The State of Grace: Maria Irene Fomes at Sixty-Two

The State of Grace MariaIrene Fornesat Sixty-Two Bonnie Marranca EARLY IN Abingdon Square a young woman says to an inquisitive friend, "You have to know how to enter another person's life." In many ways that rule of etiquette has shaped the theatre of Maria Irene Fornes whose profound theme has always been the conduct of life. This is particularly true of Abingdon Square in which she creates a universe more Catholic than any of the other worlds of her plays. The teen-age Marion marries a loving older man, she has an affair with another man, a child with a third, descends into a personal hell, and in the end nurses her husband after his stroke out of a sense of compassion and remembered love. At a time when so much writing about women (and men) celebrates the joys of sexual freedom, Fornes is writing about sin, penance, forgiveness, the power of love. She does not deny her characters the choice and excitement of self-discovery in transgression--in this case, adultery-but concerns herself instead with the repercussions of such liberating acts. Abingdon Square then is a counter-reformation for our ideological age in which responsibility for one's actions is regarded as a hindrance to personal fulfillment. Fornes's abiding humanism is in stark contrast to contemporary drama's moral relativism and continguency ploys. Fornes is an unabashed moralist which is why her thinking is so suited to the epic style she has been developing as a writer and director in recent years, at least since Fefu and Her Friends.Epic dramaturgy is rooted in the medieval morality play which produced a synthesis of theatrical and spiritual style. If Brecht used this form to proselytize for his secular religion 24 of communism, and the expressionists for the rebirth of modern man, Fornes makes it her own to represent the spiritual lives of women-the kinds of choices they make, and why. In her recent production ofAbingdon Squareat the San Diego Repertory Theatre she has brought all of these strands together in a staging of more clarity and evocativeness than the original production of the play in 1987, at the American Place Theatre in New York. The play itself has been evolving, and considerably revised, since a workshop at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1984, and Fornes's own 1988 staging at the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo. In San Diego it was performed on successive nights in English and in Spanish. Stylistically, Abingdon Square is a journey play, but more importantly, another kind ofLehrstack or learning play. Enlightenment must be spiritual, not merely the absorption of received ideas. Knowledge is understood in the Platonic sense: as absolute beauty, virtue. Fornes's moral tale is strengthened by its distance from contemporary life and values and its elaboration over a ten-year period in the World War I-era. It exudes a willful circumspection and sense of refinement. In such a universe a person must know his or her worth. Marion looks to Dante for instruction. She keeps a diary to chronicle "things that are imagined." Learning-the book, the diary, the act of writing-holds a special place in the work of Fornes, for knowledge struggled over is a form of empowerment, a way of mastering one's life, a guide to value, the cultivation of worldliness. A manuscript must be of the illuminated kind, revelatory. (Kroetz develops this same theme in Through the Leaves, also using the epic form.) One of Fornes's preoccupations in her work is the evolution of a higher, transcendent knowledge from sexual knowledge. The body is a body of knowledge. Fornes takes a very ascetic approach to life. It is important to live in a state of grace, and to save your soul. For there is a sense of heroism in the admission of shame. Her asceticism accepts the dualism of body and soul. Nothing must be extraneous, merely decorative, self-destructive. The good life is measured by accountability, purity of heart, virtue, transformation through work and study. Chekhov had that code of ethics; his thought moved along the same bourgeois lines of self improvement. The humor of characters who fail...