactly that form. That is very different from my own work.

Everything that I have written has had a different start. Successful Life of 3 started when I heard two men speaking to each other. One of them was an actor I knew.

That conversation was actually in my head. Not mat I wanted to write the play for that actor, it is just that he was there and this other guy was there, and he did not have a very definite face. That caught my imagination completely. I wrote the play in two weeks.

At the same time, I was writing Promenade, which I wrote as an exercise I gave myself. I wrote down the characters on one set of index cards. On another set of cards, I wrote different places. I shuffled them together. I picked a card that said, "The Aristocrats." And I picked the card that said, "The Prison." So the play started in prison for that reason. But I found it very difficult to write a scene with aristocrats in prison, so the first thing that happened was that they were digging a hole to escape. I wanted to get them out of there.

For some reason it worked for me that the prisoners remained prisoners. And in me next scene, they were at a banquet where there were aristocrats. After that, I found using the cards for the characters was not helping me at all. But I kept using the place cards. That is why me play has six different locations. I would write a scene and when I was finished writing that scene I would turn to the next card. That was the order the scenes came in.

By the way, I find doing exercises very valuable. It is good for me not to do things too deliberately: to have half my mind on something else and let something start happening. I am really very analytical. I like analyzing things, but it is better for me not to think very much. Only after I have started creating can I put all my analytical mind into it.

Most of my plays start with a kind of a fantasy game—just to see what happens. Fefu and Her Friends started that way. There was mis woman I fantasized who was talking to some friends. She took her rifle and shot her husband. Also, there is a Mexican joke where there are two Mexicans speaking at a bullfight. One says to the other, "She is pretty, that one over there." The other one says, "Which one?" So the first one takes his rifle and shoots her. He says, "That one, the one that falls."

So in the first draft of the play, Fefu does just mat. She takes her rifle and she shoots her husband. He falls. Then she explains mat they heard the Mexican joke and she and her husband play that game. That was just my fantasy: thinking of the joke, how absurd it was. But I do not know what came first, the shooting fantasy or the memory of the joke. (Finally, I left the joke out of the play.)

I started Fefu and Her Friends about thirteen years ago. There was just that scene. Then three years later I started again. Then mere was a woman in a wheelchair. The play was very different men, but the spirit was actually quite similar. About five years ago, I started really writing, really seeing what had to be done and shaping it. And mat was much closer to what it is today. Early this year, I decided I wanted to do that play—finish it and put it on. I just sat down and did it.

A playwright has a different distance from each script. Some are two feet away, and some are two hundred feet away. Fefu was not even two inches away. It is right where I am. That is difficult to do when one feels close. A different kind of delicacy enters into the writing. Each day I had to put myself into the mood to write the play. I wrote it in a very short period of time, in a very intense period of writing, where I did nothing but write, write, write. Every day I would start the day by reading my old folder (a different folder from the one where I keep my "messages"), where I have all my sufferings, personal sufferings: the times when I was in love and not, the times I did badly, all those anguishes which were really very profound. There were times that I just had to sit down and write about it because I felt anguish about it. It was not writing for the sake of writing; it was writing for the sake of exorcism. A lot of those things had been in this folder for many years. I had never looked at them. That was where the cockroaches were, so to speak.

I would start the day by reading something from that folder. Actually, there were even a couple times when I used things I found there, but most of it is garbage, really garbage, a collection of dirt: the whining, the complaining. But it would put me into that very, very personal, intimate mood to write.

I never before set up any kind of environment to write a play! This was the first time that I did that because the play was different. I had to reinforce the intimacy of the play.

Then I would put on the records of a Cuban singer, Olga Guillot. She is very passionate and sensuous. She is shameless in her passion. And I wrote the whole play listening to Olga Guillot. (My neighbors must have thought I was out of my mind.) There was one record, Añorando el Caribe, that particularly seemed to make my juices run. I just left it on the turntable and let it go on and on and on. The play had nothing to do with Olga Guillot. Her spirit is very different. She is very dramatic. And Fefu is very subtle and very delicate. But her voice kept me oiled.

I started the final writing of Fefu in February, 1977. At that time, I had about a third of the play written. It opened May 5, 1977. In those three months, I finished writing, I cast it, and I rehearsed it. I finished the play four days before it opened. I do not mean the very last scene. There were scenes in the middle I had to do. I made no revisions during rehearsals. I have to do some rewriting of the play now. I believe I must approach the rewrite in the same way as before: with the pile of writing and Olga Guillot.

Space affected Fefu and Her Friends. In late February, I decided to look for a place to perform the work. I had finished the first scene, and I had loose separate scenes that belonged somewhere in the second part of the play. I did not like the space I found because it had large columns. But then I was taken backstage to the rooms the audience could not see. I saw the dressing room, and I thought, "How nice. This could be a room in Fefu's house." Then I was taken to the greenroom. I thought that this also could be a room in Fefu's house. Then we went to the business office to discuss terms. That office was the study of Fefu's house. (For the performance we took some of the stuff out, but we used the books, the rugs, everything that was there.) I asked if we could use all of their rooms for the performances, and they agreed.

I had written Julia's speech in the bedroom already. I had intended to put it on stage, and I had not yet arrived at how it would come about. Part of the kitchen scene was written, but I had thought it would be happening in the living room. So I had parts of it already. It was the rooms themselves that modified the scenes which originally I planned to put in the living room.

People asked me, when the play opened, if I had written those scenes to be done in different rooms and then found the space. No. They were written that way because the space was there. I had to figure out the exact coordination for the movements between one scene and the other so the timing would be right. I had rehearsed each scene separately. Now I was going to rehearse them simultaneously. Then I realized that my play, Aurora, had exactly the same concept. There was the similarity of two different rooms with simultaneous life. I did not consciously realize until then that it had some connection with Aurora.

