[In the following essay, Sontag extols Fornes' growth as a dramatist. "The plays, " she states, "have always been about wisdom: what it means to be wise. They are getting wiser. "]

Mud, The Danube, The Conduct of Life, Sarita—four plays, recent work by the prolific Maria Irene Fornes, who for many years has been conducting with exemplary tenacity and scrupulousness a unique career in the American theatre.

Born in Havana, Fornes arrived in this country with her family when she was fifteen; in her twenties she spent several years in France (she was painting then), and began writing plays after she returned to New York, when she was around thirty. Although the language in which she became a writer was English, not Spanish—and Fornes's early work is inconceivable without the reinforcement of the lively local New York milieu (particularly the Judson Poets Theatre) in which she surfaced in the early 1960s—she is unmistakably a writer of bicultural inspiration: one very American way of being a writer. Her imagination seems to me to have, among other sources, a profoundly Cuban one. I am reminded of the witty, sensual phantasmagorias of Cuban writers such as Lydia Cabrera, Calvert Casey, Virgilio Piñera.

Of course, writers, these or any other, were not the conscious influences on Fornes or any of the best "downtown" theatre of the 1960s. Art Nouveau and Hollywood Deco had more to do with, say, The Theatre of the Ridiculous, than any plausible literary antecedents (Tzara, Firbank, etc.). This is also true of Fornes, an autodidact whose principal influences were neither theatre nor literature but certain styles of painting and the movies. But unlike similarly influenced New York dramatists, her work did not eventually become parasitic on literature (or opera, or movies). It was never a revolt against theatre, or a theatre recycling fantasies encoded in other genres.

Her two earliest plays prefigure the dual register, one völkisch, the other placeless-international, of all the subsequent work. The Widow, a poignant chronicle of a simple life, is set in Cuba, while Tango Palace, with its volleys of sophisticated exchanges, takes place in a purely theatrical space: a cave, an altar. Fornes has a complex relation to the strategy of naivete. She is chary of the folkloristic, rightly so. But she is strongly drawn to the pre-literary: to the authority of documents, of found materials such as letters of her great-grandfather's cousin which inspired The Widow, the diary of a domestic servant in turn-of-the-century New Hampshire which was transformed into Evelyn Brown, Emma's lecture in Fefu and Her Friends.

For a while she favored the musical play—in a style reminiscent of the populist parables in musical-commedia form preserved in films from the 1930s like René Clair's A Nous la Liberté. It was a genre that proclaimed its innocence, and specialized in rueful gaiety. Sharing with the main tradition of modernist drama an aversion to the reductively psychological and to sociological explanations, Fornes chose a theatre of types (such personages as the defective sage and the woman enslaved by sexual dependence reappear in a number of plays) and a theatre of miracles: the talking mirror in The Office, the fatal gun wound at the end of Fefu and Her Friends. Lately, Fornes seems to be eschewing this effect: the quotidian as something to be violated—by lyricism, by disaster. Characters can still break into song, as they did in the dazzling bitter-sweet plays of the mid-1960s, like Promenade and Molly's Dream and The Successful Life of 3. But the plays are less insistingly charming. Reality is less capricious. More genuinely lethal—as in Eyes on the Harem, Sarita.

Character is revealed through catechism. People requiring or giving instruction is a standard situation in Fornes's plays. The desire to be initiated, to be taught, is depicted as an essential, and essentially pathetic, longing. (Fornes's elaborate sympathy for the labor of thought is the endearing observation of someone who is almost entirely self-taught.) And there are many dispensers of wisdom in Fornes's plays, apart from those—Tango Palace, Doctor Kheal—specifically devoted to the comedy and the pathos of instruction. But Fornes is neither literary nor antiliterary. These are not cerebral exercises or puzzles but the real questions, about… the conduct of life. There is much wit but no nonsense. No banalities. And no non sequiturs.

While some plays are set in never-never land, some have local flavors—like the American 1930s of Fefu and Her Friends. Evoking a specific setting, especially when it is Hispanic (this being understood as an underprivileged reality), or depicting the lives of the oppressed and humiliated, especially when the subject is that emblem of oppression, the woman servant, such plays as Evelyn Brown and The Conduct of Life may seem more "realistic"—given the condescending assumptions of the ideology of realism. (Oppressed women, particularly domestic servants and prostitutes, have long been the signature subject of what is sometimes called realism, sometimes naturalism.) But I am not convinced mat Fornes's recent work is any less a theatre of fantasy man it was, or more now a species of dramatic realism. Her work is both a theatre about utterance (i.e., a meta-theatre) and a theatre about the disfavored—both Handke and Kroetz, as it were.

It was always a theatre of heartbreak. But at the beginning the mood was often throwaway, playful. Now it's darker, more passionate: consider the twenty-year trajectory mat goes from The Successful Life of 3 to Mud, about the unsuccessful life of three. She writes increasingly from a woman's point of view. Women are doing women's things—performing unrewarded labor (in Evelyn Brown), getting raped (in The Conduct of Life)—and also, as in Fefu and Her Friends, incarnating the human condition as such. Fornes has a near faultless ear for the ruses of egotism and cruelty. Unlike most contemporary dramatists, for whom psychological brutality is the principal, inexhaustible subject, Fornes is never in complicity with the brutality she depicts. She has an increasingly expressive relation to dread, to grief and to passion—in Sarita, for example, which is about sexual passion and the incompatibilities of desire. Dread is not just a subjective state but is attached to history: the psychology of torturers (The Conduct of Life), nuclear war (The Danube).

Fornes's work has always been intelligent, often funny, never vulgar or cynical; both delicate and visceral. Now it is something more. (The turning point, I think, was the splendid Fefu and Her Friends—with its much larger palette of sympathies, for both Julia's incurable despair and Emma's irrepressible jubilation.) The plays have always been about wisdom: what it means to be wise. They are getting wiser.

It is perhaps not appropriate here to do more than allude to her great distinction and subtlety as a director of her own plays, and as an inspiring and original teacher (working mainly with young Hispanic-American playwrights). But it seems impossible not to connect the truthfulness in Fornes's plays, their alertness of depicting, their unfacile compassionateness, with a certain character, a certain virtue. In the words of a Northern Sung landscape painter, Kuo Hsi, if the artist "can develop a natural, sincere, gentle, and honest heart, then he will immediately be able to comprehend the aspect of tears and smiles and of objects, pointed or oblique, bent or inclined, and they will be so clear in his mind that he will be able to put them down spontaneously with his paint brush."

Hers seems to be an admirable temperament, unaffectedly independent, highminded, ardent. And one of the few agreeable spectacles which our culture affords is to watch the steady ripening of this beautiful talent.