SOURCE: "Hen in a Foxhouse: The Absurdist Plays of Maria Irene Fornes," in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Conn, The University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 203-20.

[In this essay, Zinman detects elements of the theater of the absurd in several of Fornes' plays.]

"Where do female playwrights stand in relation to the tradition of the theater of the absurd?" This question was posed to me by the editors of this volume. Never mind its invitation to tokenism. Never mind its invitation to specious, gender-based generalizations. Better to say something than nothing.

I went back to Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd to find some clues; scanning the index yielded only one female playwright's name: Gertrude Stein, and she is described as a precursor, linked to dadaism and surrealism rather than absurdism, and Esslin points out that the works she describes as "plays" are really "short abstract prose poems in which single sentences or short paragraphs are labelled act I, Act II, and so on… . When, towards the end of her life, Gertrude Stein wrote a play with plot and dialogue, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, it turned out to be a fascinating but essentially traditional piece of work… ."1 So the question remained.

reductio ab Absurdo:

The theater of the absurd revolutionized the modern stage in both form and content; that is, absurdist drama is distinguished by its "metaphysical anguish"² stemming from our culture's loss of meaning, value, and certitude, as well as by the way such drama communicates this vision through its concrete images, its abandonment of rational discourse, and its insistence on showing rather than saying mat life is senseless, thereby revealing a profound mistrust of verbal language. Using these basic ideas, which Esslin provided us all with nearly thirty years ago, it was easy to eliminate many of the most visible women playwrights—Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Pam Gems, Tina Howe, Wendy Wasserstein, and Nell Dunn, for example—because they are obviously writing varieties of realistic drama. Even when they violate those conventions (as Wasserstein does in Heidi's interior monologues) it is within a realistic framework. Even when they exaggerate the conventions of realism, as Emily Mann does in Still Life, it is to press theater more toward the journalistic (this happened; they live in Minnesota; they said these words to me) and further from the imagistic. Even when they depart from realism through song and dance, as Ntozake Shange does in Colored Girls, it is discursively. When Shange and Mann recently collaborated on a musical play, Betsey Brown, which tries to raise both racial and feminist issues, the results were so blatantly discursive as to seem sophomoric.

It is necessary to acknowledge at this juncture that Americans have never gravitated toward absurdist drama—perhaps because, as Esslin argues,

the convention of the absurd springs from a feeling of deep disillusionment … which has been characteristic in countries like France and Britain in the years after the Second World War… . [but] The American dream of the good life is still very strong. In the United States the belief in progress that characterized Europe in the nineteenth century has been maintained into the middle of the twentieth. It is only since the events of the 1970's—Watergate and defeat in Vietnam—that this optimism has received some sharp shocks.

(311)

The logic of this reasoning would lead us to believe that women would have embraced the theater of the absurd, since they have experienced "deep disillusionment," but this is not the case. Thus, it becomes even more interesting to see that although many women writing for the stage use many of the methods of the theater of the absurd, testifying to the power of the inheritance, they do not share its vision.

Many of the overtly political women dramatists, of whom Caryl Churchill and Joan Holden are brilliant examples, could be eliminated from my "answer" to the editors' question by virtue of their commitment to radical social change. This is necessarily an optimistic position, while theater of the absurd assumes the Beckettian premise "Nothing to be done," the line with which Waiting for Godot begins. The new feminist theater, too, obviously believes that there is much to be done. The very enunciating of the polemic—despite an absurdist framework or technique—has, surely, at its base, a belief that remediation of societal as well as individual attitudes is feasible.

On the other hand, Adrienne Kennedy, who in some way shares the absurdists' metaphysic of despair, uses methods far closer to expressionism. To see life as symbolic night-mare, heavily invested in and with Christianity as Kennedy does, is, almost certainly, to miss out on the humor. And a strong sense of the ludicrous is essential in—and to—the absurdist playwright.

