SOURCE: "Still Playing Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 167-85.

[In the following essay, Worthen explores "the operation of the mise-en-scéne on the process of dramatic action" in Fornes' plays.]

Isidore, I beg you.
Can't you see
You're breaking my heart?
'Cause while I'm so earnest,
You're still playing games.
                                                  Tango Palace

A clown tosses off witty repartee while tossing away the cards on which his lines are written; a love scene is played first by actors and then by puppets they manipulate; the audience sits in a semicircle around a woman desperately negotiating with invisible tormentors: the plays of Maria Irene Fornes precisely address the process of theater, how the authority of the word, the presence of the performer, and the complicity of the silent spectator articulate dramatic play. Throughout her career Fornes has pursued an eclectic, reflexive theatricality. A Vietnamese Wedding (1967), for instance, "is not a play" but a kind of theater ceremony: "Rehearsals should serve the sole purpose of getting the readers acquainted with the text and the actions of the piece. The four people conducting the piece are hosts to the members of the audience who will enact the wedding" (p. 8). In Dr. Kheal (1968) a manic professor addresses the audience in a form of speech torture; the stage realism of Molly's Dream (1968) rapidly modulates into the deliquescent atmosphere of dreams. The Successful Life of Three (1965) freezes the behavioral routines of a romantic triangle in a series of static tableaux, interrupting the actors' stage presence in a way that anticipates "deconstructive" theater experiments of the seventies and eighties.¹ And the "Dada zaniness" of Promenade (1965; score by Al Carmines)—a musicla parable of two Chaplinesque prisoners who dig their way to freedom—brilliantly counterpoints Brecht, Blitzstein, Bernstein, and Beckett, viewed "through Lewis Carroll's looking-glass."²

Despite their variety, Fornes' experiments share a common impulse: to explore the operation of the mise-en-scéne on the process of dramatic action. Rather than naturalizing theatrical performance by assimilating the various "enunciators" of the stage—acting, music, set design, audience disposition—to a privileged gestural style encoded in the dramatic text (the strategy of stage realism, for instance), Fornes' plays suspend the identification between the drama and its staging.³ The rhetoric of Fornes' major plays—Fefu and Her Friends (1977), The Danube (1983), and The Conduct of Life (1985)—is sparked by this ideological dislocation. At first glance, though, to consider Fornes' drama as "ideological" may seem capricious, for Fornes claims that except for Tango Palace her plays "are not Idea Plays. My plays do not present a thesis, or at least, let us say, they do not present a formulated thesis" ("I write these messages" [p. 27]). But to constrain theatrical ideology to the "thesis play"—as though ideology were a fixed body of meanings to be "illustrated" or "realized" by an "Idea Play" or an "ideological drama"—is to confine ideology in the theater too narrowly to the plane of the text.⁴ For like dramatic action, theatrical action—performance—occupies an ideological field. Performance claims a provisional "identity" between a given actor and dramatic "character," between the geography of the stage and the dramatic "setting," and between the process of acting and the play's dramatic "action."⁵ The theater also "identifies" its spectator, casts a form of activity within which subjective significance is created. In and out of the theater, ideologies function neither solely as "bodies of thought that we possess and invest in our actions nor as elaborate texts" but "as ongoing social processes" that address us, qualify our actions with meaning, and so continually "constitute and reconstitute who we are" (Therborn, pp. 77-78). Whether the audience is explicitly characterized (as in Osborne's The Entertainer or Griffiths' Comedians), symbolically represented (as by the spotlight in Beckett's Play), or mysteriously concealed by the brilliant veil of the fourth wall, performance refigures "who we are" in the theater. Our attendance is represented in the "imaginary relationship" between "actors," "characters," and "spectators," where ideology is shaped as theatricality (Althusser, p. 153).

