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On December 2, 2004 Leslie Katz's dramaturgy class at University of Toronto spoke via teleconference with Maria Irene Fornes, who graciously answered questions regarding Fefu and her Friends and related topics. Class: As a teacher of playwriting, you use techniques like yoga and visualization. I was wondering what roles these techniques play in your own writing process. Maria Irene Fornes: I think that with all the techniques that I taught my students... I advise the writer to think of the characters they're developing as being more organic. If they go for a walk, they don't just come back saying what a beautiful landscape they've been looking at, but they also experience their feet hurting, not that the character needs to talk about it, but to imagine the character wishing she or he could take their shoes off and put their feet in hot water. This doesn't mean that in the play it could not happen, the writer saying: "Oh, what a good idea, I'll have the character ask for a tin full of warm water..." That could make a very charming scene... This doesn't mean that the scene is going to be about feet that hurt, but it changes the mood in the room, the tone of the scene and it provides for many different levels of responses from each character to the next... Class: We've read a bit about how you develop your own plays. Many actors say how on opening night you've given them whole new pages of script to learn... Maria Irene Fornes: That is not true. I don't think I've ever done it on opening night, but I have done it at the first performance, which is usually a preview. Whether it is changing the lines because of a rewrite of the author, or changing the lines because the actor doesn't feel right, she or he doesn't feel it has the power, it is normal to make changes up to the opening night. In fact, I make changes after the opening. And the producers would say, "Irene, you cannot do that!" And I say, "Why not?" And they say, "Because it is not done," but I say, if this is helping the actor... Class: Irene, have you ever acted before? Maria Irene Fornes: I've never acted in my life. I'm not an actress, I'm a playwright. I mean, I act in my head. When you're writing a play, you act every part in your head. You're Fefu on one line, and you're Cindy the next line, and you're the next character the next line. And you get to argue with yourself. When you get into arguments with yourself, that's the hardest, because you're every character and if for some reason you feel irritated that night (you can see I write a lot at night, I said 'that night' not 'that day')... It has happened to me that I would look at something I wrote one day, I would read it and say: "but why is Fefu so annoyed? I don't see any reason." There was even one time when I thought, "Maybe I am so irritable, and that is why Fefu is irritable!" Or what I do is: the scene would be so much better if Fefu had a reason to be irritated, and then I go back and put in something that can be considered annoying, so that Fefu could be irritated, so then it justifies all the things I wrote... Class: You have said that working on Fefu was the first time you allowed your writing style to shift, you allowed yourself to explore the characters in that way, not worry about scenes that would not make the final cut...? Maria Irene Fornes: I felt that... in a lot of modern plays with female characters, especially of Fefu's age... there appears to be a kind of eccentricity, but also a beginning of a kind of sadness of becoming older, of becoming tired, less attractive. I don't mean that that would the main focus of most plays that are about women over 35... [but] it does seem to be that a male character of the same age would usually... in plays, have much more vitality, joy. It could be that someone would say "Well, that happens in real life, that's why that happens in the theatre..." but at the time of Fefu... I thought I knew so many women who were in their 40s and even their 50s, who were so full of life, so full of joy and wonderful to be around, that I wanted to create a character that had those qualities of freshness, enthusiasm. That's something I very strongly felt during the writing of that play. Class: We would like to ask you about your experience as an abstract painter, and how this influenced your work as a director, if it did? Maria Irene Fornes: I don't know exactly... but I know that after abstract Expressionism, when Van Gogh painted the sun, everybody said that it looked so real that it was almost burning. People said to me, "I felt that if I touched the canvas, I would be melting..." It was a sensation in connection with the painting. In theatre too, there were people who were experiencing personally what the actors, the characters in the play were experiencing. I have a friend who reminded me that I had been working as a painter with Hans Hoffman, an Expressionist painter. And it was so extraordinary how he would throw some color on one end of the canvas and make another color like a green, and brush it very quickly on a diagonal, and he would create what he would call, what he was constantly talking about, a "push-and-pull"... And "push-and-pull" has to do with the enmity of color, shape, the intensity of the color, the tone of the color next to another color, according to the shape of the color, too. And those enmities, to him, were what painting was about, whether it was daffodils or a baby, the "push-and-pull" enmity of color was what painting was about... That was what influenced me in playwriting more than it influenced me in the painting, because it could more easily be applied to playwriting than to painting. Class: One critic we read made the connection between the character of Julia in Fefu and specific paintings by Frida Kahlo. I was wondering what you thought of that connection? Maria Irene Fornes: I re member when I read that and I thought that this person may have seen a similarity in temperament, that there was a scene or two in Fefu that made her think of the Surrealist mood, and therefore, of Frida Kahlo and her paintings... but I see more a desire to make a connection with a Latin American--Frida Kahlo was not Latin American, but she lived in Latin America--who was influenced by Latin American Surrealism. Or it may be that this is a connection that I made myself... and then I am the one who doesn't see it, as often we make a gesture, and they say, "Oh, it's like your grandfather," and you haven't met your grandfather. But they do see something that is there. I love all those Latin American, Mexican Surrealists. They were incredible, terribly interesting, but I just don't see the direct connection. Class: Irene, talking about Latin America, how does your own idea of Latin American culture compare to your representations and your work? I am thinking, particularly, of a play like Conduct of Life, which happens in a Latin American setting. I was wondering whether your idea of Latin American culture is similar to what you portray in your play? Maria Irene Fornes: What happened is that Mexico was going through a very brutal, sadistic government at the time I wrote the play. So it's not like Latin America is like that. It's like you are a German in the time of Nazism and you write a play about Nazi brutality, you don't mean that Germany is a country of criminals; it refers to a very particular political moment when there are assassinations without any justice. Class: We understand that your friend, Michelle Memran, is making a documentary about your life. Have you ever wanted to make your own film? Maria Irene Fornes: No... about my life? No, I have no desire to make a film about my life at all. She is making a film of this conversation at this very moment. She is laughing. She hears me talking about what she's doing. And I said to her: "You have to prepare to recognize that this is the dullest film ever to be made in the history of filmmaking. "And she would laugh, she would say, "Oh no, it's going to be very interesting." But she would laugh. I think she was laughing at the idea of making the most boring film ever made. Class: What are you reading and thinking about and being inspired by right now, even as we speak? Maria Irene Fornes: I think one is inspired by seeing other people inspired, by seeing other people working. Also, seeing people looking at a painting, and you say: "I was going to walk by. What is it that these people are interested in and I'm not?" And that's when you start to look. And you begin noticing the details the painter has made you pay attention to... © 2004 Leslie Katz |
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