So it was with a sense of relief that I answered the editors' question with the works of Maria Irene Fornes. To consider Fornes within the absurdist tradition becomes even more interesting when one considers that she is usually regarded as a feminist playwright, despite her rejection of the label. While it is certainly plausible to read her plays as feminist documents, recognizing them as absurdist theater shifts their meanings and effects considerably. Fornes is, to my mind, committed to the theater, not to politics, and she has said, "When we start respecting imagery and sensibility, the gender of the writer will be the last thing we think of."³

In Feminist Theatre, Helene Keyssar mentions Fornes's administrative work in founding the Women's Theatre Council, which collapsed in 1973 and gave rise to a new group called Theatre Strategy, of which Fornes was president. It is important to note that this group's commitment was not to feminism but "to sending experimental plays across the country."⁴ But Keyssar insists that it is in "Fornes's fifteen or more plays that we see the best evidence of the theatrical weapons she deploys in the service of feminism" (122). Gayle Austin comes to a similar conclusion; choosing three of Fornes's plays, Fefu and Her Friends, Sarita, and The Conduct of Life, she declares: "Examining these plays through a feminist lens focused on the madwoman figure shows Fornes to be a playwriting exemplar in both form and content."⁵ W. B. Worthen, who discusses Fornes's ongoing theatrical experiment, her "eclectic, reflexive theatricality,"⁶ centers his discussion on the sexual politics of the stage-spectator relationship. Although he acknowledges that "Fornes refuses to be identified solely as a 'feminist' playwright" and that her work "resists formal or thematic categorization,"⁷ he nevertheless reads Fefu and Her Friends in a strong feminist light. The way Fornes's drama changes if one changes the lens or the light is most clearly revealed by reexamining Fefu, her best known play.

The action of this play takes place in Fefu's New England house where eight women, many of whom are old friends, have met to plan and rehearse a fundraising program for an educational project. It is a spring day in 1935. This location in time and space creates an immediate disjunction, in that these women seem contemporary—in their verbal as well as their body language—and, given that this is 1935, in that there are no signs of financial hard times in these women's circumstances (cars, jobs, travel, clothes, sense of leisure). It is, nevertheless, croquet, not frisbee, that they go out to the lawn to play, but they may be using flamingos for mallets.

Fornes's characteristic emphasis on the visual rather than the verbal, a crucial absurdist preference, may well stem from the fact that she spoke Spanish before she spoke English (she emigrated from Cuba when she was fifteen) and that she saw the original Roger Blin production of Waiting for Godot in Paris when she did not understand any French.

I felt that my life had been turned around. … I felt I saw clarity. Maybe that night something in me understood that I was to dedicate my life to the theatre. … 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.⁸

And, too, Fornes was a painter (she studied with Hans Hoffman)⁹ before she was a playwright. Fornes, who teaches playwriting at INTAR, the Hispanic American Arts Center in New York, uses visualization exercises as her primary pedagogic technique, designed to "get past thinking of writing as 'how to phrase something,'"¹⁰ since her own creative process hinges on the visual:

But then there is the point when the characters become crystallized. When mat happens, I have an image in full color, technicolor. And that happens! I do not remember it happening, but I get it like clickl 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 me exact set.¹¹

The most startling "picture of the set with the characters in it" we are given in Fefu is an image early in act 1: Fefu picks up a double-barrelled shotgun and shoots her husband, who is offstage, outside on the lawn; he then, we are told, gets up and brushes himself off.

Fornes tells us that the idea for Fefu began with the image of a woman shooting her husband, and it took her years to get from that scene to the whole play. She writes:

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 this 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 mere." 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 that. She takes her rifle and she shoots her husband. He falls. Then she explains that 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.¹²

Although the joke was eliminated from the finished play, the absurdity was not. The game Fefu and Phillip play, which so scandalizes Christina and Cindy, is an absurdist image of their marriage—of, perhaps, marriage itself, of the universal, permanent warfare of male/female relationships. Consider the opening dialogue of the play:

Fefu: My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.

Cindy: What?

