ABSTRACT
The Fornes plays of the 1990s are not all gloom and doom. There is also a joyous metatheatrical focus on the process of playmaking and broader questions about writing, art, and creativity. Enter the Night has already been discussed in this context. After Tressa and Paula read Jack’s play, they open a bottle of wine to celebrate. “May Art live!” toasts Tressa. “May Theatre live!” echoes Paula. “May Poetry live,” says Jack. Here, and in The Summer in Gossensass and Letters from Cuba, Fornes celebrates the will to create and contemplates its meanings and mysteries. There is a retrospective dimension here, as if Fornes was reaching back to her roots for inspiration, guidance, or clarity. In 1968, the flamboyant, tyrannical Dr. Kheal outlined the terms of her vision – poetry, balance, ambition, energy, speech, truth, beauty and love, hope, cooking – and she returned to them again and again with a consciousness of purpose that meant that each play was composed for the aesthetic pleasure of an audience willing to engage the work on its own terms. Many of the plays – Promenade, The Red Burning Light, Cap-a-Pie, Eyes on the Harem – are overtly theatrical, adopting vaudeville or musical revue structures to link a series of songs, vignettes, monologues, and dances around a central theme. Others – Tango Palace, Abingdon Square, Enter the Night, Letters from Cuba – incorporate bits of pageantry and performance into the present-tense actions of the characters. Either way, a Fornes play is always putting on a show. As Emma says to Fefu and her friends as they prepare for their meeting, “Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre.” Sue nervously asks if she will have to act, and Emma replies with histrionic 158flair, “It’s not acting. It’s being. It’s springing forth with the powers of the spirit. It’s breathing” (Fornes 1992: 22).
