SOURCE: Fornes, Maria Irene, and Scott Cummings. “Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes.” Theater 17, no. 1 (winter 1985): 51-6.

[In the following interview, originally conducted on May 23, 1985, Fornes discusses the development of her career as a director and playwright, as well as the stylistic elements of her plays.]

1985 was a banner year for Maria Irene Fornes. She has, by her own admission, “been receiving a lot of praise lately … and awards.” To a small cadre of supporters and critics, the recognition is overdue. She is one of the few ‘first generation’ off-off-Broadway playwrights to remain consistently active there for the past 25 years. In that time, she has gone through several ‘styles’ and one prolonged drought. In 1977, Fefu and Her Friends signalled an important breakthrough. Five years later, the Village Voice awarded her an Obie for Sustained Achievement, but not until the past year has attention begun to spread beyond the downtown coterie to the regional theaters, the foundations, the academy; if she was not earlier, Irene Fornes is now a major voice in American drama. The following interview was conducted by Scott Cummings, along with Edit Villarreal, a former student of Fornes, at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village on May 23, 1985.

[Cummings]: You set out to become a painter initially. How did you come to write your first play?

[Fornes]: It didn't happen because I thought I wanted to be a playwright. I just got this obsessive idea, as if you have a nightmare and for a while you can't shake it. It's something so strong that it's in front of you all the time. You are obsessed with it. Only it was not a nightmare. It was an obsession that took the form of a play and I felt I had to write it. It was like that. That was Tango Palace. One day I started writing it. It was a weekend and I worked all day Saturday and all day Sunday. Monday I called my job and said I was sick. I didn't go to work for nineteen days. I only went out to buy groceries. I didn't want to do anything but write. It was beautiful … incredible.

Do you see any relationship between your painting and your playwriting?

No, because my painting had never really reached a personal depth for me. Painting, I always had to force myself to work. I never found that place where you're touching on something vital to your own survival, to your own life.

What was your exposure to drama before the first playwriting experience?

The first thing that I saw that stirred me deeply was in Paris: Waiting for Godot—in French—Roger Blin's original production in 1954. 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. When I left that theater I felt that my life was changed, that I was seeing everything with a different clarity.

What was it like the first time you heard actors read your material?

The first time was at the Actor's Studio in a director's workshop. The actress was standing and she said a few lines, looked around, and then she walked and stood behind a chair. And I said, “That is wonderful! That is wonderful!” and I stood up and walked around the way she had gone and I said, “but instead of stopping here, you can continue on …” Everybody was looking at me and I thought, ‘I must be doing something wrong.’ But I couldn't figure out what it was. Then the director came to me very politely and he said, “Please, Irene, any kind of comment that you want to make I am happy to hear. You make a note of it and then, after rehearsal, we go and have a cup of coffee and talk about it.”

This seemed to me like the most absurd thing in the world. It's as if you have a child, your own baby, and you take the baby to school and the baby is crying and the teacher says, “Please I'll take care of it. Make a note; at the end of the day you and I can talk about it.” You'd think, ‘this woman is crazy. I'm not going to leave my kid here with this insane person.’ I felt that way but actors were in agreement with the director. And I though when you are with insane people, you might as well just accept it. I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will work.’ Of course, it didn't. We had some very frustrating discussions in the cafeteria on Eight Avenue near the Actor's Studio.

So, in a sense, you began directing your own plays right from the very beginning.

I never saw any difference between writing and directing. I think you have to learn that there's a difference. I don't think the difference is natural. Because I didn't know anything about theater it was like: ‘you cook a meal and then you sit down and eat it.’ Of course, they are different things, but they are sequentially and directly connected. So that to me rehearsing was just the next step. To continue working on it was natural.

I didn't direct my own play for what seemed to me like an eternity. It was 1968, five years from my first production. But it did seem like a whole life, a whole career. Like at the end of my career I started directing.

How did you learn to work with actors?

I was a member of the Actor's Studio Playwrights Unit. That meant that I could observe the acting and directing classes. I saw scenes being worked on and commented on. Strasberg didn't actually teach technique there. He taught technique at his institute. There he criticized scenes or maybe referred to certain exercises. I went to Gene Frankel's school and took a course, a beginning acting course where we did sensory exercises. Also, I took a three-month directing class, which just means you get the experience of not knowing what to say to an actor. You're going to go through that anyway, you might as well go through it at school.