Fefu: Yup.

Cindy: That's just awful.

Fefu: No it isn't.

Cindy: It isn't awful?

Fefu: No.

Cindy: I don't think anyone would marry for that reason.

Fefu: He did.

Cindy: Did he say so?

Fefu: He tells me constantly.

Cindy: Oh, dear.

Fefu: I don't mind. I laugh when he tells me.

Cindy: You laugh?

Fefu: I do.

Cindy: How can you?

Fefu: It's funny.—And it's true. That's why I laugh.

Cindy: What is true?

Fefu: That women are loathsome.

Cindy: … Fefu!

Fefu: That shocks you.

Cindy: It does. I don't feel loathsome.

Fefu: I don't mean mat you are loathsome.

Cindy: You don't mean that I'm loathsome.

Fefu: No … It's something to think about. It's a thought.

Cindy: It's a hideous thought… .

Fefu: Cindy, I'm not talking about anyone in particular. I'm talking about …

Cindy: No one in particular, just women.

Fefu: Yes.

Cindy: In that case I am relieved. I thought you were referring to us. (They are amused. FEFU speaks affectionately.)

Fefu: YOU are being stupid.

CINDY: Stupid and loathsome. (To Christina.) Have you ever heard anything more …¹³

One might write a play about how "loathsome" men find women and about the self-loathing that is both cause and effect of this, and about how women deeply resent loving men, about the terrible interplay of dependence and self-assertion, about the terrible interplay of sexual passion and contempt, but then, one might be Strindberg. To contain all that in one image of Fefu's shooting Phillip with a rifle, into which he may have placed real bullets instead of blanks, is to make the stage speak in the powerful shorthand of concrete images. Further, to read the play as a feminist call to arms is to respond as Cindy does—it is to take the cosmic joke personally. Fornes theatrically demonstrates that it is naive and profitless to assume that the complex enmity inherent in such relations is remediable. The Mexican joke is funny and grotesque and horrible all at once, because it is about brutality and self-defeating stupidity, about simultaneous wish fulfillment and wish denial, about the random victim and the victimizer, about the privileging of action over speech and how powerful and dangerous that can be; it is about the Absurd.

All of this is contained in the stage image of Fefu with her shotgun, an image repeated at the close of the play, in the controversial concluding scene wherein Julia, in a wheelchair since her "hunting accident," begins to bleed from the forehead, as though the bullet with which Fefu kills a rabbit has struck her. This scene undoes the tacit realistic explanations of the earlier mysterious story of the deer hunter. Julia, we have been told, fell to the ground in the woods when the hunter shot a deer. There is no medical evidence of harm, yet she can no longer walk. The audience's easy, reassuring diagnosis of psychosomatic paralysis is reinforced, especially since we and Fefu see Julia walking in one scene. Look, the spectator can say, see how the male establishment has victimized her and how she has internalized that victimization. This is to assume realism; that is, such a peculiar event must be accounted for, and psychological exegesis is the one most comfortable to our culture. It is, further, to assume that Julia is a symbolic character whose meaning can be expressed. This is fundamental to the feminist readings of the play; for example, Keyssar sees Julia as the symbol of feminine yielding in the face of the "enormity of the struggle women must undertake," and that "woman-as-victim must be killed … in order to ignite the explosion of a community of women."¹⁴

But the bleeding wound on Julia's forehead after Fefu shoots the rabbit has also been viewed as "miracle" by Susan Sontag,¹⁵ which also suggests the play is realistic and that the only way of explaining such a "violation of the quotidian" is mystically. This, too, I think, mistakes the vision and therefore mistakes the genre. But, if we see the play as absurdist, then the images do not have to be explained; they are theater, not life, and speak with the language of the contemporary stage. Consider, for example, a stratlingly similar image: the bleeding forehead at the conclusion of Sam Shepard's Red Cross.

