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The best way to wrap your mind around the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, critic STEVEN DRUKMAN contends, is to abandon all hope of understanding them
LAST YEAR NEW YORK'S Signature Theatre dedicated its season to the plays of Maria Irene Forties. The roster included David Esbjornson's lapidary staging of Mud (and the curtain-closer Drowning); the New York premiere of the 1993 Enter the Night, confidently staged by newcomer Sonja Moser; and a world premiere of Letters from Cuba, directed by Fornes herself. Several features, reviews and profiles appeared in magazines and newspapers, each one looking back on Fornes's extraordinary career. In these articles, critics spilled a lot of ink about how Fornes is a theatrical treasure who has never received the recognition she deserves.
After 30 years or more, this "caviar to the general" lament has become the way Maria Irene Fornes gets written about. Most critics hold forth on other critics who haven't given the proper amount of critical praise to, or haven't grasped the proper critical context for, Fornes's work. Of course, when these more "enlightened" critics boot up, they, almost neurotically, avoid talking about the art itself. At least the very best-like Jonathan Kalb in New York Press last year-confess that what happens in a Fornes play "would challenge anyone's power of description." But for most, it's easier to speculate about why she occupies the strange place she does-beloved by artists, overlooked by audiencesand to then affix vague-but-shimmering descriptions to her body of work. (Often: "surreal" or "absurdist" or "avant-garde," designations bankrupt of meaning in an age when those terms are applied to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)
The truth is this: Every critic who loves the plays of Maria Irene Fornes is also, in some small way, stymied by them. And I'm talking about those of us who are her biggest fans, who can chart her ascent from the Open Theatre to the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival to the Intar Hispanic American Arts Center, right up to last year's season at the Signature. For us, too, the intoxication of a Fornes play in production turns to hangover when trying to synopsize the experience in journalistic prose, to provide interpretive closure, to pin each play down in words.
The task is...