I mention this because people put so much emphasis on the deliberateness of a work. I am delighted when something is not deliberate. I do not trust deliberateness. When something happens by accident, I trust that the play is making its own point. I feel something is happening that is very profound and very important. People go far in this thing of awareness and deliberateness; they go further and further. They go to see a play and they do not like it. So someone explains it to them, and they like it better. How can they possibly understand it better, like it better, or see more of it because someone has explained it?

I am very good at explaining things. And whatever I do not understand, I can even invent. There are people who do beautiful work and do not know why, and they think it is invalid. Those who are not good at explanation are at a disadvantage, but their work is as valid.

I think it is impossible to aim at an audience when writing a play. I never do. I think that is why some commercial productions fail. They are trying to create a product that is going to create a reaction, and they cannot. If they could, every play on Broadway that is done for that purpose would be a great success. They think they know. They try and they fail. I know I do not know, but even if I did, I do not think I would write for the audience.

As a matter of fact, when the audience first comes to one of my plays, my feeling is that they are intruders. Especially when I have directed the play, I feel that I love my play so much, and I enjoy it so and feel so intimate with the actors, that when opening night arrives I ask, "What are all those people doing in my house?" Then it changes, of course, especially if they like it. I might even think I wrote it for them if they like it. I love to have an audience like a play. But during the work period, they are never present. Basically I feel that if I like something, other people will like it, too.

I think there is always a person I am writing for. Sometimes it is a specific person that I feel is there with me enjoying it in my mind. In my mind, that person is saying, "Oh, yes, I love it!" Or if it is not a specific person, it is a kind of person. It might be someone who does not really have a face, but it is a friend, someone who likes the same things. If we saw a play, we both would like it or we both would dislike it. So in a way I am writing for an "audience." But it is not for the public, not for the critics, not the business of theatre.

I feel that the state of creativity is a very special state. And most people who write or who want to write are not very aware that it is a state of mind. Most people when they cannot write say, "I can't write. I'm blocking." And then at another point they are writing a lot and they cannot stop; it appears to be a very mysterious thing, writing. Sometimes the Muse is speaking and other times it is not. But I think it is possible to put oneself in the right state of mind in the same manner that some people do meditation. There are techniques to arrive at particular states of consciousness. But we artists do not know the techniques. I do not know, either. I learned to do it with Fefu and Her Friends with my notes and record. But who knows? Maybe I could have done the play anyway.

I find that when I am not writing, starting to write is not difficult—it is impossible. It is just excruciating. I do not know the reason, for once I get started it is very pleasurable. I can think of nothing more pleasurable than being in the state of creativity. When I am in that state, people call me, say, to go to a party, to do things that are fun, to do the things where usually I would say, "Oh yes! Of course!" And nothing seems as pleasurable as writing.

But then I finish writing, and that state ends. It just seems that I do not want to go back to it. I feel about it the same way I feel about jumping off a bridge. And to keep from writing, I do everything. I sharpen pencils. In the past few days, it has been a constant thing of sitting at a typewriter and saying, "Oh! Let me get my silverware in order!" It seems very important because, when I might need a cup of coffee, the spoons will be all lined up. Incredible. It is incredible. So I go back to the typewriter. I say, "Oh! I need a cup of coffee." And then, "I better go get a pack of cigarettes so I'll have them here." And then there is starching my clothes. That is something I started this summer. It is a very lovely thing. I make my own starch. I have to wash my clothes. I have to let them dry, then starch them. They are hard to iron. I usually do not press my clothes. I just wear them. But now that I am writing, all my jeans are starched and pressed and all my shirts are starched and pressed. Anything is better than writing.

Interview with Fornes (1988)

An interview with Maria Irene Fornes, in In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights, by David Savran, Theatre Communications Group, 1988, pp. 51-69.

[In the conversation below, Fornes and Savran talk about a number of issues relating to Fornes' dramas, including influences on her work, the content of her plays, and the political role of theater.]

Born in Havana, Maria Irene Fornes came to New York with her mother in 1945, when she was fifteen years old. She studied painting in night school and with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown before going to Paris to paint for three years, returning to New York in 1957 as a textile designer. Three years later, having read only one play—Hedda Gabler—she suddenly got the idea for Tango Palace. "I stayed home for nineteen days and only left the house to go buy something to eat," she recalls. "I slept with the typewriter next to me." In the 1960s she was active in the Off-Off Broadway movement and wrote a series of dazzling, inventive fantasies, including The Successful Life of 3 (1965), an almost comic-strip version of an erotic triangle; Promenade (1965, revised and expanded 1969), a vaudevillian celebration of unexpected juxtapositions, with music by Al Carmines; and Molly's Dream (1968), about a waitress's wistful fantasies.

In the early seventies she went through a fallow period, which came to an abrupt end in 1977 with the first production of Fefu and Her Friends, a play much more somber and emotionally violent than her early works. It was followed by a series of passionate and political works, including Evelyn Brown (1980), based on the diary of a servant in turn-of-the-century New Hampshire; The Danube (1982), about nuclear war; Mud (1983), an examination of a lethal erotic triangle; and The Conduct of Life (1985), about women held in thrall to a petty Latin American tyrant, torturer and rapist.

Despite the sharp differences between her early and her later plays, all of Fornes's work can be seen as a relentless search for a new theatrical language to explore what theatre has always been about: the difference between text and subtext, between the mask and the naked face beneath it, between the quotidian and the secret, between love and the fear and violence always threatening its fragile dominion. Fornes's early plays are filled with a slightly melancholic cheer, the result of an interplay between a sequence of fantastic and whimsical interactions and the underlying knowledge of unrequited desire and unfulfilled hopes—or in the words of her Dr. Kheal, "Contradictions compressed so that you don't know where one stops and the other begins." Promenade, for example, is peopled by a variety of symbiotic pairs, escaped convicts and a jailer, rich socialites and servants, ladies and gentlemen, a mother and her children. It is a comedy about the failure to make connections, searching for its plot in the same way that the jailer searches for his prisoners or the mother for her lost children. Throughout the play the pairs keep missing each other and although they delight in the unexpected turns, there is an intimation of a darker reality always held at bay. At the end the mother asks the two convicts, "Did you find evil?" And when they tell her "No," she assures them, "Good night, then. Sleep well. You'll find it some other time."