It may be useful to note here that the only play Fornes had read before she started to write plays was Hedda Gabier,¹⁶ and one might see Fefu's shotgun as an absurdist transmutation of Hedda's pistol; Fefu is not about to shoot herself to escape male dominance, but she may, in the shooting of the rabbit/Julia at the end, have shot the Hedda principle. This is to suggest not only the feminist act of destroying that female character who symbolizes a yielding to male dominance (or the equally self-destructive suicidal refusal to yield to male dominance), but also the destruction of the Hedda principle in theatrical terms: the rejection of the well-made, realistic play replete with explanations and meaningful actions; the well-furnished house party revisited and revised.

Perhaps the play's most subtle yet radical assault on the realistic is that its characters spring from different modes of theatrical creation: the naturalistic, the symbolic, the histrionic, and the absurdist. This is not merely to say that they exist on different levels of fictive reality—the difference, say, between the actors and the characters in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. It is also that they belong to different kinds of playwriting, and the play is, formally, built on the collision of these modes.

Julia's long speeches explaining her torment at the hands of her male oppressors—

I told them the stinking parts of the body are the important ones… .

(24)

and

The human being is of the masculine gender.…

(25)

and

I feel we are constantly threatened by death.…

(35)

—are discursive lumps in the texture of the play. It might be useful to note here that in explaining why she dislikes Arthur Miller's and Tennessee William's plays, Fornes said, "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."¹⁷ They do not, of course, find it; this quest for escape and the defeat of the quest is fundamental to the absurdist vision. By extension of these remarks, one might assume that Julia is a character out of a Miller or a Williams play. Julia defines herself as neurotic, suffering heroine, while Julia as character is defined by Fornes as a manifestation of symbolic realism. Fefu, on the other hand—by far the least verbal character in the play—is an absurdist character; she speaks as well as acts in presentational images.

Thus, it is through an image rather than an argument that Fefu shows Christina that she, too, is "fascinated with revulsion," the image of the smooth, dry stone whose underside is "slimy and filled with fungus and crawling with worms. It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest" (9). This is more than an appeal to Christina to open her mind to the excitement of grappling with uncomfortable ideas; it is a testimony to theatrical possibilities, an assertion that the stage can show us the life beneath the realistic surface. Fefu's account of the monstrous, mangled cat whom she feeds and fears and who fouls her kitchen is really an image, not a story; like Albee's dog in Zoo Story, Fornes's cat is full of unarticulable meaning; it speaks Fefu's "constant pain," which is far less explicable than Julia's.

Like an audience that has come for realism and found absurdity, the guests in Fefu's house find her shocking and puzzling. The refined Christina, who is new to the group, expresses much of the honest, dismayed reaction of audiences to theater of the absurd and to Fefu who is the incarnation of it:

She confuses me a little.… I don't know if she's careful with life.… I suppose I don't mean with life but more with convention. I think she is an adventurer in a way… . Her mind is adventurous. I don't know if there is dishonesty in that. But in adventure there is taking chances and risks, and then one has to, somehow, have less regard or respect for things as they are. That is, regard for a kind of convention, I suppose. I am probably ultimately a conformist, I think. And I suppose I do hold back for fear of being disrespectful or destroying something—and I admire those who are not. But I also feel they are dangerous to me. I don't think they are dangerous to the world, they are more useful than I am, more important, but I feel some of my life is endangered by their way of thinking.

(22)

This defines the play's mode—or collision of modes, as they are embodied not just in the minds of the characters themselves but in the very way the characters have been conceived.