Trained as a painter, Fornes is, not surprisingly, attracted to the visual procedures of the mise-en-scéne. Her interest in the stage, though, stems from a theatrical rather than an explicitly political experience, Roger Blin's 1954 production of Waiting for Godot: "I didn't know a word of French. I had not read the play in English. But what was happening in front of me had a profound impact without even understanding a word. Imagine a writer whose theatricality is so amazing and so important that you could see a play of his, not understand one word, and be shook up" (Cummings, p. 52). The theatricality of Godot is deeply impressed on Fornes' pas de deux, Tango Palace (1964). Like Beckett, Fornes contests a rhetorical priority of modern realism: that stage production should represent an ideal "drama" and conceal the process of performance as a legitimate object of attention. An "obsession that took the form of a play" (Cummings, p. 51), Tango Palace takes place in a stage utopia, decked out with a chair, secretary, mirror, water jug, three teapots, a vase, and a blackboard—theatrical props rather than the signs of a dramatic "setting." The rear wall contains Isidore's "shrine," an illuminated recess holding his special props, as well as Isidore himself: a stout, heavily rouged, high-heeled, androgynous clown. The stage is Isidore's domain: when he gestures, his shrine is lit; at another gesture, chimes sound. To begin the play, Isidore creates his antagonist—Leopold, a handsome, business-suited man delivered to the stage in a canvas bag. Isidore introduces him to the set and its props ("This is my whip. [Lashing Leopold] And that is pain" [p. 131]), choreographs his movements, and gradually encourages him to play the series of routines that occupy their evening. Like Isidore's furniture, their mutual performances are classical, "influenced by their significance as distinct types representative of the best tradition, not only in the style and execution but in the choice of subject" (p. 130). Isidore's stage is a palace of art, its history contained in its accumulated junk: "the genuine Persian helmet I wore when I fought at Salamis" (p. 132), a "Queen Anne walnut armchair. Representing the acme of artistic craftsmanship of the Philadelphia school. Circa 1740," a "Louis Quinze secretary" (p. 130), a "rare seventeenth-century needlework carpet," a "Magnificent marked Wedgwood vase," a "Gutenberg Bible" (pp. 136-37). Consigned to the stage, where behavior becomes "acting," where objects become props and history a scenario for role-playing, Isidore and Leopold engage in a fully theatricalized combat, rehearsing a series of contests ordered not by a coherent plot but by the violent, sensual rhythms of the tango.⁶

Although the events of Tango Palace often seem spontaneous, they are hardly improvised; the play pays critical attention to the place of the "text" on the stage. The dramatic text is usually traced into the spectacle, represented not as text but as acting, movement, speech, and gesture. The text of Tango Palace, though, is assigned a theatrical function, identified as a property of the performance. For Isidore's brilliance is hardly impromptu; his ripostes are scripted, printed on the cards he nonchalantly tosses about the stage.

These cards contain wisdom. File them away. (Card) Know where they are. (Card) Have them at hand. (Card) Be one upon whom nothing is lost. (Card) Memorize them and you'll be where you were. (Card) … These are not my cards. They are yours. It's you who need learning, not me. I've learned already. (Card) I know all my cards by heart. (Card) I can recite them in chronological order and I don't leave one word out. (Card) What's more I never say a thing which is not an exact quotation from one of my cards. (Card) That's why I never hesitate. (Card) Why I'm never short of an answer. (Card) Or a question. (Card) Or a remark, if a remark is more appropriate.

(pp. 133-34)

Isidore at once illustrates, parodies, and challenges the absent authority of the text in modern performance: "Study hard, learn your cards, and one day, you too will be able to talk like a parrot" (p. 135). Tango Palace, like Beckett's empty stages and Handke's prisons of language, explores the rich tension between the vitality of the performers and the exhausting artifice of their performance, the impoverished dramatic conventions, false furnishings, and parrotlike repetition of words that are the only means of "life" on the stage. Yet Isidore's text also suggests the inadequacy of this dichotomy by demonstrating how the theater insistently textualizes all behavior undertaken within its confines. The more "spontaneously" Leopold struggles to escape Isidore's arty hell, for instance, the more scripted his actions become: "Leopold executes each of Isidore's commands at the same time as it is spoken, but as if He were acting spontaneously rather than obeying":

Isidore and Leopold: Anybody there! Anybody there! (Card) Let me out. (Card) Open up! (Card)

(p. 136)

Even burning Isidore's cards offers no relief, since to be free of the text on the stage is hardly to be free at all. It is simply to be silent, unrealized, dead:

Leopold: I'm going to burn those cards.

Isidore: You'll die if you burn them … don't take my word for it. Try it.

(Leopold sets fire to a card.)

What in the world are you doing? Are you crazy?

(Isidore puts the fire out.)

Are you out of your mind? You're going to die.

Are you dying?

Do you feel awful?

(Isidore trips Leopold)

There! You died.

(p. 139)

Tango Palace dramatizes the condition of theater—the dialectical tension between fiction and the flesh—and implies the unstable place of theater in the world that surrounds it, the world that Leopold struggles to rejoin.

The theater can offer only illusion, not the gritty reality, the "dirt" that Leopold wants: "What I want, sir, is to live with that loathsome mess near me, not to flush it away. To live with it for all those who throw perfume on it. To be so dirty for those who want to be so clean" (p. 157). Isidore's "cave," like Plato's, can only provide illusion, yet in Tango Palace—as in any theater—artifice is inextricably wrought into the sense of the real. Even Leopold's final execution of Isidore serves only to extend their mutual struggle, for Isidore's impossibly stagey death is followed naturally by his equally stagey resurrection, as he returns dressed like an angel, carrying his stack of cards and beckoning to Leopold; "Leopold walks through the door slowly, but with determination. He is ready for the next stage of their battle" (p. 162).

