Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical

Context

Gwendolyn Alker

Theatre Topics, Volume 19, Number 2, September 2009, pp. 207-219 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.0.0078

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/361369

Access provided at 13 Jan 2020 00:10 GMT from University of Technology, Sydney
 Teaching Fornes:
Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context

Gwendolyn Alker

“The best way to wrap your mind around the plays of Maria Irene Fornes . . . is to abandon all
hope of understanding them.”
—Steven Drukman (36)

“The rift, I submit, does not lie between the written and spoken word, but between the archive
of supposedly enduring materials . . . and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied
practice/knowledge.”
—Diana Taylor (19)

The camera shows a face, small and wiry, with unruly teeth and an aquiline nose (Fig. 1).
Peppered grey hair flies in various directions; heavy-set black glasses come on and off as the woman
speaks. I am watching footage from the as-yet-to-be-released documentary on Maria Irene Fornes
by Michelle Memran (Fig. 2).1 As I watch, the woman at the center of the film reveals a biting wit,
a virtuosic creativity, and an inability to stay focused on any one subject as her mind wanders from
one topic to the next. As Memran noted to me, this film, originally shot on a low-budget Hi-8 Cam-
corder, has become a documentary on her relationship with Irene Fornes in light of the playwright’s
dementia. Memran’s work was also instrumental in the diagnosis of this condition, as Fornes only
agreed to seek medical advice after watching a clip of herself, filmed only a few days before, of which
she had no recollection (Fig. 3).2

This film can be thought of as the last great work of Fornes’s prolific career. It reveals her pre-
ternatural ability to create scraps of creative cloth in the face of narrative disruption. It also signals a
turn from Fornes’s neat if not broadly sculptured work in which she was the agent, playwright, and
teacher of all things Fornesian to the communities in Off-Off Broadway theatre, the Padua Hills
Playwriting Festival, the INTAR Playwriting Lab, and others. Fornes, as the film clearly shows,
remains the agent of her own creative world—and yet she cannot pass this world on to others, faced,
as she is, with narrative erosion.

Two of Fornes’s central contributions, the intertwined impact of which this article seeks to
unpack, are her role as a teacher of playwriting and directing, and her impact as a preeminent, albeit
undervalued, playwright of the 1960s and ’70s Off-Off Broadway movement. Both these roles
merit reflection and the concretization of her lineage, and yet the ways in which the textual versus
nontextual aspects of her career are remembered will necessarily be very different. One of the last
projects that Fornes focused on before the onset of her illness was a compilation of her playwrit-
ing exercises in a volume that was tentatively titled The Anatomy of Inspiration. This book has not
been, and probably will not be, published. We are thus at a moment of shift from the teachings of
the teacher to the retelling of her stories by her students. At present, Caridad Svich, at the request
of Bonnie Marranca, is gathering exercises from many of Fornes’s students that are scheduled to
appear in the PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art in 2009. This may be the only document to
stand in for the one that Fornes will not complete. This is also a liminal moment in the formation

207
208 Gwendolyn Alker

Fig. 1. Phone call. Maria Irene Fornes reminisces on the telephone with relatives in Havana. (Source: Photograph from the
documentary, “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene. Copyright © 2009 by Michelle Memran.)

of her archive: many of her documents have been gathered, but sit in boxes awaiting a direction and
a location before any sorting or cataloguing can begin.

For the most part, the lineage of Fornesian style and techniques has become an oral one,
and one that will arrive to us secondhand, susceptible to the peregrinations and individualization
of Fornes’s many students. One hears this in the frequent anecdotes that many people tell about
her: the constant presence of her mother, Carmen (Fig. 4); the quality of her voice; the precision
of her stage direction. The shift that comes from a student interpreting and formalizing the work
of a teacher is not a new academic phenomenon: one only has to think of the published remains of
Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures (available as the Course in General Linguistics, as well as many other
posthumous collaborations) to know the value of a student’s interpretation. Within the theatre,
the legacy of embodied transmission is a vast and important topic; for example, the ongoing work
of Sharon Carnicke continues to unearth and challenge ways of seeing and utilizing Stanislavski’s
techniques. As a scholar, I also remain haunted by Richard Schechner’s claim, in his frequently cited
1981 article on the death of a distinctly New York avant-garde (a world that was very influential for
Fornes): “the greatest failing of my generation is our failure to find a way of passing on performance
knowledge” (52).