That the play is about theater rather than politics is most straightforwardly suggested by the plot—the planning of the fundraiser, which is far more a rehearsal than a meeting. The star of the show the next day will be Emma, the most flamboyant character of the group, whose clothing is costume and whose speech, the centerpiece of their meeting, is performed for us rather than just assigned to a position in the program as the others are. Her speech uses a long passage from "The Science of Educational Dramatics," by Emma Sheridan Fry, an early twentieth-century teacher, full of inspirational phrases and the passionate belief that theater can teach—not as a pulpit for a particular ideology, but as a liberating catalyst of the human spirit. The rousing image that concludes Emma's speech enjoins her audience—and, by extension, us—to intrepid action: "Let us, boldly, seizing the star of our intent, lift it as the lantern of our necessity, and let it shine over the darkness of our compliance. Come!" (32). And the image of the "constant stars" of Shakespeare's sonnet 14, which Emma recites in the second act, suggests the same human capacity to convert "truth and beauty" to the storehouse of art, thus forestalling doomsday. The star image is linked to Fefu, for it is she who asks, "Have you been out? The sky is full of stars" (39).

If we read this in pursuit of a feminist interpretation, we see that Fefu sends them all out of doors, into that realm designated by the play as the male domain. Only Julia cannot or will not go, and remains confined indoors, in her wheelchair, in her timidity and terror. Fefu tries to rescue Julia ("Fight, Julia!" [40]) but when Julia retreats into weakness and fear, Fefu must reject her: "You're contagious… . I'm going mad too" (40). Politically, Fefu rejects Julia's paralyzing deference, although the concluding scene, Julia wounded or dead and the women gathered around her, remains ambiguous. Are they lending their support to the murder? Are they appalled? Mystified? Sorry? Glad? The text does not tell us, although there is nothing to suggest that this is a triumphant moment. If anything, there is clearly madness on both "sides." There is no escape in this play; both Julia and Fefu are victims and victimizers; in Fornes's version of the Mexican Joke, it does not matter which end of the rifle you are on.

The image functions as a metadramatic analogy as well. Aesthetically, Fefu's shooting of the rabbit/Julia is Fornes's rejection of the confining conventions of symbolic realism. She sends her friends out into the brilliant night, rejecting "the darkness of our compliance" and accepting the theatrical adventure of the theater of the absurd.

Perhaps even more bizarre than the collision among kinds of characters is that between "educational dramatics" and the theater of the absurd, since many of Fornes's plays are about teaching and learning, and since theater of the absurd is distinguished by its nondidacticism. Like the joyful, histrionic Emma and her namesake, Emma Sheridan Fry, Fornes believes in theater as a liberating force. In an interview she said that

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 what I have to do." But it gives you something, a charge of some understanding, some knowledge that you have in your heart.¹⁸

And, although the plays are various in size, shape, and style, one of the patterns that can be traced from the early (Tango Palace, 1960) to the recent (Mud, 1983) is the repeated use of the teaching/learning pattern; as Susan Sontag points out,

People requiring or giving instruction is a standard situation in Fornes's plays… . (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.

Dr. Kheal (1968) is her most obviously absurdist play. Flagrantly indebted to Ionesco's The Lesson, it lacks both the intellectuality and the sexual menace of its precursor. But The Lesson is an absurdist play about power and language, while Dr. Kheal is an absurdist play about absurd theatre itself, a totally self-reflexive piece. In it, the professor, dwarfed by the set composed of blackboard, water glasses, and demonstration charts—Fornes specifies that "he is small, or else the furniture is large"—plays both questioner and respondent, actor and audience, as he attempts to instruct on a range of subjects from poetry to brussels sprouts. The conclusion of Dr. Kheal's lesson is "Man is a rational animal,"²⁰ while the conclusion of Dr. Kheals lesson is to have demonstrated how foolish and pedantic the rational can be. This entire short play becomes a concrete stage image indicting rationality, and thereby also indicting the sort of drama that assumes the viability of the conventional elements of drama—dialogue, action, conflict—all of which are parodied here.

A far more subtle and disturbing treatment of teaching and learning happens in Fornes's first play, Tango Palace (1960), a two-hander about Isidore, "an androgynous clown," and Leopold, "an earnest youth." It, too, indicts rationality, although it is harder to tell how. One would do well to be guided by Fornes's preface:

To say that a work of art is meaningful is to imply that the work is endowed with intelligence. That it is illuminating. But if we must inquire what the meaning of a work of art is, it becomes evident that the work has failed us… .