Tango Palace provides a vision, an allegory perhaps, of how the stage produces a reality, but produces it as image, performance, theater. Since Tango Palace, and especially since Fefu and Her Friends, Fornes' plays have become at once more explicitly political in theme, more rigorous in exploring the ideological relation between theatrical and dramatic representation, and more effectively engaged in repudiating the "burden of psychology, declamation, morality, and sentimentality" characteristic of American realism (Marranca, p. 70). Indeed, Fornes' recent work frequently frames "realism" in an alienating, critical mise-en-scène that alters our reading of the performance and of the drama it sustains. The Danube, for instance, presents a love story between an American businessman and a Hungarian working girl. This parable of East-West relations develops the tentative romance against a distant background of European conflict and against the immediate physical debilitation of the cast, who seem to suffer from radiation sickness: they develop sores, become crippled, feeble, ragged, and ashen. Although many scenes in The Danube are minutely "realistic" in texture, the play's staging intervenes between the spectator and the conventions of realistic performance by interrupting the defining moment of realistic rhetoric: the identification of stage performance with the conventions of social behavior. The play is staged on a platform—not in a stage "room"—held between four posts that serve an openly theatrical function: postcardlike backdrops are inserted between the rear posts, a curtain is suspended from the downstage pair, and between scenes smoke is released from holes in the platform itself. In its proportions the set is reminiscent of a puppet theater, and much of the action seems to imply that the characters are manipulated by an outside agency. And, as in Tango Palace, the text of The Danube is again objectified, held apart from the actors' charismatic presence. In fact, it was a "found object" that stimulated Fornes' conception of the use of language in the play:

Fornes was walking past a thrift shop on West 4th Street, saw some 78 rpm records in a bin, liked the way they looked even before she knew what they were … so she bought one for a dollar. Turns out it was a language record, the simplest sentences, first in Hungarian, then in English. "There was such tenderness in those little scenes," she recalls—introducing people, ordering in restaurants, discussing the weather—"that when the Theater for the New City asked me to do an antinuclear piece, I thought of how sorrowful it would be to lose the simplest pleasures of our own era."

(Wetzsteon, p. 43)

Many scenes of The Danube open with a language-lesson tape recording of the opening lines of stage dialogue: we hear the mechanical inflections of the taped English and Hungarian sentences and then the actors onstage perform the same lines in character, naturally.⁷ On the one hand, this technique emphasizes the elocutionary dimension of language, how speech is already textualized in the procedures of social action—"Unit One. Basic sentences. Paul Green meets Mr. Sandor and his daughter Eve" (p. 44); #x0022;Unit Three. Basic sentences. Paul and Eve go to the restaurant" (p. 49). Yet although the tape recordings underscore the "text" of social exchange, the actors' delivery—insofar as it is "naturalistic," spoken "with a different sense, a different emphasis" (p. 42)—necessarily skews our attention from the code of social enactment to the "presence" or "personality" it seems to disclose. Onstage, The Danube suspends the identification between language and speech. The performance dramatizes the problematic of "social being," the dialectical encounter between the individual subject and the codes of his or her realization, me "intersection of social formations and … personal history" (de Lauretis, p. 14). In fact, to speak in an "unscripted" manner is simply to act incomprehensibly, to forego recognition. The characters' infrequent, trancelike monologues are not only spoken out of context, they are apparently unheard by others on the stage.⁸ We see the characters physically deteriorate, but they repeatedly deny mat their illnesses are out of the ordinary; when they speak textbook patter, they can be realized as "social beings," but when they attempt to speak expressively, they speak to no one, not even to themselves. To be known in The Danube is necessarily to "talk like a machine," say only what the "machines" of language and behavior permit one to say (p. 62).

The Danube discovers "me poisons of the nuclear age" in the processes of culture (Rich). The machine of language and the cognate conventions of social life—dating, work, medicine, international relations—represent and so inevitably distort the human life they sustain, the life mat visibly decays before our eyes. This is the point of the two brilliant pairs of scenes mat conclude the play. In scene 12 Paul's illness finally drives him to the point of leaving Hungary and Eve; the scene is replayed in scene 13, as "Paul, Eve, and Mr. Sandor operate puppets whose appearance is identical to theirs." Scenes 14 and 15 reverse mis procedure, as scene 14 is played first by puppets and men repeated in scene 15—culminating in Eve's poetic farewell to the Danube and a blinding flash of white light—by the actors. Like me tape recordings, the puppet scenes disrupt the "natural" assimilation of "character" to the actor through the transparent gestural codes of social behavior. Like me language they speak, the gestures mat constitute "character" are shown to be an autonomous text, as effectively—though differendy—performed by puppets as by people. The proxemics of performance are shown to occupy the "intersection" between individual subjectivity and me social codes of its representation and recognition. Conventions of politics, codes of conduct, and systems of signification frame the platform of social action in The Danube; like invisible hands, they guide the human puppets of the stage.