The deeper questions that emerge at this point of transferal (made legally and emotionally
more difficult in the case of Fornes’s illness) are ones of authority, lineage, content, and style. Which
of her many hats will be made preeminent in the stories that are told about her? Fornes primar-
ily taught as a playwright, and as a teacher of playwrights. Yet she is encountered most frequently
within US academic institutions in theatre history survey classes or dramatic literature classes on
gender or race, where Fefu and her Friends is often proffered as a logical if not singular example of
her lengthy and diverse career.

Beyond these more consistently recognized roles, Fornes was also a director with the eye of a
painter, and was even a costume designer in the scrappy days of the Judson poets. In other words, she
is one of the few figures of the Off-Off Broadway movement whose body of work is both script-based
 Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context 209

Fig. 2. Film montage. Text and travel—two major themes in Maria Irene Fornes’s dramatic work—are further explored in
the documentary. (Source: Photograph from the documentary, “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene. Copyright © 2009
by Michelle Memran.)

and orally recorded. She is both prolifically available through her plays and yet difficult to pin down
in her directorial and pedagogical influence. Fornes as both a playwright and teacher, whose texts are
available (even if not read for their sustained complexity), embodies within herself the curious text/
anti-textual divide that motivated Schechner’s critique and his fear of a generation’s inability to pass
on new ways of creating and understanding the theatre. And while in Fornes’s case such a division
is far too simple, the fact remains that her playtexts will generally be more accessible, self-contained,
and thus available in ways that her role as a director and teacher of playwriting is not. This career
suggests that as we pay our dues to her, devise any class about her, or offer her scripts to our students,
we must question how her own interdisciplinary nature necessitates pedagogical shifts. Finally, her
lasting legacy could be to question how the divides of text versus nontext, dramatic literature versus
conservatory training do not serve us or our students as they must embark into an economically
depleted theatrical world. Indeed, the poor theatre of today is one that Fornes willingly and suc-
cessfully inhabits. This article suggests one path of Fornesian learning across the divides of her lived
influence as a director and teacher and the texts that remain. These pedagogical interventions seek to
210 Gwendolyn Alker

Fig. 3. Me and Irene. Filmmaker Michelle Memran and Maria Irene Fornes watch footage from their travels in New York,
Miami, Havana, and Seattle. (Source: Photograph from the documentary, “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene. Copy-
right © 2009 by Michelle Memran.)

Fig. 4. Irene and her mother. A young Maria Irene Fornes sees her mother Carmen off for a visit to Cuba. (Source: Photo-
graph from the documentary, “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene. Copyright © 2009 by Michelle Memran. Super-8
screen-grab courtesy of Jana Napoli.)
 Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context 211

create a more accurate Fornesian legacy, and to suggest new ways of teaching the work of any theatre
artist who challenges the interstitial gaps between dramatic text and theatre practice.

Fornes has written and staged approximately forty plays, including OBIE award–winning
productions of The Successful Life of 3 (1965), Promenade (1965), Fefu and Her Friends (1977), Mud
(1983), The Conduct of Life (1985), and Abingdon Square (1987). Her most recent play, Letters from
Cuba, which debuted at the 1999–2000 Signature Theatre Company season devoted to her work,
has just been published by PAJ as part of a larger compilation of previously unavailable work (Fig.
5).3 Fornes has not only been prolific, writing unrelentingly truthful plays with pristine character
development, but her direction credits include most of the first and often second productions of
her own works, as well as various plays by Chekhov, García Lorca, Calderón, and others.4 Outside
of certain circles, however, Fornes’s genealogy and impact remain at risk, as if there were a cultural
amnesia surrounding the force of her impact. Perhaps this is because Fornes never embraced com-
mercial success (her one Broadway production, The Office, closed while in previews in 1966), and
there is no such thing as a signature Fornesian style, although some have tried to define her thematic
ephemera (see Drukman’s “Notes on Fornes” from 2000 in particular). Her plays run the gamut
from surrealist Western (Molly’s Dream, 1968), to iconic feminist (Fefu and Her Friends), to post-
apocalyptic romance (The Danube, 1981).

