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Mala Renganathan The doctoral work on Maria Irene Fornes is one of the first theses in India on the writer. Maria Irene Fornes is a living, active dramatist - director based in New York City. She is Cuban born settled in the USA since 1949. She can be proud of her very long career in American theatre, about 45 years. She has won 9 Obie awards (the Village Voice's Off-Broadway awards), the highest number of awards received by an individual playwright next only to Samuel Beckett and Sam Sheppard. Her plays have been translated, adapted and performed in many languages, including Spanish, German, and Italian and even in Tamil. Irene Fornes' contribution to theatre especially American is immense. She is a dramaturge with an interesting combination of pluralities: painter, costume designer, set designer, playwright, director and drama teacher. Her theatre is also noted for her indispensable contribution to the Hispanic theatre in the United States. Most of the leading Hispanic - American playwrights like Dolores Prida or Milcha Sanchez - Scott, Ana Maria Simo have emerged as outstanding artists only out of Fornes' playwriting workshops. The researcher's participation in the 'Irene Fornes Playwriting Workshop' at The Theater for the New City, New York, of 2-6 January 1996, provided scope for understanding the dramaturge's idea of playwriting/directing in relation to her workshop methods. Maria Irene Fornes' Theater: A Study highlights four important aspects of Maria Irene Fornes' theater - Fornes' leaning towards the absurd, the women oriented theater, her playwriting/directing methods and the cross-cultural influences on her theatre - examining Fornes as a dramaturge who constantly denies canonization and who constantly tends to blur boundaries between theatre and ideology, between art and its conceptualization. The project concludes that Fornes' consistent attempt at blurring boundaries gives a dual dimension to her theater, i.e., the absurd versus the post absurd, the woman versus the feminist, the playwright versus the director, and the Cuban versus the American. It is this quality that makes her a difficult writer for the critics. It is also probably this difficulty that has denied the recognition and critical acclaim, which she really deserves in lieu of her brilliant writing and sustained theatrical career. The study also records the changing styles and recurrent patterns in Fornes' plays from 1960s to 1990s. Her plays of the '60s, to mention a few, are Tango Palace, The Successful Life of 3, Promenade, Dr. Kheal. These plays are purely absurdist in tone and theme. Her '70s plays, while continuing the zany farce of the '60s start voicing an original tone. Some of the best - known '70s plays are Molly's Dream and Fefu and Her Friends. Her '80s plays are more dynamic, serious in tone and lyrically effective - The Danube, Mud, Sarita, The Conduct of Life, Abingdon Square, And What of the Night?. Her 1990s plays like Oscar and Bertha, and Terra Incognita continue the miniaturist, lyrical style and the violent tone, but also have become more enlarged and globalized in vision. The project on Maria Irene Fornes begins with the contention that her texts are performance - oriented. (She directs mostly the first productions of her plays). Her published plays seem to reflect her experiences of directing and hence present the intricacies of blocking movements, acting techniques or stage design. They also exhibit a preoccupation with the visual, viz, visual images are allowed to grow into scenes, or in other words, there is no premeditated story line or philosophy. A character put in a visual medium - this is how Fornes' play begins. The thesis comprising of six chapters highlights Irene Fornes' contribution to American theatre in general and women's theatre in particular. The first chapter "Maria Irene Fornes and Women's Theater in America", introduces Fornes as one of the finest creative women in the post war American theatre, and views her in the background of women in American theater history, and also evaluates her theater in terms of her playwriting workshop methods, and also the relevant critical views on her plays. The second chapter "Theater of the Absurd: A Feminist's / Woman's Theater", identifies the absurdist tendencies and also the post absurdist characteristics in her theatre. What is the post absurd? Why the post absurd? Is it anything different from the absurd? These questions are explored in the chapter. Her post absurd plays characterize the absurd and also subvert the absurd. For example, Beckettian humor is considered a graveyard humor, whereas Fornes' post absurd humor is full of tomfoolery, unstoppable puns and hilarious jokes. Besides, the metaphysical anguish in the absurd is replaced with metaphysical optimism. Particularly interesting is the fact that Fornes' post absurd theatre is the woman's experience of / experiment with the absurd, and that she places woman at the center of the theater of the absurd. The third chapter "Fornes' Idea of a Woman's Theater" attempts to analyze her theatre as women's theatre rather than the feminist. For ideology is not her cup of tea. Her focus is more on image and character rather than gender. Though her plays contain lot of matter that could be identified as feminist, yet she transcends the feminist for a globalist / humanist perspective of life. Fornes' idea of the woman's theatre is inherent in the following features: strong presence and portrayal of female characters; discussion of women's issues; universal issues viewed from the woman's point of view' bold exploration of eroticism; lyrical evocation of dramatic medium; meta-theatrical narrative; unique working of the female Bildungsroman and the female Don Juan in her protagonists. The fourth chapter "The Playwright as Director" highlights Irene Fornes' unique position as a playwright - director. For this purpose her directorial style is examined in the historical context of the role of the director. The following are identified as the major features of her directorial style: the director as explorer; her role in rehearsal and performance; her theatre of images, meta-theatre; woman as director; her distinctive directorial process that scrutinizes the visual with the verbal; her role as a dramaturge and how it shapes her play. The fifth chapter "Cross - Cultural Influences" views Fornes' theatre as the fine construction of her bicultural background. Her cross - cultural vision, yet subsuming a global vision in her neither totally Cuban nor purely American traits, is examined carefully. For this purpose the researcher has evolved a cultural triangle to examine her cross - culturalism. To conclude Fornes' theatre denies all canonization. The final chapter "Conclusion" considers the basic instinct in her plays as the 'neither this nor that' situation. Her theatre is primarily absurdist, but multiplies and transcends the absurd. It begins with the director's imagination, yet allows the playwright to grow beyond the proportion of the director. It is bi-culturalist in vision; nevertheless it is biculturalistic with the globalized stance. It contains the feminist and at the same time also subverts the feminist thereby surpassing and canceling it. Fornes' self - evasive, counter - explanatory theatre art has only one unifying vision - the postmodern view of art, which always 'reconsiders a situation and redefines its essence.' The thesis also contains valuable interviews conducted during the scholar's visit to the USA in 1995-96. The interviews include one with Fornes herself, and the others with set designer Donald Eastman, costume designer Gabriel Berry, and an actress Mary Forcade (who performed in Fornes' production of 'Any Place But Here'). There are enormous possibilities in Maria Irene Fornes' theatre and I hope that this study would help credit a critical and international acclaim to her valuable plays, and also make a valid and worthwhile addition to the Irene Fornes scholarship.
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