The formal intricacy of The Danube opens a dissonance between speech and language, between the bodies of the performers and the gestures of their enactment, between life and me codes with which we conduct it. This somber play typifies Fornes' current investigation of the languages of the stage, which are given a more explicitly political inflection in The Conduct of life. Set in a Latin American military state, The Conduct of Life prismatically reflects the interdependence of politics, power, and gender. The play takes the form of a loose sequence of negotiations between Orlando (a lieutenant in me military) and his wife, Leticia; his commander, Alejo; a domestic servant, Olimpia; and Nena, a girl Orlando keeps in a warehouse and repeatedly rapes. Husband and wife, torturer and victim, man and woman, master and servant: from the opening moments of the play, when we see Orlando doing jumping jacks in the dark and vowing to "achieve maximum power" by being "no longer … overwhelmed by sexual passion" (68), the play traces the desire for mastery through a refracting network of relations—work, marriage, career, politics, sex.

Rape is, however, the defining metaphor of social action in the play, and the warehouse scenes between Orlando and Nena emblematize the play's fusion of sexual and political relations. Alejo may be rendered "impotent" by Orlando's vicious torturing of an opponent (p. 75), but torturer and victim are bound in an unbreakable embrace. Indeed, Orlando speaks to Nena much as he does to justify his regime: "What I do to you is out of love. Out of want. It's not what you think. I wish you didn't have to be hurt. I don't do it out of hatred. It is not out of rage. It is love" (p. 82). Orlando's rhetoric is chilling; that this "love" should be reciprocated measures the accuracy of Fornes' penetrating examination of the conduct of social power. Late in the play, Nena recounts her life—sleeping in the streets, living in a box with her grandfadier ("It is a big box. It is big enough for two" [p. 83])—and how she came to be abducted by Orlando. She concludes:

I want to conduct each day of my life in the best possible way. I should value the things I have. And I should value all those who are near me. And I should value the kindness that others bestow upon me. And 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.

(pp. 84-85)

Rather than taking a resistant, revolutionary posture, Nena accepts a Christian humility, an attitude that simply enforces her own objectification, her continued abuse. Beaten, raped, owned by Orlando, Nena finally adopts a morality that—grotesquely—completes her subjection to him and to the social order that empowers him. Indeed, when Leticia learns how to conduct her own life—by killing Orlando—she also reveals how inescapably Nena's exploitation lies at the foundation of this world: she hands the smoking revolver to Nena, who takes it with "terror and numb acceptance" (p. 88).

Finally, The Conduct of Life uses the disposition of the stage to reflect and extend this vision of social corruption. The stage is constructed in a series of horizontal, tiered planes: the forestage area represents the living room; a low (eighteen-inch) platform slightly upstage represents the dining room; this platform steps up (eighteen inches) onto the hallway; the hallway is succeeded by a three-foot drop to the basement, in which are standing two trestle tables; a staircase leads to the platform farthest upstage, the warehouse. The set provides a visual emblem of the hierarchy of power in the play. More significantly, though, the set constructs a powerful habit of vision for the spectators. The living and dining rooms—those areas of public sociability where Olimpia serves coffee, Leticia and Orlando discuss their marriage, Olimpia and Nena gossip while preparing dinner—become transparent to the audience as windows onto the upstage sets and the occluded "setting" they represent: the warehouses and basements where the real life of this society—torture, rape, betrayal—is conducted.

As in The Danube, the staging of The Conduct of Life dis-locates the familiar surfaces of stage realism. On occasion, however, Fornes renders the ideological process of theater visible not simply by disrupting familiar conventions but by dramatizing the audience's implication in the conduct of the spectacle. Indeed, Fornes' most assured play, Fefu and Her Friends, explores the ideology of stage gender through a sophisticated use of stage space to construct a "dramatic" relation between stage and audience. The play conceives the gender dynamics implicit in the realistic perspective by disclosing the gendered bias of the spectator's interpretive authority, "his" transcendent position above the women of the stage. The play opens at a country house in 1935. The title character has invited a group of women to her home to rehearse a brief series of skits for a charity benefit to raise money for a newly founded organization. In the first scene the women arrive and are introduced. Many seem to have been college friends, two seem to be lovers, or ex-lovers. Much of me action of the scene centers on Julia, who is confined to a wheelchair as the result of a mysterious hunting accident: although the bullet missed her, she is paralyzed from the waist down. In part 2, Fornes breaks the audience into four groups mat tour Fefu's home—garden, study, bedroom, and kitchen: "These scenes are performed simultaneously. When the scenes are completed the audience moves to the next space and the scenes are performed again. This is repeated four times until each group has seen all four scenes" (p. 6). In part 3 the audience is returned to the auditorium. The women rehearse and decide the order of their program. Fefu goes outside to clean her shotgun, and suddenly a shot rings out; Julia falls dead, though again she does not seem to have been hit.