Through conversations with Max Ferra, the director of INTAR (International Arts Rela-
tions), Fornes founded and led the Hispanic Playwrights Lab at INTAR in New York City from
1981 to 1991. The expanse and depth of her impact through the lab and in other venues created
a cohesive training environment for a generation of Latina/o playwrights that are now well-known
and prolific in their own right: Cherríe Moraga, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Migdalia Cruz, Eduardo
Machado, Caridad Svich, and Nilo Cruz (who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003), among others. Many
of these students, notably Machado, who directed the graduate playwriting program at Columbia
University and now teaches at New York University’s Dramatic Writing program, and Moraga, who
is an artist-in-residence at Stanford University, are now training a third generation of Fornesian
artists. Fornes’s teaching style among playwrights has been written about sporadically.5 There are
many differing ways to describe her interaction with students. Most that I have heard speak of her
utter commitment to her students and the writing process, as well as her stern and at times harsh
critiques. There is also some acknowledgment that Fornesian techniques have influenced a wider
range of writing styles. Margo Jefferson, who worked with Machado, noted to him that his exercises
(including many that he modified from Fornes) were useful in developing a style of writing that
moved between the creative and the analytical.

This, then, is the backdrop against which I decided to design a semester-long seminar on the
work of Fornes to students in the Department of Drama at New York University. This is a large
department with an extensive theatre studies curriculum and a designated “Major Playwrights” rubric
through which faculty can create a single class focusing on the work of one or a few interlinked
artists. As someone who has used Fornes’s plays regularly in seminars devoted to Latino theatre and
gender and performance, the opportunity to explore less frequently assigned work was appealing.
I had no doubt that an immersion experience would alter students’ relationships to play structure,
character development, and artistic possibility. This was an invocation that initially led to a class
formed in the basic dramatic literature style. We read Fornes’s early, middle, and late plays, and
paired them with texts on environmental theatre, surrealism, and feminist scholarship. The class
was a basic introduction to her work, and yet it seemed primarily to be an introduction to only one
side of her persona: the playwright whose texts were the tangible legacy for a performance scholar
who had not studied with Fornes directly.

In the succeeding iterations of this class, I decided to integrate the diverse aspects of Fornes’s
career into the structure and pedagogical goals of the class. In other words, the class as a whole came
to emerge out of the question: How does Fornes’s work challenge the disciplinary boundaries of
212 Gwendolyn Alker

Fig. 5. Letter from Cuba. Rafael “Cuco” Fornes, Maria Irene Fornes’s eldest brother, writes a letter to her. His letters were not
only the inspiration for her play Letters from Cuba, but also for her trip back in 2004 for the film. (Source: Photograph from
the documentary, “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene. Copyright © 2009 by Michelle Memran.)

theatre studies and the pedagogy that ensues? The result, I believe, was a class that subtly challenged
the divisions that often exist among the creation of plays, the study of personal and professional
histories, the deep critical analysis of playtexts, and the haunting of embodied practices that shape
theatrical production.

The revised structure of this class has now been offered twice, in Fall 2006 and Spring 2008.
The shifts that I have seen within students’ work have been rewarding. In particular, using Fornesian
techniques in a class that included critical writing as the main graded component augmented the
quality of that writing—more so, I would add, than in other seminars (such as a basic first-year Issues
and Methods class) where writing techniques comprise a central part of the curriculum. While harder
to measure, I would also note that hearing the cadence of students’ language after sustained engage-
ment with Fornes’s work (both plays and other primary sources such as Memran’s film, interviews,
and whatever other sources were available to us) has been profound.6 Her influence has made them
to reevaluate paradox and dwell on the possibility of simplifying complexity without eroding its
force. Their relationship to realism, character development, and critical analysis was also irrevocably
shifted. If nothing else, the class provided a developmental stopgap in students’ ability to see and
reject the simplicity of fixed and unyielding categories.