To approach a work of art with the wish to decipher its symbolism, and to extract the author's intentions from it, is to imply that the work can be something other than what it demonstrates, that the work can be treated as a code system which, when deciphered, reveals the true content of the work. A work of art should not be other than what it demonstrates. It should not be an intellectual puzzle.… If there is wisdom in the work it will come to us. But if we go after it, we become wary, watchful. We lose our ability to taste.²¹

This is a critical caveat indeed. It also sounds like a substantial manifesto of the theater of the absurd. If we apply it to Tango Palace, it provides a gloss on the play. Both Isidore and Leopold are interested in wisdom: Isidore mockingly asserts his possession of it; Leopold urgently wishes to acquire it. Isidore's gaudy appearance (he is stout, with long hair, men's clothes, high heels, lots of makeup, and a corsage) announces, among other things, the refusal to let us know who we are looking at (surely the most basic, instantaneous perception of another person is to identify gender), but lack of clarity is Isidore's stock in trade. In contrast, Leopold, who is born into the play by crawling out of a canvas sack ("Look what the stork has brought me" [13]), is young, handsome, and wearing a business suit; we know exactly who he is. Once again, Fornes builds a play on jarring incongruities rather than old-fashioned conflict.

The vehicle of instruction in Tango Palace is a limitless pack of cards, each inscribed with a cliché ("All is fair in love and war") or with a piece of the play's dialogue. The cards seem to be cue cards after the fact, or perhaps they suggest that mere is nothing new under the sun, that all dialogue is a rerun, thereby discrediting both written and spoken language. Isidore offers them, pompously, to Leopold: "These cards contain wisdom. File them away, (card) [is flipped.] Know where they are (card) Have them at hand, (card) Be one upon whom nothing is lost, (card)" (16). When Leopold mishears or missays a cliché—"All's fair …" in the vulgar, common fashion ("Not love in war. Love and war!"), Isidore smacks him. Once the communication battle becomes physical, it escalates quickly, and soon both characters have been stabbed, although nothing is permanent here, not even death. Nothing is sacred either, since the religious images and allusions are bandied about lavishly, as Isidore opens his arms wide and is killed with a sword, but it is Leopold who says, solemnly and incorrectly, "It is done." If "cleanliness is close to godliness (card)" both "stink." The contest continues in a preposterously clichéd heaven, complete with harps and clouds and angels; Fornes's first play is its own theatricalized manifesto.

The no-exit set, complete with giant padlock on the door, is made far more interesting by Isidore's collection of eighteenth-century furniture (suggesting the museum room in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001), and forms a visual contrast to Isidore's outlandish shrine filled with bullfighting equipment and the beetle masks (debt to Kafka's "Metamorphosis"?). The image of the two men (?) playing (?) at bulls and matadors suggests the grotesque cruelty of the "astounding elegance" of blood sport, which is supposed to yield wisdom and truth. "As I stick each banderilla on your back I'll reveal the answer to a mystery. And then… . (taking the sword) the moment of truth.… As eternal verity is revealed to you, darkness will come upon your eyes …" (28). (Debt to Kafka's "The Penal Colony"?)²²

The nature of this strange play is finally emblematized in itself; Isidore gives Leopold a drawing lesson on the blackboard, teaching him how to draw a "portrait of a mediocre person" by connecting three dots and adding an eye dot and a mouth line to the resulting triangle. But this easy system will not yield a portrait of Leopold, since

all we can establish is that I am at the top. And way down at the bottom is you. There is no other point. We therefore can't have an angle. We only have a vertical line. The space around us is infinite, enclosed as it may be, because there is not a third person. And if the space around us is infinite, so is, necessarily, the space between us.

(20)

This oxymoronic image of the infinity of enclosed space is, to my mind, the image of the absurdist stage. The lack of a third character, one that might resolve the tension of two points symmetrically suspended, is the hallmark of absurdist drama as it theatricalizes absence and redefines linearity and chronology. That it takes two to tango is precisely the point here.