In the theater, the play examines the theatrical poetics of the feminine not only as "theme" but in the structuring of the spectacle itself, by unseating the spectator of "realism" and dramatizing "his" controlling authority over the construction of stage gender. Early in the play, for instance, Fefu looks offstage and sees her husband approaching: "Fefu reaches for the gun, aims and shoots. Christina hides behind the couch. She and Cindy scream… . Fefu smiles proudly. She blows on the mouth of the barrel. She puts down the gun and looks out again" (p. 9). As Fefu explains once Phillip has regained his feet, "It's a game we play. I shoot and he falls. Whenever he hears the blast he falls. No matter where he is, he falls." Although Phillip is never seen in the play, his attitudes shape Fefu's stage characterization. For as she remarks in her first line in the play, "My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are" (p. 7). The shooting game provides an emblem for the relation between vision and gender in Fefu, for whether the shells are "real" or "imaginary" ("I thought the guns were not loaded," remarks Cindy; "I'm never sure," replies Fefu [p. 12]), me exchange of power takes place through the "sighting" of the other.⁹

The authority of the absent male is everywhere evident in Fefu, and particularly is imaged in Julia's paralysis. As Cindy suggests when she describes the accident, Julia's malady is a version of Fefu's "game": "I thought the bullet hit her, but it didn't … the hunter aimed … at the deer. He shot":

Julia and the deer fell. … I screamed for help and the hunter came and examined Julia. He said, "She is not hurt." Julia's forehead was bleeding. He said, "It is a surface wound. I didn't hurt her." I know it wasn't he who hurt her. It was someone else.… Apparently there was a spinal nerve injury but the doctors are puzzled because it doesn't seem her spine was hurt when she fell. She hit her head and she suffered a concussion but that would not affect the spinal nerve. So there seems to be no reason for the paralysis. She blanks out and that is caused by the blow on the head. It's a scar in the brain.

(pp. 14-15)

The women of Fefu and Her Friends share Julia's invisible "scar," the mark of their paralyzing subjection to a masculine authority mat operates on the "imaginary," ideological plane. The hunter is kin to Julia's hallucinatory "voices" in part 2, the "judges" who enforce her psychic dismemberment: "They clubbed me. They broke my head. They broke my will. They broke my hands. They tore my eyes out. They took away my voice." Julia's bodily identification is broken down and reordered according to the "aesthetic" canons prescribed by the male voice ("He said that … to see a woman running creates a disparate and incongruous image in the mind. It's antiaesthetic" [pp. 24-25]), the silent voice that characterizes women as "loathsome." This internalized "guardian" rewrites Julia's identity at the interface of the body itself, where the masculine voice materializes itself in the woman's flesh. Other women in the play envy"being like a man. Thinking like a man. Feeling like a man" (p. 13), but as Julia's coerced "prayer" suggests, to be subject to this representation of the feminine is to resign humanity ("The human being is of the masculine gender"), independence ("The mate for man is woman and that is the cross man must bear"), and sexuality ("Woman's spirit is sexual. That is why after coitus they dwell in nefarious feelings" [p. 25]). The subliminal masculine voice inscribes the deepest levels of psychological and physiological identification with the crippling gesture of submission:

(Her head moves as if slapped.)

Julia: Don't hit me. Didn't I just say my prayer?

(A smaller slap.)

Julia: I believe it.

(p. 25)

Fornes suggest that "Julia is the mind of the play," and Julia's scene articulates the shaping vision of Fefu as a whole, as well as organizing the dramatic structure of part 2. In the kitchen scene, for instance, Fornes recalls Julia's torture in Paula's description of the anomie she feels when a relationship breaks up ("the break up takes place in parts. The brain, the heart, the body, mutual things, shared things" [p. 27]); the simultaneity of the two scenes is marked when Sue leaves the kitchen with soup for Julia. Sue's departure also coordinates Julia's prayer with the concluding section of the kitchen scene. Julia's submission to the voice in the bedroom is replaced by Paula and Cecilia's suspension of their unspoken love affair: "Now we look at each other like strangers. We are guarded. I speak and you don't understand my words" (p. 28). This dramatic counterpoint invites us to see Paula and Cecilia's relationship, Cindy's violent dream of strangulation (in the study scene), Emma's thinking "about genitals all the time," and Fefu's constant, nightmarish pain (in the lawn scene) as transformations of Julia's more explicit subjection.

