[In the essay below, Moroff investigates "the theatrical palimpsest in Fornes's theater, the simultaneous literary and visual texts that are theater."]

The theater dramatizes, makes perceptible, literary themes; concepts are made visual; they exist—as they do in life—in both language and the image. We do not only hear about abuse, for example, we can see it; we see Orlando's molestation of Nena. There is no opportunity in the theater for the spectator to forget context either for thought or for action; we cannot forget that Shakespeare's Othello is a Moor surrounded by Caucasians or that Hamlet is forced to see Claudius actually sit on his father's throne. Like the self more generally, the theatrical character is defined by context, by whom as well as what it comes up against. Chekhov made certain to keep the spectators' gaze on the cherry orchard, whose branches brush the stage space, in order to give us more insight into the characters' contentions with the past. The orchard is an image of that past, and, as the characters enact their conflicts in the very context of what has compelled those conflicts, their struggles become more than abstraction.

In this chapter I explore the theatrical palimpsest in Fornes's theater, the simultaneous literary and visual texts that are theater. Fornes has with increasing care highlighted the palimpsestic nature of the theater, particularly to illuminate the functioning and intersection of her characters' labors for power and the realization of their desires.

Her characters are frequently sexual, always sensual and emotional, always physical. For thirty years Fornes has complemented each of her character's intelligence with his or her sensuality. That meaning invoked by what characters say to one another is mediated by what the spectator sees the characters do to one another as they act out their sensuality. Her characterizations become more unstable and more authentic simultaneously; through the imaging of characters' desires, we see how the self can be simultaneously powerful and powerless, how desire can be simultaneously punishing and enabling.

Typical of Fornes's dichotomies, desire makes her characters impervious and vulnerable simultaneously. It is both selfish and necessary, punishing and rewarding to the self and to the other, central to the complex and ambiguous tasks of attaining subjectivity and objectivity. Desire formulates the subject and necessarily engenders an object, but its obscuring of boundaries threatens the integrity of both the lover and the beloved in Fornes's plays, even while it contributes to their sense of completion.

Within individual plays and within her oeuvre, a haunting lyricism results from the patterns that emerge when characters act out their desires in struggles for power over themselves and one another. The history of Fornes's theater has been, in fact, a history of representing that desire and its complicated web of simultaneous targets and aspirations: the achievement of a self, the procuring of a lover, the forging of a satisfactory role within a community—each of which act violently disrupts the self and the other.

Fornes has been consistently devoted to relationships as the most productive narrative context for the representation of what it is to be human. She has been consistently devoted, too, to the body as the site of that drama, which lends a particularly sensual quality to her stages, obscuring a line between mere physicality and sexuality. In the tradition of sensual writers like Anais Nin, Fornes uses physicality to explore some of the less tangible, more elusive connections between people. She often substitutes exposition and psychology with the equally telling image. As Ross Wetzsteon suggests, "Fornes's heart doesn't seem to be in psychologizing, she seems to use it only to depsychologize the scene, she's much more comfortable explaining to the actress how she wants her to sit down—that's the kind of grounding she focuses on" ["Irene Fornes: The Elements of Style," Village Voice 31, No. 17 (19 April 1986): 42-5]. The subtleties of characters' relationships are often defined by physical gestures, ranging from pouring bourbon and bringing soup in Fefu to the exhibitionist masturbation in Mud to explicit sexual foreplay in Sarita. Characters are always undergoing a process of definition through their physical interactions with others. Whether explicitly sexual or not, mese interactions are profoundly intimate and symbolic of desire.

Fornes's characters have internalized the theater, watching themselves and one another as if they were watching performances. Their sensuality, in turn, takes on highly theatrical attributes; sensuality is projected outward into the image of the character: the spectator sees that sensuality in order to comprehend characters' words and actions. In this chapter I read moments of simultaneous texts—the narrative and the image—in the four plays discussed in the preceding chapters [Fefii and Her Friends, Mud, Sarita, and The Conduct of Life], as well as in Abingdon Square (1987) and in What of the Night? (1993), in order to explore character often as the result of the convergence of the literary and imagistic texts of desire and power.

