| Abstrakt: |
Criticism often refers to the playwright and director, María Irene Fornés's plays as displaying a visual artist's sensitivity. It is easy to see the origins of this argument in Fornés's early career in painting and in her own affirmative that her painterly experience had significant impact on her theater. I would like to further pinpoint two formative sources that are necessary to take into account in order to understand the painterly structures of Fornés's plays: first, the experimental performance style at the Judson Poets' Theater, which intended to heighten the audience's phenomenological awareness of the moment; and second, the preoccupation with the body and sensuousness, which dominated the experimental art scene in the 60s, and which was epitomized in Susan Sontag's imperative for "an erotics of art" (Against Interpretation 14). Recent studies on Sontag and the posthumous publication of her diaries provide evidence of the brief but intense creative collaboration between Fornés and Sontag in the early '60s, and the mutual influence it exerted on their work. However, as opposed to Sontag's well-known ideological shift from the celebration of sensuousness to a self-proclaimed moralism, which characterizes her later thought, Fornés retains a notion of body that is not inherently carrying political meaning, and even decades later she displays firm commitment to the aesthetic principles of the early '60s. What unites her plays since the '80s is not so much a thematic concern than a practical approach to art that assumes stylistic, predominantly visual, concerns to be the organizing force of theater. In typically brief scenes, Fornés renders performers' bodies in stylized compositions on the stage. These tableaux-like compositions share structures with certain Old Masters' paintings that explore subversive corporeality. With its main focus on the 1984 The Danube, this paper argues that it is through the sensuous aspects of the body that Fornés touches upon the psyche of her characters and thus invites broader social and political considerations about her theater. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