The action of Fefu and Her Friends takes place under the watchful eyes of Phillip, of the hunter, of Julia's "guardians," a gaze that constructs, enables, and thwarts the women of the stage: "Our sight is a form they take. That is why we take pleasure in seeing things" (p. 35). In the theater, of course, there is another invisible voyeur whose performance is both powerful and "imaginary"—the spectator. Fefu and Her Friends extends the function of the spectator beyond the metaphorical register by decentering "his" implicit ordering of the theatricality of the feminine. First performed by the New York Theater Strategy in a SoHo loft, the play originally invited the spectators to explore the space of Fefu's home. In the American Place Theatre production, the spectators were invited, row by row, to different areas of the theater—a backstage kitchen, an upstairs bedroom, the garden and study sets—before being returned to the auditorium, but not to their original seats.¹⁰ At first glance, Fornes' staging may seem simply a "gimmick," a formalist exercise in "multiple perspective" something Yet Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests.¹¹ Yet Ayckbourn's trilogy—each play takes a different set of soundings from the events of a single weekend—implies that there could be, in some mammoth play, a single ordering and relation of events, one "drama" expressed by a single plot and visible from a single perspective. In this regard the structure of The Norman Conquests, like its philandering hero, Norman, exudes a peculiarly masculine confidence, "The faith the world puts in them and they in turn put in the world," as Christina puts it (p. 13). Despite Fornes' suggestion that "the style of acting should be film acting" ("Interview," p. 110), Fefu and Her Friends bears little confidence in the adequacy or authority of the single viewing subject characteristic of both film and fourth-wall realism. In this sense, Fefu more closely approximates the decentering disorientation of environmental art than "some adoption by the theater of cinematic flexibility and montage."¹² Different spectators see the drama in a different sequence, and in fact see different plays, as variations invariably enter into the actors' performances. Fornes not only draws the audience into the performance space, she actively challenges and suspends the epistemological structure of realistic vision, predicated as it is on an invisible, singular, motionless, masculine interpreter situated outside the field of dramatic and theatrical activity. By reordering our function in the theatrical process, Fefu reorders our relation to, and interpretation of, the dramatic process it shapes.¹³

As Cecilia says at the opening of part 3, after we have returned to the auditorium, "we each have our own system of receiving information, placing it, responsibility to it. That system can function with such a bias that it could take any situation and translate it into one formula" (p. 29). In performance, Fefu and Her Friends dramatizes and displaces the theatrical "system" that renders "woman" visible: the predication of feminine identity on the sight of the spectator, a "judge." Fornes regards traditional plot conventions as naturalizing a confining set of feminine roles: "In a plot play the woman is either the mother or the sister or the girlfriend or the daughter. The purpose of the character is to serve the plot" ("Interview," p. 106). In this sense Fornes' theatrical strategy may be seen as an attempt to retheorize the interpretive operation of theatrical vision. Fornes replaces the "objective" and objectifying relations of masculine vision with the "fluid boundaries" characteristic of feminist epistemology.¹⁴ As Patrocinio Schweickart argues, summarizing Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, "men define themselves through individuation and separation from others, while women have more flexible ego boundaries and define and experience themselves in terms of their affiliations and relationships with others" (Schweickart, pp. 54-55). The consequences of this distinction have been widely applied and have become recently influential in studies of reading, studies which provide an interpretive analogy to the action of Fornes' dramaturgy. Schweickart suggests that in a feminist, reader-oriented theory, "the central issue is not of control or partition, but of managing the contradictory implications of the desire for relationship … and the desire for intimacy" (p. 55). David Bleich, surveying actual readings provided by his students, suggests that "women enter the world of the novel, take it as something 'there' for that purpose; men see the novel as a result of someone's action and construe its meaning or logic in those terms" (p. 239).¹⁵ Writing the play, Fornes sought to avoid "writing in a linear manner, moving forward," and instead undertook a series of centrifugal experiments, exploring characterization by writing a series of improvisational, extraneous scenes (Cummings, p. 53). But while Fornes again disowns political or ideological intent ("I don't mean linear in terms of what the feminists claim about the way the male mind works," she goes on to say), her suspension of plot organization for a more atmospheric or "environmental" procedure articulates the gendered coding of theatrical interpretation. Perhaps as a result, the staging of Fefu challenges the institutional "objectivity" of theatrical vision. For the play not only realizes Julia's absent voices, it casts us as their speakers, since we enact the role of her unseen, coercive tormentors. The play reshapes our relation to the drama, setting our interpretive activity within a performance structure that subordinates "plot" to "environment" and that refuses our recourse to a single, external point of view.