Both times I have opened the syllabus with a section titled “A Question of Voice,” which
foregrounds the varying threads present in a discussion of Fornes’s or any other author’s work. Who
has control of the production and interpretation of meaning? What is our role as co-creators in the
production of this meaning? How do we move between the impulse for creativity and the ability
to analyze? Between her voice and our voices as critics? This becomes not only the challenge of the
semester, it also invokes a lineage that is central within literary studies, from the New Critics, to
New Historicism, to debates on the death of the author instigated by the widely read work of Roland
Barthes. This well-worn debate, via Fornes, takes on new resonance when the class is able to read
 Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context 213

the playwright’s own complicated and often contradictory interactions with critics and theorists
who are striving to interpret her work. The first week’s reading assignment included Drukman’s
article, Fornes’s satirical one-act Dr. Kheal, and an interview with Una Chaudhuri that contains this
somewhat belligerent exchange:

Fornes: Well, if I tell you how that part of the play got there, you would be totally frustrated,
because you won’t be able to build a theory on it.
Chaudhuri: Don’t worry. I’m getting used to that!
Fornes: I’m glad you’re getting used to it. (110)

The underlying defensiveness created by Chaudhuri’s questions, or perhaps by additional forces

not revealed to the reader, is quite clear. And while Fornes does interact with some critics and aca-
demics whom she admires—namely, her publisher Bonnie Marranca, Scott Cummings,7 and Ross
Wetzsteon, among others—her reaction in this interview and in other primary documents serves as
ready fuel for any young acting student who is toying with anti-intellectualism. Ultimately, I chose
to confront this creative/critical divide by suggesting that we start in a place of failure by doing what
the object of our study has asked us not to do, with a heightened awareness of the possibility for
methodological shift.

One path in the ensuing weeks of the class was to interrogate and experiment with possible
ways in which theoretical writing could also be creative writing, and to use Fornes’s pedagogical
methods in the process of interpretation and analysis. As Fornes did in her writing workshops, we
often began the class with some physical exercise—no doubt a differing variation of what I have
heard of as “Irene’s old lady yoga”; other times we began with free-writing exercises, the quality of
which developed throughout the course of the semester, as will be discussed below. The goal was a
breakdown of a common misperception of theory classes housed in a theatre department, and perhaps
in institutions more generally: that creative action and critical reaction stream from a fundamentally
differing source; that the mind and the body are separate; and that the actor is an active agent while
the scholar is a passive respondent.

As previously noted, class time, as well as significant assignments outside of class, engaged
in the practice of free writing. While we grounded this with theoretical readings on the surrealist
movement, paired with a reading of Fornes’s undervalued play Molly’s Dream, we also played with
the style and content of the free write. At the beginning of the semester, free writes were more open,
with little structure; this structure shifted in a Fornesian fashion throughout the semester. The
writing, however, became a little less free. By mid-semester, I was playing with the ways that the
seams of free writing and critical writing might rub up against each other. For example, during our
discussion of The Danube, there were three very brief free writes. The first was a timed, two-minute
piece; the second, a modified Fornesian exercise, inserted vocal lines during the free write, which
may or may not influence the writing itself. From stories I have heard, Fornes often did this with
newspaper articles that she would read aloud as her students scribbled play scenes relative to them.8
In my class, I picked something from the text edited by Marc Robinson that we had read for that
day: “[t]he Danube is, in fact, a play about the end of the world” (Fornes 230). This free writing also
lasted for two minutes. Finally, I had students pick a passage from the play as their own prompt that
demonstrated what they thought Robinson was trying to say. Time shifted for most of the students
in each exercise: levels of momentum, external input, or integration of the reading from the night
before may all have had an impact. This was, of course, not fully Fornesian. I was moving students
towards critical analysis while trying to maintain a memory of a more creative style.