Within the theatrical world of Fefu and Her Friends the relationships mat matter most are the relationships the spectator sees. The visual text subsumes the supposed social and cultural text of "a man's world." The omission of men from Fefu, particularly when considered in light of Fornes's thematic and formal scope over thirty or so years, may be directly responsible for any empowerment of its women. The women are allowed to recreate their relationships—for that matter, they are allowed to have relationships—without me mediation of a Conduct of Life's Orlando, for example. The palimpsest of the women's interactive presences over their tortured narratives of oppression, fear, and anger offers the women redemption. The space for desire ultimately unmediated by men often allows for that desire's productivity.

In Fefu characters are largely defined by their desires, and whatever images of desire—sexual or otherwise—Fornes provides are between women. Men are referred to, particularly Fefu's husband, Phillip, but they remain beyond the audience's field of vision. Therefore, though heterosexual desire makes it into the dramatic text, it does not make it into the theatrical text. Even when the topics of the women's conversations cover characters, real or imaginary, outside of their theatrical event, their concerns are with themselves and one another above all else. Their desires, as imaged in this theatrical event, are for the comfort and support of the women with whom they share this space. And those desires are responded to.

Fefu's other desire, ostensibly for her husband, is both punishing and enabling. She experiences her desire for Phillip as ultimately damaging to her autonomy. But that desire is finally proxy for a desire for her own self's health. In the play's last act Fefu tells Julia that Phillip has left her:

His body is here but the rest is gone.… I torment him and I torment myself. I need him, Julia.… I need his touch.… I need the person he is. I can't give him up. (She looks into Julia's eyes.) I look into your eyes and I know what you see. It's death. Fight!

(139-40)

The irony of "His body is here"—when his body is not here—foregrounds the productive possibilities of even unmet desire in Fefu's experience. Fefu imagines that Julia sees her need for Phillip as a kind of "death" to herself, but, to the contrary, she implies, it saves her. It is not Phillip who can save her but the desire for Phillip; "his body is gone," but Fefu does not finally need his body on this stage in order to experience her own desire—which is a way of avoiding the death that has been the consequence of Julia's eradication of her own capacity to desire.

In Mud, Abingdon Square, and Sarita Fornes concerns herself with the components of a woman's desire—how desire is constructed as both self-nurturing and as defense against persecution. Fornes increasingly explores women's characters in her later work: The Successful Life of 3's lackadaisical She makes way for Mud's rebellious Mae; the romantic Molly of Molly's Dream makes way for the sexually and emotionally complex heroine of Sarita. Acting out desire becomes largely responsible for the producing of a woman's role, sometimes against societal expectations.

Mud depicts Mae's thwarted desires for a realized self in the image of the voyeuristic sex imposed upon her by Henry and Lloyd. At separate moments in the drama both Lloyd and Henry masturbate in front of Mae. Though both insist that they do so in efforts to compel Mae to make love to them—that is, in an inverted process of lovemaking or seduction—both are in fact putting on performances that Mae is compelled to watch. Their masturbations are meant to master Mae by forcing her into the position of voyeur, unwittingly and unwillingly included in their sexual acts; she is necessary for the masturbator's climax. While Mae's verbal exchanges with Henry and Lloyd say that all of their behavior results from the frustrations of poverty, ignorance, inability to communicate, and unfulfilled needs—or even from Mae's manipulations as she aggressively seeks power—the theatrical image of the men's masturbations demonstrates that the men prevent the possibility for Mae of productive "intercourse."

Lloyd and Henry's supposed desire for Mae is punishing for all the characters in the constrained dramatic world of Mud. Unexamined and fettered, that desire is never realized as a desire for their own autonomy; repressed, it then violently reemerges as a coveting of Mae, which, in an effort to prevent her from leaving the stage, compels Lloyd to kill her, leaving him and Henry bereft. Mae's desire is subject to these same constraints; her repressed desires reemerge purely selfishly as a desire to improve herself but with no awareness of the need to alter context to do so. For Mae, however, her desire is enabling as well: she becomes a poet and achieves self-love, even if only at the moment of her death—though the visual palimpsest offers no cause for celebration. Her dead and bloody body eclipses anything that has been productive about her desire.