I went to the Actor's Studio with the interest of somebody who wants to find out what is an actor. 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. My own personal taste was already quite developed. I was an artist, I lived in an artistic world, my artistic taste was already extremely sophisticated. In the theater I was green but not artistically. Two productions had this great impact on me. One was Waiting for Godot and the other was the adaptation of Ulysses in Nighttown directed by Burgess Meredith with Zero Mostel.

How did your work at the Actor's Studio affect your playwriting?

My writing changed when I first found out what the principle of Method is. My writing became organic. I stopped being so manipulative. In Tango Palace I felt I knew what needed to happen in a scene and that the writing was serving me. You can see the moments when a character is speaking for my benefit rather than from their own need. 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.” There I was applying the Method technique for the actor to my writing and it was bringing something very interesting to my writing.

Your formal theater training was in the American Method but the off-Broadway theater that excited you at the time was not at all in that tradition. Wasn't there a conflict?

Not at all. The question of aesthetics has nothing to do with Method. A Method actor should be able to work in a play of O'Neill as well as Ionesco as well as Shakespeare. You don't need any special training to do Ionesco. What you need is to be aesthetically aware, and to understand that imagination is a part of natural life, of everyday life. There were many people whose acting career really suffered because they had the same feeling as Strasberg: that these exercises were only to do naturalistic plays.

What is the difference in the theater scene between 1985 and 1965?

For me it's not that different. Because I work at the Theater for the New City. Which in New York is probably the place that most resembles the original off-off-Broadway. You have to do everything yourself. There's a lot of madness around. And wonderful people who are very unpretentious and working very hard. They're very generous. It's a kind of place where anybody looking for any order would go crazy. I love working there.

The original off-off-Broadway situation centered very much around the playwrights. The exciting thing was when Sam Shepard was going to do a new play, or Murray Mednick, Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens, Ronnie Tavel. Everybody got excited about the idea. That didn't last very long.

By '68 already the directors had taken over. Most of the playwrights who were very active in the early years of the off-off-Broadway movement became sort of outcasts. So we started the New York Theater Strategy which was a production organization to produce the plays of these people. I was the office, the fundraiser, the production coordinator, the bookkeeper, the secretary, the everything. I did everything. We started in 1972 and went until 1979. In 1977 I did Fefu. Fefu was such a breakthrough for me. I had the feeling I didn't want to do managerial work. I wanted to write. From then I didn't supervise the whole thing. I had other people to help me.

What kind of a breakthrough was it?

My style of work in Fefu was very different from my work before. I hadn't been writing for a few years. When you start again something different is likely to happen.

The style of Fefu dealt more with characters as real persons rather than voices that are the expression of the mind of the play. In Fefu the characters became more three-dimensional. What I think happened is that my approach to the work was different. Instead of writing in a linear manner, moving forward—I don't mean linear in terms of what the feminists claim about the way the male mind works—I started doing what you might call ‘research,’ work where you just examine the characters. I would write a scene and see what came out and then I would write another as if I were practicing calligraphy. You write whatever happens. You don't say, “I'm not going to waste my time writing a scene with five characters that are not going to be in the play.”

That's one thing that is wonderful about writing this way: you realize how much you learn about the characters when you put them in situations that are not going to be in the play. That's one thing we haven't learned from the rehearsing process. Can you imagine if a director asked an actor to do an improvisation and he said, “Why should I do this scene? This scene is not going to be in the play.” They do it gladly. They're thrilled. They know they're going to gain an enormous depth by going to the past, to the future, to other times that are in between scenes. They do it all the time, but we writers don't do it.

It's very difficult to change your style of writing. It's the hardest thing for a writer to do and the most important thing for a writer to do. I feel like we set our style of work very early for no reason at all. It's totally arbitrary. I think that any style you write in you dry up. You get exhausted and you get bored.

Your recent plays are deceptively realistic in style. Do you think they're diminished by a straightforward realistic approach?