Even in these early works Fornes's revolutionary use of language is evident. From the first, she has honed speech to a simple, concrete and supple essence, whether in dialogue or as here, in the song of the convicts from Promenade:

When I was born I opened my eyes,
And when I looked around I closed them;
And when I saw how people get kicked in the head,
And kicked in the belly, and kicked in the groin,
I closed them.
My eyes are closed but I'm carefree.
Ho ho ho, ho ho ho, I'm carefree.

This is language surprisingly capable of expressing complex shades of emotion and mobilizing a rich and understated irony.

One way of approaching Fornes's recent work is to see a reversal in the relative tonalities of surface and depth, the action now much more ominous, the characters no longer the "cardboard dolls" of Promenade but beings who breathe and sweat. The change is heralded in the first scene of Fefu when the title character, discussing her husband's belief that women are "loathesome," compares her fascination with it to turning over a stone in damp soil. The exposed part "is smooth and dry and clean." But that underneath "is slimy and filled with fungus and crawling with worms. It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest." Fefu warns, "If you don't recognize it … (Whispering.) it eats you." All of Fornes's later plays are explorations of the dark underneath. In Fefu Fornes unearths the workings of a furtive misogyny and its destructive power. The seven women who join Fefu at her country house are all, to some degree, victims of the men, with their "natural strength," hovering just offstage. "Women have to find their strength," Fefu explains, "and when they do find it, it comes forth with bitterness and it's erratic." Those among them unable to recognize their internalization of masculine attitudes are destroyed.

The plays since Fefu, written in a great diversity of styles, explore the workings of violence—psychological, political and sexual—and the self-destruction toward which it leads, with the aim of teaching, of asking the spectator to understand and to make another choice. The Danube was conceived when, by chance, Fornes came across a Hungarian-English language record. "There was such tenderness in those little scenes," she recalls. When asked to write an antinuclear play, Fornes thought of the sadness she felt for "the bygone era of that record, and how sorrowful it would be to lose the simple pleasures of our own." Set on the eve of World War II, the play charts the gradual decay of a civilization along with the emotional and physical destruction of its well-meaning protagonists. It ends with a "brilliant white flash of light," and then, darkness.

Fornes's plays differ from those of most of her contemporaries in that almost all are set either in a preindustrial society or on the far edge of middle-class culture. They are filled with a deep compassion for the disenfranchised, for whom survival—rather than the typically bourgeois obsession with individual happiness and freedom—is the bottom line. They do not delight, even covertly, in suffering but take a stand unequivocally against dehumanization and violence in its myriad forms. Perhaps it is in this context that her revolutionary use of language is best understood, its simplicity and beauty signaling, in the midst of violence and decay, a verbal utopia in which things are called by their proper names and brutality is so embarrassingly evident that it can no longer hold sway.

OCTOBER 29, 1986—RIVERIA CAFE, SHERIDAN SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY

[David Savran]: What got you interested in theatre?

[Maria Irene Fornes]: A play that I wanted to write got me interested in theatre. I was not a playwright. I was not in theatre because at that time theatre was not a very interesting art.

When was that?

1959, '60. At that time the most advanced writers in the American theatre were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. That was the American theatre. Important theatre took place on Broadway. The beginning of the avant-garde theatre came from Europe: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. It was as if those European writers were inviting us. But even when these writers became known here, it took a few years before we actually started doing their work.

For years most of my friends were in the arts. They were writers—novelists, poets—or painters. I didn't know anybody in theatre. So I was never at a rehearsal of a play. I never knew an actor who would talk about rehearsals or auditions or anything like that. Very few people I knew went to the theatre. I do remember going to see A Streetcar Named Desire because word filtered down that it was interesting. But when I started to write a play, although it did have something to do with some theatre I had seen, it had nothing to do with a general affection for or interest in the theatre.

So you were more attracted to European theatre?

In '55, I think it was, or '54, I saw the original production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, directed by Roger Blin. I'd just arrived in Paris and I didn't know a word of French. But I was so profoundly upset by that play—and by upset I mean turned upside down—that I didn't even question the fact that I had not understood a word. I felt that my life had been turned around. I left the theatre and felt that I saw everything so clearly. Maybe it was just a clear night, but it was such a physical experience. I felt that I saw clarity. Maybe that night something in me understood that I was to dedicate my life to the theatre. My feeling was that I understood something about life. If you'd asked me then what it was I'd understood, I couldn't have told you. If I had understood the text it still wouldn't have been clear. Of course, I knew the play had something to do with slavery and freedom.

I was a painter and lived in Paris for several years. I was not interested in writing. I came back to New York in '57 and the next year, I think it was, I saw a production of Ulysses in Nighttown, with Zero Mostel, directed by Burgess Meredith. It was performed in a place—on West Houston Street, I think—that was not ordinarily used as a theatre. And that too had a profound effect on me. But still I didn't think I wanted to write a play. I just thought, "How wonderful, what an incredible thing."

Then in 1960, or maybe it was 1959, I had an idea for a play. I was obsessed with it. And I started writing it. Most of the people I knew, especially writers, said, "Theatre's a very difficult medium. You have to learn how to write a play, otherwise it won't be put on." I thought that was very funny because I never thought that I would write a play to put it on. I had to write this play because I had to write this play. It was as personal as that. I never thought of a career or a profession. So I wrote it. And writing it was the most incredible experience. A door was opened which was a door to paradise.