During this particular exercise, a volatile response occurred during our class discussion. First, it
is necessary to explain that some of the students in this seminar come from other programs throughout
the university. And in this debate, two of the most vocal students were from the dramatic writing
program and had studied directly with Eduardo Machado. This created a fascinating question of
214 Gwendolyn Alker

Fornesian lineage and authenticity. No doubt Machado—one of Irene’s closest mentees, a director
and playwright in his own right, and, one might say, the inheritor of her INTAR mantle—can lay
claim to the specificity of a Fornesian exercise in ways that I cannot. Indeed, some of my students
had been given Machado’s (and thus more substantively “Irene’s”) version of this exercise before they
came to my class. I, on the other hand, had heard of such exercises only secondhand, on occasion
from Machado himself—a supportive and generous colleague. What varied for most for these students
was the amount of time they had to write. In a playwriting class, they had been given far more ample
time to compose in response to the verbal trigger. In my seminar, we used shorter amounts of class
time to cover the similar exercise. Students training to be playwrights noted they felt “angry” with
the two-minute prompts, which they stated did not allow them to “get out of their heads.” What was
most valuable about this reaction was the debate that ensued. As in the best of pedagogical moments,
I ended up settling back and listening as students defended the exercise and the time restrictions.
Some liked the direct comparisons, or the brevity; others thought that this exercise remained useful
in light of the overall class progression. The diversity of opinion surrounding this exercise suggested
that an exercise transformed becomes a new and valid idea. Yet shifting an established exercise with
a population familiar with its origins requires far more justification.

The students who had worked with Machado were correct in many ways—the element of
time and the amount of time needed for spontaneous creativity were central to Fornes’s teaching
at INTAR. She tells of the hours that she joined in with her students, clustered in a room, writing
together. I myself lay no claims to recreating what I have never encountered (and even if I had, the
question of lineage and authenticity still contains numerous pitfalls). However, what I hoped this
class offered students was a concrete moment of questioning the boundaries of critical, creative,
and so-called stream-of-consciousness writing. At the very least, I insisted that they contemplate
how good critical writing must have a creative component. Many students began to shift their
writing strategies, telling me how they would leave two window screens open while writing their
final papers: one window allowed for a cohesive narrative, the other for spontaneous thoughts that
needed noting. The final essay would be an amalgamation of both. Other students ended up using
these short prompts at home to jump-start their writing, or to tackle the dreaded writer’s block. This
wasn’t merely an exercise in enjoying one’s paper more; it was about using creative tools to bolster
one’s critical toolbox.

Early on in the semester we connected these free-writing skills and physical exercises into a
focused critical analysis, what I called “a close reading.” Here, students had to choose an extremely
short passage from either a play or article (and ultimately one from each), then analyze freely and
with as much detail as possible every word, sentence structure, metaphor, element of tone, and iota
of meaning in that chosen passage. I stressed that the difference between this exercise and the read-
ing and writing strategies taught in critical writing classes was that students must come to terms
with what they actually see before them—before adding layers of interpretation. Ironically, this is a
difference manifest in Fornes’s own work with her students, and one that could benefit all teachers
of expository writing. The starkness of Fornes’ prose, where characters rarely hide their emotional
lives, provided a litmus test of students’ prior training, willingness, and ability to comment clearly
on what they saw before them.

Such a claim toward a simple factuality may sound disingenuous within a poststructuralist
literary world. Indeed, I am willing to be convinced that different realities may be present. Yet the
ability to simply state what one sees in a playtext may be a skill that has been suffering in the devel-
opment of various writing techniques. Take, for example, a heated debate that took place in class
after students received their first graded close readings. I remember one student saying, “We’ve been
taught that an apple can’t just be an apple, it has to symbolize something else”—no doubt such as
the fruit of condemnation from the Garden of Eden, and onward from there. The problem is that,
in Fornes’s plays such as Mud, the starkness of the metaphor is always preceded by the simplicity of
the object itself. The mud that the characters live in is certainly indicative of their status as poor and
 Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context 215

slovenly, a world that the character Mae wants to free herself from; yet the red earth of this mud,
according to Fornes’s telling of this story, comes from the red earth of the Padua Hills Playwriting
Festival where Mud first came together physically and spatially. The metaphors in her plays are usu-
ally literal before they emerge as profound, and are often surprising links in their characters’ worlds.
The clearing of student expectations was a central part of the creative process that allowed them, by
the end of the semester, to compose prose that sparkled with clarity. The simplicity of the building
blocks of observation led to far deeper analyses, as students learned to situate them in foundational
places of their critical argument.