I don't know what straight realism means. Realism is just behavior. I like acting that is true, that I can see and believe something is happening to that character. I've always considered that a necessity. It's a basic thing—A … B … C—that's the A. You have to suffer that; if you don't you are in trouble. You have to be well grounded, grounded not with your intellect but with your humanity, your body, your carnality. As long as your feet are always on the ground, you can go incredible distances. To me, that is realism. But the moment you are separated from the ground and you start with conceptual things, it is completely dull and very pushy.

To a lot of people realism means mildness and plainness. Some people think that realism has to concern itself with practical matters like your job or your marriage, but even marriage from the point of view of the practical matters. They don't realize they consider that realism because that happens to be their concern. If you deal with the same marriage or the same job but not with the practical part but with something much more complex—as realistic as the other because it's as abundant as the other—they are not as concerned with it so they think it doesn't exist. They think you are fantasizing. They don't notice that it is all over, that it is right in front of their eyes.

It sounds like your plays talk to you as much as you talk to them.

What I teach in my workshop is simply to learn how to listen to the characters, not only how to listen to the characters you have planted there but even how to have a character appear in front of you. You don't know where that person came from or what that person is doing there, but you follow that vision and follow it through.

What sort of techniques do you use to do that?

We do half an hour of yoga. After the yoga we go to our tables and I give an exercise that comes out of meditation, visualization mostly, with eyes closed, often a memory that is very specifically visualized.

What kind of instruction do you give them to trigger the memory?

It could be anything. I might say something like, “Transport yourself towards a moment between the ages of 7 and 10, for example, and remember something in connection with water.” Now water may be anything from a glass of water to a river to an ocean to being on a boat or at the beach or in the shower. Each person goes their own direction. I ask them to visualize the place. And I guide the visualization. If it's a room, I ask them to visualize the floor, whether it's wood or carpet, the walls, the windows. I go through a whole list of things. After this I ask them to make a drawing. If the place is empty, I might say, “Let somebody come into that place.” It may be a familiar character you've already worked with or somebody you've never seen before. Watch the person for awhile and see what they do. You're really just watching. You are completely passive. You begin to distinguish the difference between when you're manipulating and when you're not. When you start manipulating, everything gets brittle and fake.

Usually if the visualization is personal, I give them an element that takes it into the imaginary. I throw in lines of dialogue, which brings in the fictional. It intrudes upon it but at the same time it triggers something else. The line I pick from anything. A newspaper or a book. I like having to do a new exercise every day so I don't get lazy. If I'm really into it, everybody else is inspired. Then, as they start writing I become more inspired, too. That's where I get my writing done. That's why I've been writing so much lately. The workshop is a discipline for writing that I don't have.

So the last thing to come is language or speech. It comes after you establish an environment, trigger a memory, and put a person in that environment.

Yes. I wrote a play called Dr. Kheal. Dr. Kheal is talking about the will and he says, “In the beginning was the word—the work of the devil, son of a bitch.” What he means is that the devil passed the word around that in the beginning was the word and that it's sinister to think that. Can you imagine? I don't know why words want to become authoritarian.

You also wrote in Dr. Kheal: “Words change the nature of things. A thing not named and the same thing named are two different things.”

The experience of drinking a glass of water is one thing and you say, “I just drank a glass of water” and you immediately alter that experience. Words do not have the scope that the experience of drinking a glass of water encompasses. You may be lucky and evoke practically everything that was experienced. That's what makes a writer, of course. But you're always being lucky that you're evoking. Already you're conceding that all the words can do is try to accomplish in terms of evocation rather than—I don't know what—words fail.

What is your characters' relationship to language?

What I want language to be is an expression of the characters, but a very careful expression so that they or the words don't get carried away and become their own expression. The action of the words coming out or forming in the brain is a delicate one. It is as if words are dampness in a porous substance—a dampness which becomes liquid and condenses. As if there is a condensation that is really the forming of words. I want to catch the process of the forming of thought into words.

How does music and song figure in your work? How do you know when to turn from prose dialogue to song or music?