Which play was that?

That was Tango Palace. I imagine there are few writers who have such a sharp beginning. Usually a person's interest in theatre or literature starts early. Then one day you decide that you'd like to do something. It's very gradual. For me, it was like when you miss a step and fall into a precipice. I didn't even decide that I was going to step into it. And there I was, flying up!

What about other influences? Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams?

I don't like Arthur Miller at all. I don't like Tennessee Williams' plays very much either, because it seems to me that he celebrates a kind of feminine neurosis, that he sings praise to it. I don't like that. But I don't dislike him the way that I dislike Arthur Miller. I feel love for Tennessee Williams, like someone I knew. In his writing you see the spirit of somebody with delicate feelings who was beat up as a child and lives in a world of pain and tears with a kind of complacency. Maybe complacency is not the right word. Maybe it's masochistic—the feeling that you cannot escape it. So you have a longing for beauty and for romance, you dream that Prince Charming's going to take you away from it all. I don't see the point of that at all. I feel we're fortunate that no matter how terrible things are, we live in a society where we have the freedom to take action, even if some people make this difficult for you, or if you're disabled from your upbringing. I understand how one can be mangled psychologically, but still your effort should be to find your vitality and move on.

I don't romanticize pain. In my work people are always trying to find a way out, rather than feeling a romantic attachment to their prison. Some people complain that my work doesn't offer the solution. But the reason for that is that I feel mat the characters don't have to get out, it's you who has to get out. Characters are not real people. If characters were real people, I would have opened the door for them at the top of it—there would be no play. The play is there as a lesson, because I feel that art ultimately is a teacher. You go to a museum to look at a painting and that painting teaches you something. You may not look at a Cezanne and say, "I know now what I have to do." But it gives you something, a charge of some understanding, some knowledge that you have in your heart. And if art doesn't do that, I am not interested in it.

I don't know what my work inspires, because I'm never the spectator. But I'm horrified to mink that my work in any way would suggest there is no way out. I've been told by some women, for instance, that by killing Mae in Mud, I have robbed them of the possibility of thinking there's a way out. "If she cannot escape," they said, "how can we?" I feel terrible that I have made them lose hope. The work that has most inspired me to action or to freedom is not work that's saying, "Look, I'm going to show you how you too can do it."

Kafka's The Trial, like Waiting for Godot, gave me the experience of a remarkable energy inside me. Pozzo beats on Lucky and at the end Lucky doesn't get free, but it doesn't matter because I do! I've never been anybody's slave but when I see that I understand something. Josef K. may get guillotined or go to the electric chair but, rather man saying "I'm doomed," I learn from his behavior. I know what my intention is, but I don't know if, after seeing Mud, it would be difficult to feel, "I'm getting out." I know that most people don't feel depressed by it.

So many of your plays have apocalyptic endings, where an amazing thing happens, like the burst of light at the end of The Danube. It's as though you're not so much ending a situation as producing a shock wave directed at the spectators, which makes them deal with what they've seen.

Maybe I have to be a little more careful with that. As I'm writing the play, I suffer with the characters and I share their joys—or else I can't write. I am dealing with them for a long time and then analyzing, breaking the play down, trying to see if it works. I become a technician and start moving things around. It could be that the shock is more violent to the audience than it is to me, because often that violent moment has to do with the violence of ending the work. That's a violence to an author.

Often, when you've become very involved in the life of a character, when you're riveted, and the play ends, you have a feeling of rupture. This world has died. But maybe that feeling of rupture is deeper in me … after all, audiences are involved in it for an hour and a half or two hours. But I've been involved for one to three years. I don't know how to end a play unless … who's going to kill whom? It could be that it's so violent for me that I transfer it to the stage. But to a member of the audience who doesn't have the same sense of loss when it's over, it's a shock, right? You say it is startling. I experience Mae's death, for instance, as a natural thing. I don't see how they could possibly let her go.

In retrospect it becomes an inevitability. The ending makes me go back to discover why.

I think usually the people who have expressed to me their dismay at Mae's being killed are feminist women who are having a hard time in their life. They hang onto feminism because they feel oppressed and believe it will save them. They see me as a feminist and when they see Mae die, they feel betrayed. I say "they," as if it were a multitude of people. A couple of people have said, "How could you do this to me?"

They expect positive role models. This also comes up in regard to black theatre. Some people are disturbed to see, for example, a black man who is as oppressive as the white man he's fighting against.

I don't believe in role models because I don't believe in that expression. I've never played a role in my life, and role playing to me is the beginning of death. You have to be yourself and you have to find wisdom and enlightenment within yourself. The moment you're playing a role, you're faking it, pretending you're this or that. I know that's not what they mean but the choice of the word is unfortunate.

We have the potential to learn by example or by demonstration. If you're trying to teach people to be careful when they cross the street and not just trust the light, and you show them a film where someone doesn't look and a drunk driver comes by and kills him, you're not saying, "You're going to get killed," You're saying, "Look what happened to this person. You look and don't get killed." That is a classic way of teaching. But maybe that's old-fashioned and I am an old-fashioned person.

How do you begin a play? Plot, characters, a situation?

Usually characters, but not characters that I choose or people I meet and about whom I say, "I'm going to write a play about them." They're characters that come to the page. I was so inspired when I wrote Tango Palace. I didn't ask for it, it just came into my mind and possessed me. Considering that it was my first play, it was easy to write. And it received a production at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, very well directed by Herbert Blau and very well acted by Robert Benson and Dan Sullivan. Then it was published shortly afterwards in a college book of literature, among writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare and you can imagine … When you have a first experience like this, you're always looking to repeat it.