In another early play, The Successful Life of Three (1966), easily recognized as absurdist, the teaching/learning motif reappears to show us that stupidity and ignorance allow for a "successful life"—whereby rivalry, greed, criminality, incompetence, and ineducability allow mese two men and one woman to tolerate their existence. Fornes requires in her headnote to the play that each character has one characteristic facial expression—She has a "stupid expression," He "looks disdainful," and Three looks "with intense curiosity"; the note further specifies that these are to be played "very deadpan."²³ The required lack of emotional range clearly rejects the traditional theatrical aesthetic, and creates an absurdist version of Greek masks (absurdist partly because they miss the importance and clarity of comedy and tragedy, and partly because live human faces are being used as masks).

The Successful Life of Three begins with the literalizing of a cliché:

Three takes a shoe off and drops it. At the sound of the shoe, He becomes motionless, his arms suspended in the air. Three looks at He, and freezes for a moment.

Three: What are you doing?

He: Waiting.

Three: What for?

He: For the other shoe to drop.

Three: Ah, and I was wondering what you were doing. If I hadn't asked, we would have stayed like that forever. You waiting and me wondering … That's the kind of person I am. I ask … That's good, you know.

He: Why?

Three: *** [Asterisks signify their characteristic expression.]

He: Why?

Three: It starts the action.

He: What action did you start?

Three: We're talking.

(43-44)

After this metadramatic opening, each of the play's conventional dramatic situations—middle-aged man and young man as rivals for "a sexy young lady," a thief getting caught by the police, the achievement of financial success with an invention—is meaningless, devoid of the emotional component convention demands. The other shoe never drops, as it never does in absurdist drama.

Sontag asks us to "consider the twenty-year trajectory that goes from The Successful Life of 3 to Mud, about the unsuccessful life of three."²⁴ Although this play, typical of Fornes's recent work, seems far more naturalistic than the earlier plays, both Sontag and Bonnie Marranca²⁵ have been at pains to define the redefinition of realism these later plays, Mud and The Conduct of Life (1985), imply. Just as these two plays continue Fornes's career-long discussion—and celebration—of learning and teaching (and, thus, of the viability of received wisdom), so they also continue her interest in the stage as visual field.

Mud pulls against its apparent realism by creating a series of seventeen scenes, each of which ends with a tableau vivant, an eight-second freeze "which will create the effect of a still photograph."²⁶ Thus the play becomes a photograph album, ironically using the art form most easily associated with realism to break the stage realism.

Like The Successful Life of 3, this is a play about a love triangle of two men—one older, one younger—and one woman, but here the play ends in the woman's death, as Lloyd, who refuses to let her leave, shoots her with a rifle. This play, like most of Fornes's others (Tango Palace, Fefu, Conduct of Life, The Danube, Sarita), ends with a murder. Fornes has said, "I don't know how to end a play unless … who's going to kill whom?"²⁷ This seems to me more a function of an ontology than of politics; the violence is emblematic of a catastrophic vision of human life rather than of tyranny and oppression. The catastrophe at the end of Mud is still another reworking of the appalling Mexican joke discussed earlier—the literalizing of the metaphor to create a new image, far more powerful than the easily laughed-off metaphor of the joke.

Mud's capacity to move us deeply lies in Mae's human longings to learn, the value of different kinds of knowledge, and the eloquence of the poetic language that speaks that knowledge. Mae reads from a textbook about starfish—"The starfish is an animal, not a fish. He is called a fish because he lives in the water. The starfish cannot live out of the water …" (27)—and this information is transformed into the beauty of her final speech as she lies dying on the kitchen table: "Like the starfish, I live in the dark and my eyes see only a faint light. It is faint and yet it consumes me. I long for it. I thirst for it. I would die for it. Lloyd, I am dying" (40).