Marion of Abingdon Square resembles Mae, though in a completely different world, a world of wealth and privilege, a genuinely beautiful world not of a dark kitchen embedded in mud but of space and light, of French doors and gardens. Her dramatic life begins as pure romance, her much older husband-to-be, Justin, singing Handel to her, her husband's son Michael her dancing partner and friend. But Marion, like Mae, feels crippled by her ignorance. Her education was interrupted by the death of her parents, and she feels she does not "yet comprehend a great many things" (6). That assessment is followed by a scene in which she and her cousin Mary muse upon the sexual lives of others and are then consumed with guilt. Marion seeks to use her self-education as punishment for that guilt; she studies Dante's "Purgatorio" by standing painfully in her overheated attic, "on her toes with her arms outstretched, looking upward" (11). Her self-education is excruciating. She explains to her great-aunt Millie, who finds her in this posture:

I feel sometimes that I am drowning in vagueness—that I have no character.… I do this to strengthen my mind and my body. I am trying to conquer this vagueness I have inside of me. This lack of character… . This weakness.

(13)

Marion constructs her own palimpsest; she essays to offer up an image of herself as strong in contrast to her profound experience of weakness.

Eventually, Marion extends her search for self-definition into a blatant using of men. When her books and religion do not work, Marion becomes a writer of sorts, keeping a daily "diary," which is really a fictional revisioning of her life. She writes in a lover, a mysterious man with the first initial F, who does in fact enter her life through the streets of New York's West Village and eventually through her husband's French doors. But even then he is not the lover she initially takes. Marion protects herself from an actual lover by taking instead the house painter (their one sexual encounter leads to the conception of her child). Terror of her own sexual desire and the subsequent indication of a powerful and dangerous self to Marion necessitate the continuation of the self-denying pattern begun with marrying a much older man, to whom Marion feels indebted but not in love. In time, something like courage, but more like need, compels her to live her devised fiction. Frank becomes her lover, and she even relocates herself into another space, into an apartment for "privacy" on Abingdon Square.

Despite Marion's increasing aggression, these are futile steps to alter a resolute context, which is that of a young, orphaned woman, insufficiently educated, fettered by marriage, controlled by the men who benignly enough are the masters of that context. Marion finally becomes motivated by what is figured as sexual desire above all else, eventually depicted as destructive. Inevitably, it destroys her marriage to Justin and hence terminates her companionship with Michael, who insists he must remain faithful to his father. Frank acts the typically elusive lover, who insists they must be careful and so distances himself from her. Marion had hoped through her fiction to become alive, to live her own life, but she experiences the consequences of that vitality as threatening even to that unrealized self: "When I sinned against life because I was dead I was not punished," she insists. "Now that life has entered me I am destroyed and I destroy everything around me" (34).

Fulfilling the prophecy of the larger script in which she acts—mat is, the script that defines her as a young wife, inherently and futilely rebellious—Marion becomes a menacing sexual animal, at least according to Justin. After their separation he tells Michael:

Last week I followed her to a dance parlor… . Marion's behavior is irrational. She's not sane… . I followed her in and I took a table by the window. A man wearing a soldier's uniform greeted her. They started dancing. And moved to a dark corner. She knew I was there looking at her and that's why she did what she did. They kissed and caressed lewdly. I've never seen such behavior in public.

(35)

Marion accepts Justin's definition of her. She describes to Mary her instinct to murder Justin by shooting him, which would give her "a great satisfaction. A satisfaction equal to flushing a toilet.… I am crude. I know I'm crude. I know I'm uncivilized" (36). Though Marion is essentially humbled and prostrate at Justin's bedside as he is likely to die from a stroke, the drama holds her responsible for his death: her lifelong repression engendered a violence that fell over into all of their lives (Justin's stroke was the consequence of a scene in which the two stood facing each other with guns). With great and sad irony, Marion becomes the abuser as the consequence of the abuse of a world mat gave her no room for self-definition; she is an agent only when acting against others, imaged via her instigated sexual encounters, each of which tell the story of a woman reduced to a kind of physical hysteria in efforts to achieve a self.

The eponymous protagonist of Sarita is one of the only female characters Fornes's audience actually sees making love. But when Sarita makes love—either physically with Julio or verbally with Mark—she is not giving love or sex as much as taking her own satisfaction. Sarita is empowered by her impulses toward self-fulfillment. While Fornes celebrates Sarita's sexuality, particularly by contrasting her with her mother, Fela, who has effectively been deadened by her passionless life, she also suggests that Sarita's desire is what causes her tragedy. Sarita is so consumed with desire for Julio that she has sex with him repeatedly at the cost of both her self-esteem and her marriage with Mark. Ironically, it is Julio who clarifies Sarita's conduct; he eventually asks her for money, confirming that he has been playing her prostitute.