I tried to find ways to be possessed again. I devised writing games—I put descriptions of characters on a number of cards and places on other cards, and shuffled them. I wrote Promenade like that. I took one card and it said The Aristocrats and I took another card and it said The Cell. All the locations followed the cards I was getting. And I found that it was possible to be caught up again in a kind of writing where the characters take over and they do what they do and you have nothing to do with it. All you do is write down what's happening. If I don't write that way, the dialogue is very flat and tedious. I have to force the writing out. When the characters take over, it's fluid and fast and interesting. And you are as surprised as when you see something in the theatre and don't know what's going to happen next.

For six years now, I've been teaching play writing at INTAR. I have an ideal situation there. This year we are meeting every morning at 9:30 for thirteen weeks, which is very intensive. Usually we meet three times a week for six months. First thing, we do half an hour of yoga. Then I give them a writing exercise. I have invented exercises that are very effective and very profound. They take you to the place where creativity is, where personal experience and personal knowledge are used. But it's not about your personal experience. Personal experience feeds into that creative place. It's wonderful to see that people can learn how to write.

My writing has been coming from the lab for the last five years. It has changed my style of writing. Tango Palace was very passionate. I realized after I wrote it that I didn't know yet how to write painful things without going through agony myself. So I started to write things that were lighter because I just didn't want to suffer. I'm not going to jump into fire so that I can be inscribed in the roster of great writers. But now, through my exercises, I know how to do it. My students know how to do it.

Right now we're in the second week of work. Today we were doing an exercise and one of the writers started sobbing. He was in the lab last year so he knows how to go into that and come out. It's not unusual for me to look over and see someone filled with tears. And you say, "Oh wow, I wish I were there because that must be something good." But he was sobbing and he stopped writing. So I went over behind him and said, "Are you okay?" He said yes. And I said, "Do you need anything?" because I thought maybe he needed comforting. He was okay; he was going through pain, but so what? After a while he went and blew his nose. He looked in the mirror and said he didn't look as pretty when he cried as Natalie Wood so he better stop [laughs]. Pain can be channeled—it's like what actors do. Actors go into the most agonizing thing and they're shaking and you think, "My God, how can they do this every night?" You want to say, "My poor darling. Let me hold you for a while to comfort you." And you go back to the dressing room, and they look like they've just been swimming in the Caribbean. They look radiant, and you're a wreck. So that's how I write [laughs].

It's wonderful to have that every day, with a group of people. We do our yoga quietly. I give them an exercise. We hardly ever talk. We write all morning. The last half-hour, they read. At first, I have a lot to say but I don't criticize the writing. I see if they are trying to write according to some other person's rules. You can tell from the dialogue—if it doesn't have any real life, you know they're following some idea of how people write.

Writing every day is wonderful. You may feel, "I'm not inspired," but maybe after half an hour you begin to be able to write. At home I would say, "Okay, I'll do something and then I'll write." And then I don't write that day. I don't write the next day. After a month of not writing, I don't know how to write. I forget. If you write every day, it's like another kind of existence. There's something in you that changes. You're in a different state.

How long have you been directing your own scripts?

Since 1968 with Molly's Dream. That summer there was a workshop for playwrights at Tanglewood in connection with Boston University. They had a company of fine actors. The plays were done in elaborately directed readings, with a lot of people memorizing as much as they could. Robert Lewis was the director of the program, but he wasn't directing any of the plays. I told him I wanted to direct and he said, "No. The directors will direct." I said, "But this is a playwrights' project and, as a playwright, I need to direct this play." He said no. I was annoyed, but I asked Ed Setrakian because I knew him as an actor and liked him and thought, "Why not?"

Then Ed started doing things that I didn't think were right. The play was very simple and he was making it too abstract. So I went to Bobby Lewis and said, "This is not right. He's asking people to do this bizarre behavior. The play's a kind of movie fantasy where people behave normally." So Bobby Lewis said, "You have to ask Ed to do it the way you want. And if you have any problems, I'll talk to him." So Ed did what I asked and then he said to me, "I haven't been able to sleep because of what you're doing to me." And I looked at him and said, "Ed, I'd rather you don't sleep than I don't sleep."

I'd always been so timid. When a director would say "Boo," I would acquiesce. But that situation taught me never again to give in. I didn't want to make Ed not sleep. I wanted to do it myself. If then it doesn't come out right, I did it wrong and nobody else has to suffer. I promised myself that I wasn't going to let anyone else direct my work. And I didn't care if it never got done again.

So I went to New Dramatists—I was a member there—to do Molly's Dream again. I wanted to do it with Julie Bovasso. They said, "All right, but we have to get you a director." I said, "No, I want to direct it." They said, "There's a rule here that playwrights are not to direct." And I started screaming, "I'm directing or I'm quitting. If this is a playwrights' organization, you have to do what is good for the playwrights. What are you going to lose?" So they made an exception for me. I directed Julie Bovasso and it was a bumpy ride. I didn't know her history of quitting and throwing chairs at directors. It worked because I didn't have a director's ego. I just wanted her to do my play. And she was wonderful.

I direct the first production of my plays and often the second. Sarita's going to be done a second time in San Francisco. They wanted me to direct it but I can't. It's too exhausting and I have too much writing to do. I wish I were directing it because I usually make changes in the second production. With the first production, sometimes I haven't finished the play.

So you're active as a writer while you're directing the first production.

Often I'm writing the play. Since Aurora, the play after Molly's Dream, I have never had a finished play before I started rehearsal. Usually I have a first draft of most of the play. It still needs a lot of rewriting but at least the scenes are there. Aurora and Fefu and Her Friends were not finished until three days before opening. For Eyes on the Harem I had something like three little pages written when we started rehearsal.

During the summer when I work at Padua Hills Playwrights' Workshop in California, we're supposed to write a play for a particular place, a particular grove. For me that's a first draft, or not even a first draft, because usually they want only forty minutes. Then I write more and it becomes a longer play. The Danube and Mud came from California. The Mothers I did last summer at Padua. It may be called something else when it's a big play.