The "educational dramatics" of Fefu and Her Friends not only alert us to the paralyzing effect of a patriarchal ideology on the dramatic characters; they also imply the degree to which this ideology is replicated in the coercive "formula" of realistic sight.¹⁶ As Emma's speech on the "Environment" suggests ("Environment knocks at the gateway of the senses" [p. 31]), the theatrical activity of part 2 reorders the traditional hierarchy of theatrical perception—privileging the drama to its performance—and so suspends the "objective" absence of the masculine eye. Fefu criticizes the realistic theater's order of subjection, an order which, like "civilization," is still "A circumscribed order in which the whole has not entered"; even Emma's "environment" is characterized as "him" (p. 32). In Fefu and Her Friends, vision is achieved only through a strategy of displacement, by standing outside the theatrical "formula" of realism in order to witness its "bias." The play undertakes to dramatize both the results of that bias—in the various deformations suffered by Julia, Fefu, and their friends—and to enact the "other" formula that has been suppressed, the formula that becomes the audience's mode of vision in the theater. To see Fefu is not to imagine an ideal order, a single, causal "plot" constituted specifically by our absence from the performance. For Fefu and Her Friends decenters the absent "spectator" as the site of authentic interpretation, replacing "him" with a self-evidently theatricalized body, an "audience," a community sharing irreconcilable yet interdependent experiences. The perspective offered by the realistic box set appears to construct a community of witnesses, but is in fact grounded in the sight of a single observer; the realistic audience sees with a single eye. Fefu challenges the "theory" of realistic theater at its source by dramatizing—and displacing—the covert authority of the constitutive theoros of naturalism and the social order it reproduces: the offstage man.¹⁷ In so doing, Fefu provides an experience consonant with the play's climactic dramatic event. Much as we are returned to the auditorium in part 3, to assume the role of "spectator" with a fuller sense of the social legitimacy embodied in that perspective, so Fefu finally appropriates the objectifying "bias" of the unseen man in order to defend herself—and free Julia—from its oppressive view. Fefu cleans the play's central "apparatus" and then assumes the hunter's part, the "sight" that subjects the women of the stage:

(There is the sound of a shot. Christina and Cecilia run out. Julia puts her hand to her forehead. Her hand goes down slowly. There is blood on her forehead. Her head falls back. Fefu enters holding a dead rabbit in her arms. She stands behind Julia.

Fefu: I killed it … I just shot … and killed it … Julia.

(p. 41)

Despite the success of Fefu and Her Friends and of several later plays— Evelyn Brown (1980), Mud (1983), Sarita (1984)—addressing gender and power issues, Fornes refuses to be identified solely as a "feminist" playwright (Cummings, p. 55). Spanning the range of contemporary theatrical style (experimental theater, realism, "absurd" drama, musical theater, satiric revue), Fornes' drama resists formal or thematic categorization. What pervades her writing is a delicate, sometimes rueful, occasionally explosive irony, a witty moral toughness replacing the "heavy, slow, laborious and pedestrian" didacticism we may expect of "ideological" drama. Brecht was right, of course, to encourage the members of his cast to play against such a sense of political theater: "We must keep the tempo of a run-through and infect it with quiet strength, with our own fun. In the dialogue the exchanges must not be offered reluctantly, as when offering somebody one's last pair of boots, but must be tossed like so many balls" (Brecht, p. 283). Like Brecht' s, Fornes' theater generates the "fun," the infectious sophistication of a popular art. Juggling the dialectic between "theater for pleasure" and "theater for instruction," Fornes is still—earnestly, politically, theatrically—"playing games."

Notes

¹Fornes describes The Successful Life of Three as arising from her association with the Actors Studio: "The first play that I wrote that was influenced by my understanding of Method was The Successful Life of Three. What one character says to another comes completely out of his own impulse and so does the other character's reply. The other character's reply never comes from some sort of premeditation on my part or even the part of the character. The characters have no mind. They are simply doing what Strasberg always called 'moment to moment.'" Insofar as Fornes applies acting exercises to the techniques of dramatic characterization, she seems accurately to have evaluated her relationship to Strasberg: "I was very impressed with Strasberg's work as an actor's technician or a director's technician but I would completely ignore anything he would say about aesthetics" (Cummings, p. 52).