It would be easy to read this as a feminist play, but Fornes has specifically rejected her idea of the feminist interpretation:

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.²⁸

Mud is not immediately recognizable as an absurdist play; nevertheless, it participates in the most basic premises of the theater of the absurd: structurally, it builds on inaction at the conclusion of each scene; theatrically, it conveys, through images rather than explanations, the terrible conflicting human needs inherent in human relationships; linguistically, it demonstrates simultaneously both the inadequacy and the dazzling beauty of words.

Just as Mud can be mistaken for a conventionally realistic play or a conventionally feminist play, The Danube (1982) is often mistaken for a conventionally absurdist play, along the lines of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, since it depends on foreign language tapes and seems to depict people as puppets. It would be equally easy to read The Danube as a feminist work as well, but in fact, although both elements are present, such exclusionary interpretations diminish the play's range and power. Rather than a reductive post-Edenic diatribe, Fornes gives us glimpses into the male-female relation in all its dangerous symbiosis. Similarly, she avoids a prefabricated indictment of the failure of devalued language.

In a statement that seems worthy of an absurdist in the widest and deepest meaning of the term, Fornes has said:

A way of expressing your awe is to say, "Words fail me." That's language.

Notes

¹Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3d ed. (New York: Doubleday, Pelican, 1983), 397.

²Ibid., 23.

³Performing Arts Journal, "Women Playwrights Issue," 7, no. 3 (1983): 91.

⁴Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (New York: Grove, 1985), 121.

⁵Gayle Austin, "The Madwoman in the Spotlight: Plays of Maria Irene Fornes," in Making a Spectacle, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 76.

⁶W. B. Worthen, "Still Playing Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 167.

⁷Ibid., 180.

⁸Quoted in David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 54.

⁹ibid., 51.

¹⁰Quoted in Neena Beber, "Dramatis Instructus," American Theatre, January 1990, 24.

¹¹Maria Irene Fornes, "I Write These Messages That Come," Drama Review 21, no. 4 (December 1977): 27.

¹²Ibid., 30.

¹³Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends (1978), in Word Plays (New York: PAJ Publications, 1980, 7-8. All further page references will appear in parentheses in the text.

¹⁴Keyssar, Feminist Theatre, 125.

¹⁵Susan Sontag, preface to Maria Irene Fornes Plays (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 8.

¹⁶Savran, In Their Own Words, 51.

¹⁷Ibid., 55.

¹⁸Ibid., 56.

¹⁹Sontag, Fornes Plays, 8.

²⁰Maria Irene Fornes, Dr. Kheal, in A Century of Plays by American Women, ed. Rachel France (New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1979), 184. The play's title, although often written Doctor Kheal, appears with the abbreviation Dr. in this edition, as it does in its more recent publication in the collection titled Promenade and Other Plays (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987).

²¹Maria Irene Fornes, Tango Palace, in Playwrights for Tomorrow, vol. 2, ed. Arthur H. Ballet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), 9. All further page references appear in parentheses in the text.

²²Fornes has said that The Trial, like Godot, gave her "an experience of incredible energy inside me" (Savran, In Their Own Words, 56).

²³Maria Irene Fornes, The Successful Life of Three: A Skit for Vaudeville, in Playwrights for Tomorrow, vol. 2, ed. Arthur H. Ballet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), 42. All further page references appear in parentheses in the text.

²⁴Sontag, Fornes Plays, 9. Writing the title as Sontag does, with the figure 3 rather than the word Three, eliminates the ambiguity that it may be the character, Three, whose success the play is about. It is worth noting, too, that this play is dedicated to Susan Sontag. The word Three is used in the play's first publication in Playwrights for Tomorrow.

²⁵Bonnie Marranea, "Maria Irene Fornes and the New Realism," Performing Arts Journal, no. 22 (1984): 29-33.

²⁶Maria Irene Fornes, Mud, in Maria Irene Fornes Plays, 16. Further page references appear in parentheses in the text.

²⁷Savran, In Their Own Words, 56-57.

²⁸Ibid., 57.

²⁹Ibid., 65.