This idea of a close reading was inspired by the Fornesian concept of the “found object,” and
as the semester progressed, we dove further into this idea—one that is fairly legendary in her work.
For Fornes, her downtown-theatre aesthetic, with its economic limitations, led her to find objects in
secondhand thrift stores, flea markets, and elsewhere that would not only provide props and costumes,
but also inspire narratives for many of her well-known plays. The found object also has resonance
with the very Cuban sensibility of self-reliance and reuse. Of course, it is unclear just how much of
Fornes’s upbringing influenced this notion, and how much emerged from her artistic development
in New York City. One example comes from her supposed decision to set Fefu and Her Friends in
the 1930s after finding eight cocktail dresses from that era, which would be used for the characters
of Julia, Emma, Fefu, and the five other women in the play; another example were the Hungarian-
language tapes that led to the intermittent cross-cultural exchange in The Danube. These examples
reflect her Off-Off Broadway sensibility and the sense of cultural recycling underlying both her own
aesthetic and the aesthetic that she passed on to her students.

The idea of the found object as a generator of meaning clearly has resonance (and yet differ-
ences, as will be discussed below) with the scholarly idea of a central text or case study, which, when
followed, leads to the germination of a central idea. The way that I chose to connect the found
object more deeply to the process of scholarly research was through archival research. Perhaps the
archive does have some resemblance to a thrift store in ways that we may not care to admit: dusty
and well-worn objects gathered together and waiting for rediscovery, the organization of which may
or may not lead to clear viewing. Yet one of the central and under-acknowledged aspects of such
finds is that one must frequently enter into the acquisition process with an open mind—an aspect
of the found object that saturates Fornes’s interaction with them. Often her plays were bare before
the arrival of the objects. Fefu was not an environmentally staged play until Fornes encountered the
back rooms of the Relativity Media Lab, where the play was first staged. In the archive, however,
objects are already invested with a certain weight. I asked the students to consider clearing a space
for inspiration, and to assume that whatever finds them may be of use in ways that they would not
expect. I have come to believe that such a commitment to spaciousness and the passivity of the
author is something that is well taught within studio settings, but is frequently lacking in the faster,
information-saturated world of critical analysis.

Requiring archival work at the undergraduate level is a rare occurrence, but our location
in New York City opened up the possibility for research at the Downtown Theatre Collection of
NYU’s Bobst Library and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, as well as the myriad theatres
around town that hold vestigial paper remains of Fornesian productions. After an archival tour of
the Judson collection at NYU with the senior librarian, students designed research projects on a
variety of topics, all of which would include some archival research in the process of completion.
Many traveled to the Lincoln Center archives, where they were able to watch video documentation
of productions that Irene Fornes both wrote and directed.9 Others worked with the staff at INTAR
or at the Signature Theatre Company. The concept of the found object allowed students to change
their relationship to their archival discoveries. For example, one student who found a review of a
Fornes production (I believe it was for her little-known Broadway debut, The Office, in 1966) noted
both the text on the front end, as well as the quality of the font and the printing of a theatrical ad
on the back of this piece of original paper—a scrap that had inadvertently made it into an archive
216 Gwendolyn Alker

due to the publication being double-sided. It was this reverse side that made the student to firmly
understand that the date of the production in the mid-1960s was a very different time than our
own. The viscerality of this moment is perhaps like good dramaturgy of a play. The playtext, itself
a pristine object that can move easily through time and place, is grounded back into a messy, dusty,
and nonabstract historical moment. Having students enter into the archive through the idea of the
found object made research less daunting and more akin to the process of researching character or
costume. The result, which I cannot stress too strongly, was a concretization of a theatrical abstrac-
tion into meaningful text in action.