Although Sarita never comes to the realization, Fornes illustrates that Sarita's desire for Julio has been misdirected from the start. Sarita's real desire, projected onto Julio and contextualized by an affair, has been for her own self. As discussed in chapter 4, Fornes spends considerable time imaging Sarita in the act of making love. Those images, when viewed through the lens of Fornes's appreciation of Sarita's sexuality, suggest mat her lovemaking in this sense has been masturbatory in the most productive of ways: she has been trying to care for herself. And to a degree she succeeds, in that she survives this drama and mat she is eventually responsible for liberating both herself and Julio from their roles. Though the process involves her murdering Julio, and hence Sarita's loss of the apparent object of her desire, Fornes hints that Sarita may be on the brink of understanding her desire's misdirection. That even after her various crimes—abandonment of her child, adultery, murder—Mark is at her side at the play's end, providing an audience for her confessions, offers Sarita the opportunity and the context in which she may learn to restructure her desire.

The palimpsests within The Conduct of Life are largely formulated by the shifting relationships between Orlando and Nena; his active sexual abuse of her confirms his power over her, but her goodness, her endurance, and her sturdy position over his dead body at the play's end dramatically overturn that narrative.

While Orlando sexualizes every encounter, even comparing the torture of political prisoners to horses mating, the women in the drama undo that imagery. Virtually anti-climactically, Nena's progress is from sexual victim to innocent child, brought up from the torture chamber in the cellar to the safety of the kitchen, where she shells peas with Olimpia. A drama that focuses on the reverberations of political violence characterized by rape and mutilation of genitalia concludes in a space in which circumspect if aggressive women control the stage.

In Conduct, as in Fefu, Fornes returns to the redemptive possibilities of the relationships between women. Orlando's links with each of the female characters in the play become the models for links between the female characters. The women repeat certain of Orlando's behavior: Leticia sometimes abuses her power over Olimpia; Olimpia mimics Orlando's violent language; Leticia chooses to emulate her husband's denial of his abuse of Nena. But, while all of Orlando's abuses can be characterized as sexual abuses in that they are experienced by his victims as suppression of their human desires, none of the women can indulge in such objectification. Even Leticia, who has jealous cause, can never objectify Nena, as Orlando does everyone who crosses his path, from the political prisoners he tortures to his wife to his abducted child-mistress.

As Nena's literal master, Orlando's abuse of Nena is far more profound than Lloyd and Henry's abuse of Mae in Mud. Orlando repeatedly masturbates against Nena:

Look this way [Orlando says to Nena]. I'm going to do something to you… . Don't move away. (As he slides his hand along her side.) I just want to put my hand here like this… . This is all I'm going to do to you… . (He pushes against her and reaches an orgasm.)

(76)

Orlando rapes Nena, makes her his voyeur, his audience, all for the specific sake of overpowering her. Ironically, however, Orlando's corruption of desire obliterates his own self in addition to threatening Nena's. His efforts in the play's final scene to force Leticia into the role of corrupt désirer (he tries to force a "confession" from her concerning a nonexisting lover) results in his erasure from this drama. The sheer violence of his desire can only be destructive.

The brutality of his mastery of Nena prevents any physical escape for her; ominously, her only option is to close off feeling, to lose that part of herself. But, rather than allow that complete repression of herself, Nena desperately pursues her own aptitude for kindness, and she succeeds: "If someone should treat me unkindly, I should not blind myself with rage, but I should see them and receive them, since maybe they are in worse pain than me" (85). Nena transforms her role as Orlando's voyeur into a productive role; she rejects her status as his victim and, in fact, in that manner overpowers him, even while she is physically defeated by him throughout the drama.