The printed version of The Conduct of Life is different from the performance you saw. Orlando's speeches about his sadism were written after the play was first produced.

When I saw the play I really disliked the character, he's such a horrible man. But from reading it, I understood him much better.

The difference is partly in the writing, and partly in the fact that the actor was a young man without much experience. When you work Off-Off Broadway—which means there's no money—there are a number of excellent actresses available. It's much harder to get men. Men don't work for nothing. There are more parts for them, more jobs. If they don't start making money from acting after, say, a couple of years of acting classes and one or two more of auditioning, they quit. Women don't because either they have a husband to support them or they are dedicated to the theatre. They will spend their whole life working a job and acting wherever they can.

Do you read the critics?

I never read a review until people tell me whether it's good or bad. It makes me too nervous. So if people say, "It's excellent," or "It's so-so," or "It's terrible," then I can read it. But I usually read it quickly. Maybe a year or two later, I pick up a review and say, "Oh, I thought this was worse, actually it does say things that are good, that are interesting."

I'm sure critics hate to have a playwright think this, but I find there's very little I learn about my work from reading the reviews. A lot of the critics—not from the New York Times, but the Voice—are talking to the playwrights, as if we're having a conversation and they're saying, "Look, Irene, it's time you did this." But I don't find that they are usually insightful enough. Maybe I'm being unfair, since I find when I read a review a few months later, it reads differently from the way it first did. Maybe I never find it insightful because I'm so guarded. But I think I'm right to be guarded because there's a difference between having a private conversation and a public one. A negative review is read by everybody. And not only that, but the people who read a negative review—"It was terribly slow"—won't go to see the play. You lose your audience because the critic wanted to have a conversation with you. When you have the power of the media and you tell everybody I'm stupid, that's not a conversation.

But the Village Voice has been very supportive of your work.

I owe my life in the theatre to the Village Voice. If the Village Voice did not exist, I don't know if I would be writing now. Richard Eder was positive about my work when he was with the Times. Since he left, about nine years ago, the Times never comes and when they do come, it's just hell. Marilyn Stasio has been supportive but she doesn't get much of a chance at the Post. They print Clive Barnes and they print reviews that she writes when they feel like it. I complain about the Voice because to me they are the only paper. I don't complain about the Times critics because to me they don't exist. They don't say anything.

They fulfill a function in the marketplace. Frank Rich doesn't have anything to offer people working in the theatre.

It's just for businessmen. They say to this guy: yes, no or so-so. They should just print that in the newspaper: SO-SO, in large type. I think a journalist, a critic of value, is someone who can teach, who can persuade people to stretch themselves a little bit. I don't mean doing the playwrights a favor or art a favor, I mean helping the audience understand something. Critics are not doing that.

Aunt Dan and Lemon was one of the very few recent plays for which, I think, Rich did fulfill that role.

I didn't like the play because I feel it is promoting fascism.

I didn't read the play as promoting fascism but forcing the spectator to confront his own fascist sympathies.

But you know who Wally Shawn is. You know he's not a fascist. How do ordinary people know who he is? It's not that he has to say straight out, "I'm showing you how stupid people are. Listen to how stupid this girl is who's saying it's decent and normal to be fascist." But there is something about where the heart of the author is. When your heart is dubious and perhaps you take a little too much pleasure in sadistic things, it may be confusing.

I don't know anything about Wally Shawn's politics. I know of his father and I saw him in My Dinner with Andre, where he was playing a poor writer. Well, he's not poor so I thought, he's playing a part. I don't know whether he's a fascist or so intellectual, so sophisticated, like Andre with his thing about burying himself to experience death. You don't know how far these people can go with, "Let's experience it." Maybe he thinks it's a good idea to go around and kill people. I don't know! I bet you that most people left the theatre saying, "I think Reagan is right. We have to eliminate all the people in Honduras and Nicaragua that are standing in our way."

I saw it as being about Reagan too, but about the incredibly seductive power of his fascism.

But how do you know that Wally Shawn is not pro-Reagan? That girl was a little too convincing for me. When she said, "We're not really compassionate, we are, maybe, a little embarrassed"—something like that—there was something so intelligent about that line. This is too dangerous. If he means to say, "Watch out, look how quickly you can turn," he shouldn't do it so convincingly. Don't hypnotize me into believing that it's right because then, what are you doing? You are creating murderers, the same way they do when they brainwash men who join the marines.

In the threatre I wanted to shout, "No!" I felt outraged. Then I looked around and I became more interested in watching the audience. I don't think people were thinking, "How wrong this girl is." I thought they were thinking, "Is it true, what I'm being told?" You know how many people in that audience actually don't have compassion, but only a little disgust? And you know how many are liberal, just because they think it's right? I felt him convince half that audience. I thought, "The reviewers didn't think that because either they know Wally and they know he has a tender heart or because they think, 'Wally Shawn couldn't be writing this fascistic thing.'" And they all saw it as you feel it was intended. Let's hope most people read the reviews.

When I wrote Orlando's speeches in Conduct of Life, I worked very hard to try to imagine the experience of a sadist. I went through hell. It was so difficult. It was so ugly. I have written violent things and they all come out of me … easy, natural. I have a monster in me. I have many monsters in me. But that particular one, Orlando, is not in me, I don't understand it. It was a nightmare for me to write those speeches. But I hope that I didn't write them too convincingly. If I did, I would eliminate them from the play. And I feel that Orlando is less dangerous because not many people, especially people who go to the theatre, are going to abuse little girls.

What Wally Shawn is proposing, that they support Reagan, is not as drastic as that. You just go into the voting booth and think, "I want to keep my comfortable life, so I won't tell anybody." That's easy.

In The Danube you use some Hungarian, in the sections of translation. That makes me think of your own position. How is it for you writing in a second language?