The irony here is that the archive allowed students to perceive the performance texts as variable
and subjective records of an embodied event. While Diana Taylor, in The Archive and the Repertoire,
notes that it is the archive that is generally given the power of static objectivity, she also compli-
cated such a binary by defining the archive as a mediated idea. In many ways, what the students
encountered—not only working with Fornesian materials, but with the various guests who visited
the class (Memran, Marranca, Machado, Svich, and others) and studying the plays in this historical
moment—was the process of the archive in formation. Indeed, in the last version of this class, some
students were able to access papers pulled from Fornes’s apartment that have since been boxed while
awaiting the decision on where her papers will permanently reside. Some students participated in
the creation of archiving documents by reviewing materials at INTAR and the Signature Theatre
Company, writing production histories, and conducting interviews. These research projects will
hopefully be added to the archival remains as one voice among many in the Fornesian lineage.10

Revisiting the concept of “repertoire,” defined by Taylor as that which “enacts embodied
memory” (20), the connection between the found object and the archive is further complicated. The
ephemerality of the found object, the impermanence and transitory nature of Fornes’s thrift stores,
and the productions that her techniques inspired are, of course, irrevocably different from the goals
instigated by archival research. And while any essay or play has a fixity that will inevitably stand more
solidly than a performance, Fornes’s own playtexts struggle against this finality. As Bonnie Marranca
noted to our class regarding her recent publication of What of the Night (2008), in her research for
the book, it was unclear which version of the text was the final one. The path to the most recent ver-
sion of the script and the one that she eventually published was long and convoluted. Fornes herself
seemed to view her playtexts as works in progress—accounting, no doubt, for her maddening style
of directing, which called upon actors to shift and change their lines very close to opening night.11
This also may account for the fact that even the databases on Irene Fornes and her plays are quite
frequently filled with inaccuracies, which her particular history makes it hard to eradicate.

The binary difference between the archive and the repertoire, as that which is stable and
certain versus what is ephemeral and fleeting, was challenged in many ways by our encounter with
multiple archives. However, the concept of the repertoire still suggests what we might be losing by
teaching Fornes under the rubric of dramatic literature. Fornes is someone who is well-regarded
enough to be considered solely as a playwright. Yet as a rare and true chameleon of the theatre, she
merits study in not one but many roles. The history of her presence in NYU’s neighborhood alone
was something that I tried to invoke in embodied ways. During the first days of class, I used the
Fornesian exercise of marching students through a few blocks of New York City street life, and then,
after returning, having them write down everything they saw. Conversations with Fornes’s former
student Andrea Onstad suggest that this simple manner of building an awareness may have been
more of a draconian exercise when utilized by Fornes.12 On our excursion, we added a historical
element by walking directly to and from Judson Church, a Fornesian connection that most students
were unaware of until later in the semester.

While Fornes presents an unusual case, thinking of the embodied histories of any playwright
is a pedagogical tool worth considering. Certainly Caryl Churchill’s compositional work with Joint
Stock and Monstrous Regiment points toward a differing necessity for how Top Girls and Light
 Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context 217

Shining in Buckinghamshire are framed. I still find it curiously difficult to teach the published texts
of performance artists Karen Finley, Deb Margolin, and Holly Hughes without introducing students
to the artists themselves. Using Fornes as a case study may allow other teachers, in consultation with
the vibrant community that she has created, to expose students to a new way of teaching dramatic
literature as only one still frame in the larger repertoire of lived experiences. The generosity of her
students and their willingness to work with mine also suggests that her expansive generosity and
impact is an enduring element of her life’s work.

I have plans to teach the Fornes seminar again during the 2009–10 academic year. The date
should allow us to connect the class to events surrounding Fornes’s eightieth birthday. At present,
I am in discussions with Eduardo Machado and Bonnie Marranca about staging readings of some,
most, or all of her plays in rapid succession, without much rehearsal time and with minimal bud-
get. This would be reminiscent of the shoestring budgets of the INTAR productions that Fornes
instigated during the playwriting workshops during the 1980s. No doubt, for my students, both the
opportunity to see enacted the plays we are reading (or to act in them), and to see the manner of
their author’s directorial ideas featured would further augment the idea of experiencing a dramatic
text as a living, malleable entity. Hopefully, Irene Fornes will join us for this event to witness the
continuation of her creative spirit in a fourth generation of students (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Irene on the beach. Maria Irene Fornes walks up the beach in Sunny Isles, Florida, where her eldest sister lives. (Source:
Photograph from the documentary, “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene. Copyright © 2009 by Michelle Memran.)
218 Gwendolyn Alker