Nena's capacity is explicitly dependent on her particular grasp of her role as voyeur, her awareness of the transcendent and complex palimpsests. She understands Orlando's desire for an audience to his sexual behavior because all of her life she has been searching for "anyone watching over me" (84). While Orlando steals his audience—imprisoning his victims, demanding the attention of his spectators—Nena receives her as a gift. Even Nena's monologue explicitly acknowledges the need for an audience, her dependence on her spectators' presence. She tells her story precisely because she believes Olimpia is watching over her, and she concludes her horrible litany of Orlando's abuses with the gift of example: "I should value the things I have. And I should value all those who are near me" (85). In her way Nena is Fornes's most pathetic victim to date—by far the most abused and least able to protect herself from that abuse—and yet Nena is also Fornes's greatest heroine. Utterly ensnared in a dangerous drama, and in Orlando's violent theatricality, Nena still rejects that role. Nena's image moves from a sexualized object to a spiritual, inviolable agent of good, representing Fornes's theme of the possibility for moral perpetuation by example. By becoming the most powerful figure—the one holding the gun—on Conduct's stage, Nena illustrates the transformation of her own palimpsest.

Fornes's most recent published play, What of the Night? returns to nearly pure absurdist theater, with particular emphasis on the image as context for the violence of sexuality. The play consists of four plays in turn, Nadine, Springtime, Lust, and Hunger (some of which have been published and performed independently).¹ While characters may be traced through each play, the context (time and place) differs so completely from play to play that until Hunger only characters' names are recognizable. An overall system is suggested by the inclusion of a few familiar elements but undermined by the complete novelty of each new play. That chaotic order is largely what the play is about: it describes the patterns of abuse from adult to child, the consequences of abuse of power, and the explosive fragmentation of the self in a violent world. Each play has at its center a sexually explicit encounter; each encounter is also brief and virtually superimposed on the narrative.

The title character of Nadine is an impoverished mother in the Southwest, 1938, a prostitute whose son, Charlie, makes some money for the family by stealing for Pete, who is forty years old, "stupid and mean" (159). Pete is abusive to Charlie; he hits and cheats him and speaks vulgarly to his girlfriend, Birdie. Nadine, in an effort to force Pete to give Charlie more of what he is due, offers Pete sex:

Nadine walks behind Pete. She puts her hand inside his jacket and squeezes his breast. He grabs her arm to remove it but begins to shake. His eyes roll. She lowers her hand to his crotch. He quivers. He pants and grunts. His eyes roll.

Nadine insists, "You got to pay," while Pete "whimpers and stamps his feet. He growls and drools" (166). Nadine's seduction resembles abuse; the image of their "successful" sexual encounter (Pete reaches orgasm and gives Nadine three dollars for Charlie, one "on her cleavage" [167]) conveys the violence of these characters' desperation. While Nadine ends with the smallest hint of hope when Birdie chooses to leave this stage behind and, in turn, thwarts Pete's efforts to rape her, the image of the only adults on the stage, parental figures of sorts, engaging in something like a mutual rape, suggests that the likelihood of the children escaping unscathed is slight at best.

In Springtime even the silhouette of the abusive figure destroys the lives of two lovers. The play centers a male character, whom the audience meets only once, in the midst of a romance between Rainbow and Greta. Midway through the play, and after much talking about him, Ray's brief presence in the women's bedroom is shocking. His intrusion into what is otherwise the women's space destroys the sanctity of that space.

Ray casts a menacing shadow over the women's love affair, imparting danger at his first mention. Rainbow, to earn money for Greta's medicine, has apparently been coerced by Ray into something resembling prostitution: "I had to agree," Rainbow tells Greta, "to do something for him… . Meet someone" (84). But Ray's villainy in these women's eyes does not last the course of the drama; either naively or wishfully, the women see his influence over them as redemptive. Though Greta battles both jealousy about Rainbow's relationship with Ray and fear for what Ray does to Rainbow, she also attributes to him the role of a savior. She believes Ray has saved Rainbow from a life of crime, has made her "impeccable" when once she was "peccable" (86). And Rainbow insists that Ray has been a friend to her, that she "understands" him, that "he's not what he appears to be" (85).

From the audience's perspective both Greta and Rainbow are being generous, even ingenuous. The facts appear to be that Ray is Rainbow's pimp and that he hires her out for pornographic photography. He not only takes advantage of Rainbow's need but, eventually, of Greta's need as well. The audience learns that Greta too has been having sex with Ray (or "something," which is all the information Fornes offers), possibly in an effort to free Rainbow from him.