I came here when I was fifteen and that is precisely the time you begin to become your own person, when you are no longer's a child. You begin to go outside your family or school and venture on your own, you start thinking thoughts that you can't share with your family. So when I started thinking independently—or rather, when my thinking connected to society rather than home—it all happened in English. If I want to talk about simple things, I can do it equally well in Spanish or English. When I start talking about thoughts, if I speak Spanish, I have to translate all the time.

For many years I've admired your use of a language that's simple and straightforward, and very poetic.

My vocabulary in English is very limited. When I read a newspaper or magazine article I'm constantly finding words that I don't know. I don't mean technical words. But words I don't use. So I look them up and then I forget what they mean. And it may be that because my knowledge of the language is limited, I always have to be sure of what I'm saying because I have nothing else. I can't say, "I'll put a fancy phrase in here and cover up," because I don't know how to write a fancy phrase. So I have to think, "What does the character want to say? What is the reality of what's happened? What is the need? What is it inside him that can be said to depict him?" I think more of painting, of a character painting a picture, getting a picture clear.

At the same time, it seems your plays are about the impossibility of language to comprehend experience, about the difference between text and subtext. Doctor Kheal says that you can't talk about beauty.

It's become fashionable to say that about language and I'll tell you why I object. Evidently the directors of some productions of The Danube believe that I use the language tape to show how we're prisoners of language and how we repeat, as if there were a recording going and we were puppets. Unfortunately, there's also the image of puppets in the play which confirms this for them. Can you imagine? Language is the greatest gift that we have. We've been sitting here talking for two hours. And to think that I would say, "We are imprisoned by language"?! But they have people act like puppets. Don't they understand that this play is about life and the destruction of life? You can't blame language if you don't know how to use language, if you stop thinking. It's like a computer, you just press a key and you get a whole sentence. That's how so many people use language. It's gotten to the point if you don't use set paragraphs, people don't understand what you're saying.

People often speak about my work as being singular. What's singular is that each person's speech is full of little pieces, how they really think, one word at a time. People are very simple. But they are specific about each little detail. Even if it's just, "Oh, good morning, how are you? How's your daughter?" Maybe I leave out one word that, when I talk, I don't. Words that are useless, like "actually." I take those little words out.

But you were asking me about Doctor Kheal. Of course, language is language and life is life. There's no question about it. The number of things you can experience and don't know how to express are infinite. And it is true that sometimes we think we're experiencing only those things we know how to talk about. But that doesn't mean that language is shit. Language is a miraculous thing, probably the greatest gift we have. But it doesn't substitute for life. People who try to use it that way are in trouble. They have to know what experience is. But also they have to try using this incredible tool to clarify what they are experiencing. Because I'm a writer, I know how much work that is. Doctor Kheal has a hard time explaining beauty. So? He explains everything else. It's just that for a moment he would rather experience it. He's saying, "How could one ever come near it? I bow my head in front of it." A way of expressing your awe is to say, "Words fail me." That's language.

How does the American theatre look from your perspective?

You could say that the regional theatre, the Broadway theatre and the Off-Off Broadway theatre are schools of theatre. The theatres are training writers they've never seen, young artists who see whose plays get done all the time and whose plays don't get done at all.

You can go to the school without walls, which is Off-Off Broadway. There's more freedom there. There's more variety. But there, nobody's paid, so you can't demand too much.

I feel that the regional theatres have betrayed the playwrights. Their training has turned too many into documentary writers. Some people are doing actual documentaries, like Emily Mann and Adrian Hall. But that's just journalistic, those pieces are not going to last. That's not theatre literature. It may be serious and subtle work but it's not a play. Plays are written with a bit of that mentality, too. Even if the story is not about a current situation, there's a correlation with something happening right now, like corruption in City Hall.

The regional theatre depends too heavily on subsidies. It's inevitable. I'm not saying that they should do something different. There are less brains on Broadway but more energy. It's a business. I think that the regional theatre is more frightened than the Broadway theatre.

Do you think that's true of the Off-Broadway companies here? Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage?

Those are part of the regional-theatre aesthetic. But I don't go to the theatre enough to be able to say that with great conviction. The timidity comes from being afraid of losing your subscribers. If you lose your subscribers or your single-ticket buyers, you lose part of your funding. Because the more money you make at the box office, the more money you're given. It makes a certain business sense but it has nothing to do with art. And they're afraid, especially when they get into bigger expenses. Part of this has to do with the Equity scales. They have every reason in the world to be afraid. I think that they would put on anything that they could get an audience for.

Just recently, I've seen some of the regional theatres opening up to my work. I know my work has changed. It's more accessible, more emotional. There's more of a plot. Maybe they're not changing and I'm changing. I don't know. Maybe they're looking for something and writers who are less conventional will have an opportunity to be done on this large a scale. But it's not all good news because if the audience doesn't like it. … Of course any art always depends on sales. Theatre has become an unnatural thing, unlike television or film. So it has to be subsidized.

When I wrote my first play, I was writing because I wanted to write. And I still feel that a little bit. I do it for my own evolution. That doesn't mean I don't want theatres to put on my work, that I don't want audiences to flock to the theatre, that I don't want critics to write fantastic things, that I don't want to get every award there is. If it happens, it's part of my evolution.

Was there a time when you felt you weren't making progress?

After Promenade was done at the Promenade Theatre. Actually, I think it had started a little before. Up through Tango Palace, Successful Life of 3, Dr. Kheal … some of those were humorous but there was more there too. And then I started to repeat. I think in Aurora I tried to repeat Promenade. It wasn't conscious. And Molly's Dream, too, in a way. Those plays were more charming than substantial. They had less muscle. That's why I find my exercises in writing are so important. I think the worst thing for a writer is to write in only one way. It's not from being lazy or clever, you just get into a rut. You don't know you're in a rut. You say, "That's how I write." But if you do those exercises, you write from so many different places and your writing seems so peculiar. Afterwards, you look at it and say, "No, it's not peculiar. It was just peculiar for me. I'd never written from that place before."