²See Barnes; Stephen Holden compares the play to Bernstein's Candide, Beckett, and Carroll; and Daphne Kraft describes the play as a hybrid of "Marc Blitzstein's "The Cradle Will Rock' and Leonard Bernstein's 'Candide.'"

³See Pavis, p. 44.

⁴See Bigsby, p. 23, and Terry Eagleton's suggestive account of the relation between text and production in Criticism and Ideology (pp. 64-68).

⁵On "identification" and ideology, see Burke, p. 88 and passim. 6"Martin Washburn suggests not only that Fornes has "absorbed the continental traditions" but that "Isidore may actually represent the toils of continental literature which the playwright wants to escape."

⁷It should be noted that some scenes have no taped opening, some have a tape recording of the opening lines only in Hungarian, and some scenes proceed throughout in this manner: English tape, Hungarian tape, actor's delivery.

⁸As, for instance, when a waiter delivers a sudden, trancelike tirade: "We are dark. Americans are bright.—You crave mobility. The car. You move from city to city so as not to grow stale. You don't stay too long in a place… . Our grace is weighty. Not yours. You worship the long leg and loose hip joint. How else to jump in and out of cars" (p. 52).

⁹The gun business derives from a joke, as Fornes reports in "Notes on Fefu": "There are two Mexicans in sombreros sitting at a bullfight and one says to the other, 'Isn't she beautiful, the one in yellow?' and he points to a woman on the other side of the arena crowded with people. The other one says, 'Which one?' and the first takes his gun and shoots her and says, "The one that falls.' In the first draft of the play Fefu explains that she started playing this game with her husband as a joke. But in rewriting the play I took out this explanation" (p. 38). It's notable that the gun business dates from Fornes' original work on the play in 1964, as she suggests in "Interview," p. 106.

¹⁰Although he seems to have disliked leaving his seat, Walter Kerr offers a description of the procedure of the play; see his review of Fefu and Her Friends. Kerr's painful recollections of his displacement are recalled several months later, in "New Plays Bring Back Old Songs." See also ; and ("this enclosed repetitiveness sums up entire trapped lifetimes").

¹¹In Ayckbourn's trilogy the same romantic comedy is replayed three times. In Table Manners the audience witnesses a series of misadventures transpiring over a country-house weekend and hears about a variety of offstage events; in Living Together these offstage events and others are dramatized while we hear about (and recall) the now-offstage events of the first play; in Round and Round the Garden the material from the first two plays is now offstage, and we witness a third series of scenes.

¹²Stanley Kauffman's reading of the play's filmic texture is at once shrewd and, in this sense, misapplied: "I doubt very much that Fornes thought of this four-part walk-around as a gimmick. Probably it signified for her an explanation of simultaneity (since all four scenes are done simultaneously four times for the four groups), a union of play and audience through kinetics, some adoption by the theater of cinematic flexibility and montage. But since the small content in these scenes would in no way be damaged by traditional serial construction, since this insistence on reminding us that people actually have related/unrelated conversations simultaneously in different rooms of the same house is banal, we are left with the feeling of gimmick."

¹³As Richard Eder remarked of the bedroom scene, "Julia is lying in bed, and we sit around her. Our presence, like that of the onlookers in Rembrandt's 'Anatomy Lesson,' magnifies the horror of what is going on." See also

¹⁴For this phrase I am indebted to my colleague Joan Lidoff.

¹⁵In terms of the theatrical structure of Fefu and Her Friends, it is also notable that Bleich's male students not only tended to "see" the novel from "outside" its matrix of relationships but tended to privilege the "plot" in their retellings: "The men retold the story as if the purpose was to deliver a clear, simple structure or chain of information: these are the main characters; this is the main action; this is how it turned out… . The women presented the narrative as if it were an atmosphere or experience. They generally felt freer to reflect on the story material with adjectival judgments, and even larger sorts of judgments, and they were more ready to draw inferences without strict regard for the literal warrant of the text, but with more regard for the affective sense of human relationships in the story" (p. 256).

¹⁶Emma's speech on acting is taken from the prologue to Emma Sheridan Fry, Educational Dramatics. Elsewhere in the book Fry defines the "dramatic instinct" as the process that relates the subject to its environment: "It rouses us to a recognition of the Outside. It provokes those processes whereby we respond to the attack of the Outside upon us" (p. 6).

¹⁷As Jane Gallop describes it, "Nothing to see becomes nothing of worth. The metaphysical privileging of sight over other senses, oculocentrism, supports and unifies phallocentric sexual theory (theory—from the Greek theoria, from theoros, 'spectator,' from thea, 'a viewing'). Speculum (from specere, 'to look at') makes repeated reference to the oculocentrism of theory, of philosophy" (pp. 36-37).

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