[In the following essay, Marranea describes the essential characteristics of Fornes' drama, praising the "warm delicacy and grace that distinguish it from most of what is written today."]

Ever since Fefu and Her Friends Maria Irene Fornes has been writing the finest realistic plays in this country. In fact, one could say that Fefu and the plays that followed it, such as The Danube and now Mud, have paved the way for a new language of dramatic realism, and a way of directing it. What Fornes, as writer and director of her work, has done is to strip away the self-conscious objectivity, narrative weight, and behaviorism of the genre to concentrate on the unique subjectivity of characters for whom talking is gestural, a way of being. There is no attempt to tell the whole story of a life, only to distill its essence. Fornes brings a much needed intimacy to drama, and her economy of approach suggests another vision of theatricality, more stylized for its lack of exhibitionism. In this new theatricality, presence, that is, the act of being, is of greatest importance. The theatrical idea of presence is linked to the idea of social being expressed by character. The approach is that of a documentary starkness profoundly linked to existential phenomenology.

Fornes's work goes to the core of character. Instead of the usual situation in which a character uses dialogue or action to explain what he or she is doing and why, her characters exist in the world by their very act of trying to understand it. In other words, it is the characters themselves who appear to be thinking, not the author having thought.

Mud, which has as its center the act of a woman coming to thought, clarifies this process. Here is a poor rural trio, Fornes's first lower depths characters, which consists of Mae, Lloyd and Henry, all who lead lives devoid of any sense of play or abandonment; their lives are entirely functional. Each of them exists in varying relations to language—Mae through her desire to read and acquire knowledge realizes that knowledge is the beginning of will and power and personal freedom; Henry, who becomes crippled in an accident during the course of the play, must learn again how to speak; Lloyd, barely past the level of survival beyond base instincts, has no language of communication beyond an informational one. Mud is the encounter of the characters in seventeen scenes which are separated by slow blackouts of "eight seconds," the story of struggles for power in which Henry usurps Lloyd's place in Mae's bed, and Lloyd kills Mae when she eventually walks out on Henry and him and their destitute existence. The violence committed in this play is the violence of the inarticulate.

Through the plays of Bond, Kroetz, Fassbinder, Wenzel, Vinaver, to name a few, a new and different realism stripped bare, plays that outline the contemporary vision of tragedy, came into drama in the seventies in Europe. These extreme reworkings of realism prove that the heritage of epic performance opened up by Brechtian dramaturgy, namely, the concept of gestus, still is a major source on which to build the new dramatic vocabulary. But this refinement of realism, to the extent that it could be called a movement, never happened here, largely because of the heavy input of psychology and speech in American theatre, the scant interest in stylized gesture and emotion, the lack of attention to the nuances of language as a political condition. (Though one could point to such plays as Tavel's Boy on the Straight-Back Chair, Shepard's Action, Mamet's Edmond, Shank's Sunset/Sunrise as steps toward an American rethinking of realism, they are only isolated phenomena.) What Fornes has done in her approach to realism over the years, and Mud is the most austere example of this style to be produced in the theatre on this side of the Atlantic, is to lift the burden of psychology, declamation, morality, and sentimentality from the concept of character. She has freed characters from explaining themselves in a way that attempts to suggest interpretations of their actions, and put them in scenes that create a single emotive moment, as precise in what it does not articulate as in what does get said.

She rejects bourgeois realism's cliches of thought patterns, how its characters project themselves in society; she rejects its melodramatic self-righteousness. Though her work is purposely presented in a flat space that emphasizes its frontality, and the actors speak in a non-inflected manner, it is not the detached cool of hyper- or super- or photo-realism, but more emotive, filled with content. Gestures, emptied of their excesses, are free to be more resonant. The Danube resounds with the unspeakable horror of nuclear death precisely because it is not named.

Mud's scenes seem, radically, to be a comment on what does not occur in performance, as if all the action had happened off stage. Her realism subtracts information whereas the conventional kind does little more than add it to a scene. She turns realism upside down by attacking its materialism and in its place emphasizing the interior lives of her characters, not their exterior selves. Hers is not a drama infatuated with things, but the qualities that make a life. Even when Henry buys Mae lipstick and a mirror in which to see herself, the moment is not for her a cosmetic action but a recognition of a self in the act of knowing, an objectification, a critique of the self.

There is no waste in this production. Fornes has always had a common sense approach to drama that situates itself in the utter simplicity of her dialogue. She writes sentences, not paragraphs. Her language is a model of direct address, it has the modesty of a writer for whom English is a learned language. She is unique in the way she writes about sexuality, in a tender way that accents sexual feelings, not sex as an event. It is a bitterly sad moment when Henry, his body twisted, his speech thick with pain, begs Mae to make love to him: "I feel the same desires. I feel the same needs. I have not changed." Emotion is unhidden in her plays. Just as language is not wasted, so the actors don't waste movements. Each scene is a strong pictorial unit. Sometimes a scene is only an image, or a few lines of dialogue. This realism is quotational, theatre in close-up, freeze frame. Theatre made by a miniaturist: in The Danube an acted scene is replayed in front of the stage by puppets, creating a fierce honorableness in its comment on human action. It is not imperialistic in its desire to create a world on the stage invested with moral imperatives, it is interested only in tableaux from a few lives in a particular place and time. Each scene presents a glimpse of imagery that is socially meaningful.