Also, the Off-Off Broadway writers started to feel indifference from the people who had been our producers. They started getting excited by directors.

You're talking mid-seventies.

Even earlier, late sixties. The period when the writers were the main energy source in the Off-Off Broadway theatre was only two or three years. I think that '65 was really the beginning of the flowering. I don't know if Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Rosalyn Drexler or Rochelle Owens was writing before that. I started in '65. The first thing that I heard about was Rosalyn Drexler's Home Movies. That may have been '64. By '69 already the directors had taken over—Tom O'Horgan, Open Theatre.

Richard Schechner founded the Performance Group in '67.

It's so important to have interest from outside, to have a theatre that wants your work, actors who ask, "Can I be in your play?" And we had Michael Smith in the Voice. He was our critic in our paper. You need that. A group of people coming with excitement to the theatre, that's all I need. But I do need that. I cannot write in isolation.

Are there any favorites among your plays?

There are favorites but usually it's the one that I'm working on, the one that I don't really understand yet. Like when you're in love, it means you don't really understand the person. When you understand the person, it's a love, rather than in love. I think Fefu is a very beautiful play. I did it in Minneapolis in May and working with it again, I find it's a very moving play without being sentimental. Men who are more feminine in their nature, more artistic, feel it as deeply as women. There are some men who don't know what's happening. They say, "What? Is there a play there? Is there anybody on the stage?" Mud I think is a little jewel.

I'm worried about The Conduct of Life because I only did it once. When I do a play once I feel that I don't yet understand it fully. And I worry whether it would work as well if I didn't direct it. I know Mud would work. I saw one production of it which wasn't good and yet it worked. But Conduct of Life may have a strange soul to it.

How so?

I don't know how it reads. Recently there was a reading of it at Los Angeles Theatre Center. I got a call from the director. He wanted to talk about casting, so I said, "Please, above all, Orlando should look like a very ordinary person, a nice guy. You meet him and he's like someone who works in an office and has a nice job." And he said, "Fine." For Letitia he said he had a very strong woman. Then he asked, "How old is Olimpia?" I said, "Olimpia's a middle-aged woman." He had cast a young girl. I said, "She's a housekeeper, a woman who cleans. She's short and heavy." An attractive girl would throw the balance of the play. I don't even know if the play would work.

He was thinking, too, of women being oppressed. All those women are strong. Nena is a strong woman, a strong child. It's not just women being oppressed. When you have a nut, a crazy person like that, everybody's oppressed. It's the oppression of a sadist. It has nothing to do with women. So a playwright has to be careful. I thought it was so obvious that Olimpia is an illiterate housekeeper that I didn't specify that she's middle-aged, overweight and unattractive. How can you say Olimpia's being oppressed? She runs the house! A servant is a job like any other. You work. When you go to work in an office, are you oppressed? You think that everybody should be a boss?

People like to draw a clear line between victim and victimizer. It's frightening for people to recognize their role in the maintenance of this system.

I don't think Olimpia, Nena and Letitia are maintaining the situation. I remember shortly after the Castro takeover there was a group of Cuban exile artists. They wanted me to go to meetings, to have readings, and they said, "It's not political." So I went. They had readings of poetry and discussions of painting and stuff like that. Then one day they passed an anti-Castro manifesto around that we were supposed to sign. It talked about the Red monster and the language was extreme. I said, "No, I don't want to sign." They were indignant and asked, "Are you in favor of Castro?" I said, "Not really. I'm not in favor of Castro but I'm not against him either. I don't know enough." And they said, "If you're not against him, you're for him." I'm not for him and don't tell me what I am because I know what I am. It's like saying if people don't fight the system, then they are for the system. That's not so. People have to survive. If you don't go out and get a gun and shoot the general, it doesn't mean you're supporting the system.

Letitia is in love with Orlando, but I don't think she's a masochist. She discovers horrible things, that he's in love with a child. She discovers what he is and she shoots him, because she cannot live around him. Before that she has enough information to realize what he is, but she cannot face it. But that doesn't mean that she's supporting the system. There is an oppressor in that play, but it's not Orlando, who is just a peon in the political system. It's the generals.

I don't think everybody there is supporting the system. What are they going to do? Olimpia has a job. She has to survive. You think she's going to say, "You son of a bitch. I'm not going to work in this house anymore. I'm going to go out and starve." We can do that in this country. Here, if Olimpia leaves a job, she's employed the next day somewhere else, because she's a good housekeeper and knows how to cook. But not in other places. So you cannot say, if you don't fight it, you're with it.

It may not be true in Latin America, where survival is the bottom line. But in this country so many people are passively complicit with an oppressive regime. That's a very serious problem.

Are you supporting Reagan because you don't go out and shoot him?

No.

Do you know how many people in other countries think that you are? Because you are going around with your little tape recorder and doing your little interviews instead of fighting.

There are ways of being politically active besides picking up a gun.

Letitia is just an ordinary woman who doesn't know anything. She's just in love with this guy. She's not political. She's not even intelligent. And Olimpia is an imbecile! Do you expect her to be political? And Nena? You expect her to be political? I expect you to be political. I expect me to be. We're supposed to be. It's been going on how many years now?

Six.

It's getting worse and worse. There isn't even a strong opposition as there was in the sixties. I would say that we are parties to this, but not them. We have the knowledge, the intelligence, the perspective. We know what's right and what's wrong.

What does this mean then in terms of bringing about social change, for people who don't have the perspective we have?

They cannot bring about social change. They don't know what's possible.

What can they do?

The only thing they can do is act emotionally. Letitia acts emotionally. She kills Orlando. Not because he has betrayed her, but because he attacks her physically. When he does, she shoots him.