Gwendolyn Alker is an associate teacher of theatre studies in the Department of Drama at Tisch
School of the Arts, New York University. Her teaching and research interests include gender and
performance, Latina/o theatre, and issues of spirituality and embodiment. Most recently, she curated
the symposium “The Performing Body in Theory and Practice,” which was held at NYU during the
spring of 2009. She has published book chapters, articles, and reviews in various journals, includ-
ing TDR, Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, and Women and Performance, where she was also
the managing editor. Gwendolyn holds a PhD from NYU’s Department of Performance Studies,
and is currently president of the Performance Studies Focus Group of ATHE.

Notes

1. Memran is currently in the editing stage of her documentary on Irene Fornes. An early screening of the film,
tentatively titled “The Rest I Make Up”: Documenting Irene, was held in September 2008 at the IFP in New York
City. Further information can be found at <documentingirene.com>. My thanks to Michelle for the images
that accompany this essay.

2. Fornes’s most definitive diagnosis is that she is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, but there is some debate
on this point. There is also a possibility that she suffered a series of minor strokes that have impaired her
memory.

3. Letters from Cuba and Other Plays, published 30 August 2007.

4. A complete list of Fornes’s directing projects, plays, and awards can be found at <www.mariairenefornes.
com>. Notably, as discussed below, her work makes the accuracy of production histories difficult at best. Certain
dates on the website are inaccurate.

5. See, for example, the excellent collection, Conducting a Life, edited by Caridad Svich (1999). This text
contains what are currently the most complete, albeit anecdotal, descriptions of Fornes’s exercises and her
impact on her students.

6. Personal connections also arose through Michelle Memran’s generosity, for which I am deeply grateful. In
previous semesters, a few students were able to meet Irene Fornes at a birthday party hosted by Memran. This
past semester, students in the class composed postcards that were sent to Fornes. According to Memran, Fornes
uses such postcards (which she used to use as prompts in her exercises) to decorate her walls. These experiences
were intimidating and yet powerful moments of putting students in personal contact with an object of study.

7. Scott Cunnings is also working on a new book on Irene Fornes, which will no doubt add immensely to the
existing literature.

8. My thanks to Andrea Onstad, who gave me many substantive ideas for this section during a guest lecture in
the Fornes seminar on 14 September 2006.

9. While many schools do not have access to such materials, significant strides are also being made with digital
archives. See, for example, the Cuban Theater Digital Archive at the University of Miami <http://scholar.library.
miami.edu/archivoteatral/index.html>; see also <http://www.nypl.org/research/lpa/lpa.html> for information
on the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. While digital archives do create greater access, the
tangible quality of their holdings, of course, will be lost.
 Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context 219

10. Projects were conducted in conversation with Lillian Manzor of the University of Miami, who intends to
post such documents on <http://scholar.library.miami.edu/archivoteatral/index.html>.

11. For further information on Fornes’s directing techniques, see “Fornes in Performance,” in The Theatre of
Maria Irene Fornes, edited by Marc Robinson.

12. Onstad first shared this information during her 2006 guest lecture mentioned above.

Works Cited

Chaudhuri, Una. “Maria Irene Fornes.” Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American
Playwrights. Ed. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996. 98–114.

Drukman, Steven. “Notes on Fornes (with apologies to Susan Sontag).” American Theatre 17.7 (2000):
36–39, 85.

Fornes, Maria Irene. “Creative Danger.” The Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes. Ed. Marc Robinson. New York:
PAJ Books, 1999. 230–33.

———. Letters from Cuba and Other Plays. New York: PAJ Publications, 2007.

———. What of the Night?: Selected Plays. New York: PAJ Publications, 2008.

Schechner, Richard. “The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde: Why It Happened and What We
Can Do About It, Part 1.” Performing Arts Journal 5.2 (1981): 48–63.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2003.