The pictorial aspect of this realism signifies an important change in theatrical attitudes towards space. It brings about a reduction of depth and a flattening of the stage picture which allude to a new pictorialism in drama. Whereas traditional realism concerned itself with a confined physicality determined by "setting," the new realism is more open cosmologically, its characters iconic. That is one of the reasons why this emotive, aggressive realism is rooted in expressionist style. (Expressionism keeps realism from becoming melodrama.) It is not coincidental that contemporary painting should also turn to expressionism after a period of super-realism, in order to generate an approach to emotion, narration and content. If styles change according to new perceptions of human form and its socialization, then painting and theatre, arts that must continually revise their opinions of figuration, should follow similar directions in any given period. Today, the exaggerated theatricality in everyday life has brought painting and theatre closer together.

The new realism would be confined by mere setting, which is only informational, it needs to be situated in the wider poetic notion of "space" which has ontological references. In the ecology of theatre, setting is a closed system of motion while space is more aligned to the idea of landscape which influences theatre, not only in writing but in design, as a result of now regarding the stage as "performance space." The very idea of space itself indicates how much the belief that all the world's a stage has been literalized. The concept of theatrical "space" alludes to the global repercussions of human action, if only metaphorically.

In recent years Fornes has become such a self-assured director that the movement in her productions seems nearly effortless, totally inhibiting actorly artificiality. She doesn't force her actors' bodies on us in an attempt for them to dominate space. She leaves spaces on the stage unused. She makes the actors appreciate stillness as a theatrical idea, they are considerate toward other theatrical lives. And Fornes acknowledges the audience by giving them their own space and time in the productions. In Mud the short scenes and blackouts emphasize this attitude toward reception. They leave room for the audience to enter for contemplative moments. The authorial voice does not demand power over the theatrical experience. It is not territorial. There is room for subjectivity, as a corrective to evasive objectification, on the part of all those involved in the making and witnessing of the event. Fefu and Her Friends is the play that most literally invites the audience into the playing space—there were five of them to be exact—and for this Fornes created a style of acting that seemed, simply, a way of talking, it was so real.

Fornes has found her own stage language, a method of discourse that unites play, actor and space in an organic whole that is always showing how it thinks, even as it allows for fragments of thought, unruly contradictions. One of the characteristics of Fornes's plays is that they offer characters in the process of thought. Her characters often question received ideas, conventions, the idea of emotion, even how one engages in thought. "What would be the use of knowing things if they don't serve you, if they don't help you shape your life?" asks Mae, an only partially literate woman who yet is dignified with a mind, however limited in its reach. All thought must be useful to characters and find meaning through life itself, to allow life its fullest expression. Mud is imbued with a feminism of the most subtle order, feminism based on the ruling idea that a free woman is one who has autonomy of thought. So, it does not matter to the play that Mae is murdered because the main point has already been made: Mae is free because she can understand the concept of freedom.

On one level, Fornes's plays equate the pleasure of thinking with the measure of being. That so many of her plays, Dr. Kheal, Tango Palace, Evelyn Brown, besides those already mentioned here, to one degree or another deal with the acquisition of language, alludes to what must surely be one of her consistent interests: the relationship of language to thought to action. The dramatic language is finely honed to exclude excessive qualifiers, adjectives, clauses. Sentences are simple, they exist to communicate, to question. There is a purity to this language of understatement that does not assume anything, and whose dramatic potential rests in the search for meaning in human endeavor. That is why the human voice, as an embodiment of social values, has so significant a place in this kind of writing.

Fornes's work has a warm delicacy and grace that distinguish it from most of what is written today. Apart from her plays there is little loveliness in the theatre. And yet I must stop to include Joseph Chaikin and Meredith Monk in this special group of artists for they also reflect this "loveliness" of presence. Loveliness?—a humanism that guilelessly breathes great dignity into the human beings they imagine into life, and so propose to reality.

Working for more than twenty years in off-Broadway's unheralded spaces, Fornes is an exemplary artist who through her writing and teaching has created a life in the theatre away from the crass hype that attends so many lesser beings. How has she managed that rare accomplishment in this country's theatre—a career? What is admirable about Fornes is that she is one of the last of the real bohemians among the writers who came to prominence in the sixties. She never changed to fit her style to fashion. She has simply been busy writing, experimenting, thinking. Writers have still to catch up to her. If there were a dozen writers in our theatre with Fornes's wisdom and graciousness it would be enough for a country, and yet even one of her is sometimes all that is needed to feel the worth of the enormous effort it takes to live a life in the American theatre.