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Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 43, Number 2, Summer 2000
- pp. 204-215
- 10.1353/mdr.2000.0035
- Article
- Additional Information
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Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes SALLY PORTERFIELD "I didn't think I was a playwright before I started writing. I was a painter, but it's the same thing. You like so much the way that little tree looks beside that house and so you draw it...1 Maria Irene Fornes indicates a tree just visible from the window of the small Greenwich Village cafe where we sit over coffee . It takes me a moment to find the tree because of the surrounding tangle of people, traffic, trash cans, and buildings. But there it is: a spindly little maple, leaning at a rakish angle toward one of the area's shabby-genteel apartment buildings. Then the picture comes into focus and I see it through the eyes of the playwright . An isolated snapshot, apart from the world around it, the tree stands as a gallant symbol oflife amid the ruins. The image also seems to embody an art that, like Fornes's little tree, emerges from seeming chaos as a miracle of selection that is the essence of life as she experiences it. "Chance," she says, "Can be more reliable than thinking about things and planning." We had met twice before when she came to the University of Hartford as visiting artist and attended scenes from her plays and a performance of Sarita. Encouraged by the playwright's approval, my undergraduate actors wanted to understand what it was that allowed them to find her characters and to live within them so thoroughly; why words that lie inert on the page come to life in the actor with a startling immediacy that takes both actor and audience by surprise. The universe of Fornes's artistic imagination seems to be formed by a distillation of universal experience. When we meet these archetypal characters and situations within the strange and exotic world of her drama, it becomes an eerily unexpected and moving encounter. Her plays are so dissimilar that each might have been written by a different artist. I suggest that she seems to possess what Keats called Shakespeare's Modern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 204 Maria Irene Fornes 205 "negative capability," the ability to project herself so thoroughly into her characters that there is no trace of the playwright showing through. GETTING INSIDE THE WORLD OF FEFU AND HER FRIENDS Fornes responds to that idea by describing the process of "getting inside the play." As an example, she cites the new version of Fe/u and her Friends, her best-known work, which she recently translated into Spanish.' Since the original three-act version, in which the second act is played in four separate locales within the theatre,3 is not suitable for many spaces, she wanted to write an alternative version. in which the scenes are combined on the main stage in order to make the work more viable for production. Working with the translation permitted her to get back into the writing mode with Fe/u, she says: "[ got into the exact same frame of mind, inside that world, not looking in." Thus the adaptation had, for her, the same creative impulse as the original. When she then translated the revised middle section into English, it was also new and fresh again. The new version pleases her because it allows her actors to live within that world with integrity. Like a fond but practical mother, she loves her plays but allows them to develop and shape their own lives. We discussed Fe/u's characters, who seem like old friends both to her, their creator, and to me, whose introduction to her work was as an actor, playing the title role some years ago. The play deals with a group of women who have gathered at Fefu's house to discuss their volunteer social work. Set in the 1930s, it functions as a portrait of emerging feminist sensibilities. [ suggested that one of Fefu's speeches carries a particular power because it seems to work as a metaphor for clinical depression: I am in constant pain. Idon't want to give in to it. If I do I am afraid I will never recover...