I think that has to do with a taste for lyricism. I'm a romantic. I have a very feminine nature. I'm very tough in some ways but I have a taste for the feminine. Lyricism is romantic. I remember having what became almost an argument with a friend of mine who is very political. It was about my play Molly's Dream. She said it was romantic and meant it as a criticism and I said, “yes, isn't it?” and meant it as a high compliment. I remember we were in a bar, we were drinking beer, and I said, “Have you ever been with a person when just being with them makes you see everything in a different light. A glass of beer has an amber, a yellow that you've never seen before and it seems to shine in a manner that is—” and she said, “Yes!” and I said, “That is romantic! That is romance!” and she said, “Well, in that case …” I said, “It is more beautiful. It isn't that you want it to be more beautiful or that you are lying to yourself. It is. Your senses are sharpened.”

There is a power in that feeling that can make a character do things that are not in his or her own best interest. I'm thinking of Sarita now.

Romance is romance. It's like intelligence. Now you can say that some people are so intelligent that sometimes they become too mental and brainy and it leads to their destruction. Well, of course anything can go wrong, but you cannot criticize intelligence for that. In some cases it does happen that people want it so much that they start deceiving themselves but there is no deceit in romance. There should not be. It's only when it goes wrong that you start fooling yourself. Why blame the feeling? When the glass of beer looks like the most beautiful amber, there's no deception, because it is actually. Everything is very beautiful. We get grey and we don't see anything as being beautiful because we are grey, we are dull, nothing shines for us. To respond to the beauty that's around you, there's no deception in that. That's why I like lyricism.

Is there a tension between being feminine and being a feminist?

To be a feminist I think means that you follow a political process that has a development and you are part of the development and you adhere to it. I am a feminist in that I am very concerned and I suffer when women are treated in a discriminatory manner and when I am treated in a discriminatory manner because I am a woman. But I never thought that I should not do certain work because I'm a woman nor did I think I should do certain work because I'm a woman.

What sort of discrimination have you encountered in your career as a playwright and a director?

It's hard to tell because when your work is rejected you don't know if the reason for rejection is that they don't like your work. You have to allow for that. Since you cannot tell for sure, I prefer not to be suspicious and not to give it too much thought. I have other reasons to suspect why doors are closed to me. One is just that my work is avant-garde. By that I mean I am always experimenting on something. Another reason is that I am not even consistently avant-garde. My work really varies a lot. There are certain things that it always has. There is a certain spirit, but I think that my form changes too much for me to have a real following. Or I could imagine that people feel a little suspicious of my writing because my mother tongue is not English. I'm the last person to know.

When did you learn English?

I was fifteen when I came here. I knew some English before.

Do you have any desire to write anything in Spanish?

I want to write English and Spanish which I have been doing. In The Conduct of Life, when Crystal Field was memorizing some of her speeches she found it very difficult. I say, “Why?” She said, “The language, the language!!!” In English, you have short sentences that add up to a thought. In Spanish, many sentences are linked, so you could have a whole paragraph that is one sentence, a lot of commas and one period. I was doing that in English. And that was what Crystal felt. When she started memorizing, it was hard, but once she would get going she just loved it. She said it was like taking a flight. You'd start a sentence and you knew it was going to take you around and around and around until you land. That's even more important than writing in Spanish and writing in English: what you bring from one language into the other.

What are your plans for the immediate future? How do you balance your work now between writing and directing, teaching and translating? What are your priorities for the next stretch of time?

I have been receiving a great deal of praise lately. And awards. But the world is very fickle. They pick you up one day and then—zoom!—they drop you down. Miles down. They don't care, there's no niceness. My feeling is that if I thought I had to work hard before, I really have to work hard now. I know that this kind of praise that I've been getting is not going to last. It can't last. It's been very intense. I got an NEA grant for two years. I got a Rockefeller Foundation grant. I've been getting Obie Awards regularly in the last few years. The first one was in 1965. Then I didn't get one for 12 years. Now I've gotten five since 1977. Erika Munk said I was “the truest poet of the theater.” Susan Sontag said I was one of the best American writers. I just received a letter from the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center commissioning me to write a play, saying that they feel that whatever I write would be a necessity for the National Theater, that I am a “national treasure.” What else? I received an award from the American Academy of Letters. All this since January. The last six months. It's like every time I open my mailbox there's some award or something. It's too strange. I love it but I have to be very careful. There are times when I have the feeling that somebody messed up with the computers and I'm going to return one of these calls and they'll say, “What?!? Who?!?”