Greta's and Rainbow's romance is never private; it is never only their own but always the man's too. Fornes may be suggesting that a romance between two women can never be their own because the cultural context for romance is heterosexual. Or Fornes may be suggesting that romance in general can never belong solely to its participants, that expectations of the form control the lovers' behavior. Ray controls the progress of Greta and Rainbow's relationship, preventing either of them from ever being truly honest and from giving what they want to give to each other. When Greta discovers Rainbow's photographs, Rainbow says: "I don't mind. It's for you" (87). In order to be able to give her love to Greta, and to take care of her, Rainbow must pass through the conduit of male sexual desire; in order for Greta to save Rainbow's dignity, she too must pass through that conduit. When their relationship ends, the audience is to understand that Rainbow leaves Greta because their relationship does not satisfy her criteria: "For me," she says, "to love is adoring. And to be loved is to be adored" (88). But the audience has no evidence that Greta has not fulfilled her part in Rainbow's formula. The evidence we do have is that Ray has come between them, prevented the women's desire. His sexual role has determined the fate of Greta's and Rainbow's narrative.

Lust opens with Ray, "passionate and driven," and Joseph, "a self-contained businessman," discussing a boy's welfare, Ray urging Joseph to fund the boy's education. While the dialogue runs its formal course ("I'm asking the foundation to help him financially"; "How can I help?" "With a scholarship and additional funds for medical expenses"),

Ray speaks, Joseph sits next to him. He reaches for [a] blanket and covers their middle. He puts his arm around Ray's waist and twists him around so Ray's back is to him. He pulls Ray's pants down and begins to move his pelvis against him.

(194)

The visual text of their sexual encounter, which both men admit feels "quite natural" to them, overwrites the literary text. The men's sexual relationship and its power dynamics serve as context for the rest of the relationships in the play.

Helena, Joseph's daughter, enters immediately after the men have zipped up their pants. She is hysterical and needy, almost a parody of what a woman would be in Joseph and Ray's world, and Joseph arranges for Ray to marry her, clearly in order to watch over this ailing woman. The play focuses largely therein on Ray and Helena's inability to communicate and Ray's rise to power over Joseph. A series of Ray's dreams dominate the tableaux, including one in which Ray masturbates against his own image in the mirror while a woman yells angrily at him from another room, and another in which he demands, "Measure my cock" (206), to another unknown woman. Helena ends the play walking her father around the stage until "he becomes more and more debilitated [and] he falls to the ground inert and naked but for his shorts"; she concludes that, though her father knew that if he had a son he could have been "like you [Ray], distasteful in every way … he said that he still wished I had been a boy" (218). None of the relationships in this play exist independently of the primary relationship described by the image of the sexual exchange between Joseph and Ray.

A number of characters return for the final play, Hunger, compelling the spectator to seek out connections between the other plays, as a rhyme returns the reader to the word it echoes. Hunger is an emotionally tender narrative, marked by significantly less violence in the moment but also by the vexing depiction of the characters who have been permanently marred by the violence of the other vignettes from What of the Night? Charlie is now damaged, "a portly old man," "pensive," with "a scar on his forehead" (219). He does not recognize Birdie, his childhood girlfriend, but is drawn to her nonetheless. The sexual encounter in Hunger is tentative and tender. Charlie admires Birdie, now seventy-four. He takes her hand, she touches the side of his face, and he puts his arm around her waist and draws her to him: "I would like to know what it feels like to put my body against yours. I knew you'd feel fresh. Like water. Like I've had you in my arms" (225), he says. Though Birdie stops the embrace there, the tenderness of their union—this moment of articulated and imaged desire—pervades the rest of the drama, which offers the portrait of Ray reduced, like King Lear, to homelessness, rage, and fear. The play's final image is the foursome of Birdie, Charlie, Ray, and Ray's companion, Reba; Charlie wraps a blanket around Birdie's shoulder, Reba offers Birdie some sherry to help her ease her way into their world, and Ray, who had harmed Birdie back in Lust, "stretches his arm to her," sobbing (235).

An angel enters the abandoned warehouse that houses, and apparently will house forever, these sufferers. The angel too is impaired, "one of his wings is broken and hangs behind him" (219), and he walks, "shuffling his feet with short wide steps" (234). His gracelessness is accentuated by what he has brought to feed the characters; he spills his box full of animal entrails on the floor, and, like animals in turn, the four elderly characters kneel down to eat. Birdie, not yet inured to these victuals, gags and faints. Reba remarks:

She's not used to this.—[To the Angel.] Next time would you bring her something she can eat? Something she likes. [To Birdie.] What would you like? … Bring her some bread and coffee and some juice and cream… . She should have some vegetables, carrot sticks! … And also a little red wine.… Or sherry's better, I think… . Would you like a little liqueur?

(235)

Reba is the one character in the final play of What of the Night? new to the drama. Her role is defined entirely as caretaker, first of Ray then of Birdie. She has a strength and endurance possible only by having not lived through the first three plays, by coming to life at the moment of her dramatic presence as a nurturer. But, kind as she is, she cannot conceal from the spectator that desire has been reduced to the simple if sensual need for food, as Reba articulates it and as the characters' postures, bent over that food, illustrate.

The repression of characters' desire in What of the Night? recalls the repression of Conduct's Nena. Orlando's abuse of Nena in the basement restrains her growth; she remains a child, experiencing desire as a child will for little more man the company and safety available in the kitchen. In Nena, Fornes represents all of her victims: victims to others' abuse of power, victims to structures others have created as well as those to which me individual has contributed, to politics and to art. And, in Nena, Fornes represents the vulnerability inherent to our theatrical lives. But, in her, Fornes also offers the power of a particular kind of spirit, naive maybe but optimistic enough, young enough, to be entrusted with even the most dangerous of our props and roles—the gun Leticia hands her, the story she asks her to tell.

The goal for perhaps all of Fornes's characters—from the somewhat two-dimensional characters of Tango Palace or The Successful Life of 3 to the complex victimized victimizers of The Conduct of Life or Mud—is a health that can be characterized sexually, intellectually, and spiritually. To inhabit healthily the theatrical self can mean access to one's sexuality. Many of Fornes's characters seek specifically a sexual contentedness: Leopold, Dr. Kheal, She, Molly, Sarita, Fefu—there is at least one in virtually every play. The process toward that sexual contentedness is self-theatricalization, literally role-playing, performing, soliloquizing, displaying: theatrical seductions of other characters and members of the audience. In turn, a healthy sexuality—self love, in the final account—enables characters to find good roles to play, to rearrange their stages, to rewrite their dramas. Often these moments are the implied moments just beyond the play's end. This could be Nena's fate, Fefu's, Sarita's. And the spectator's.

As may well be said for all theater, the spectator is the final player in Fornes's theater. Sometimes the character of the audience is explicitly acknowledged by Fornes, but, even when that character is less explicit, the audience's role in the creation of the drama is manifest. Spectators play voyeurs in Fornes's drama; their roles as witnesses make them responsible for the turn of events.

The increasingly violent subtexts of Fornes's plays reflect not only the reality of our increasingly violent world but also the more subtle violence to the human spirit that this physical violence does. The transformation of Fornes's characters' sexuality, from She and 3's playfulness, for example, to Orlando's perversities, describes a sensual deadening. In her more recent work many of Fornes's characters die at their drama's end, presumably because by that point in their dramatic and theatrical narratives their bodies are only shells. Fornes's dramas increasingly link sex to violence, not in order to moralize but, rather, to represent, with impact, the extent of human powers. Fornes's images of the potential violence of role-playing do not strike me as cynical. To the contrary, they are her version of the honest truth meant to spur her audience to action.

Fornes has exceptional respect for, and hence exceptionally high expectations of, her audience; she expects our relationships with her characters to be as honest as are her relationships with them. She expects us to learn from their mistakes. We are to take the meatrical presences of Fornes's characters literally, to locate ourselves within the theatrical presents of her dramas, and men to embrace her theatrical images as wonderfully, or dangerously, real.

Note

¹An earlier version of Nadine was first performed as The Mothers at the Padua Hills Festival, Los Angeles, 31 July 1986. Hunger was first produced by Engarde Arts, New York City, 1 March 1988. Springtime and Lust and the four plays as a unit were first performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater as And What of the Nighf! 4 March 1989 (Women on the Verge 1993, 158).