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aría Irene Fornés was the subject of a Dramatists Guild “Playwrights Talk” session, moderated by Sandy Schreiber (Director of Special Projects), under the auspices of the Guild’s Projects Committee (Gretchen Cryer and Terrence McNally co-chairs). Here’s the transcript of this conversation, edited with the approval of the participants. Questions from the audience are identified by the letter “Q.’’

Sandy Schreiber: I understand you were learning to play the violin in your early teens, aiming at a career as a musician?

María Irene Fornés: Yes, and it was good that I went through that because I was able to make a comparison later on when I tried painting. It was after those careers that I started writing plays. Interconnection with the arts means that you open something inside you that is secret, hidden, that has never surfaced. Through working in these arts it bursts out like magic, and there is a sense of understanding of what it is you have to do.

I was a better painter than musician, and there were years of study and self-discipline. But neither of these ever gave me pleasure. I had an image of myself as an artist, and when I finally failed at both of these arts and started writing, I realized that image has nothing to do with it.

Schreiber: When and why did you decide to become a playwright?

Fornés: I never thought I would be a playwright just because I wrote plays. An idea came to mind—an idea and an inspiration at the same time. It made me want to write a play, the same way another might see something and want to paint it. It was purely personal, it had nothing to do with profession.

When I told my writer friends I wanted to write a play, they said, “Don’t be ridiculous, of all the literary arts playwriting is the most difficult.” I explained that I didn’t want to be a writer, I just wanted to write a play. They told me I’d never finish it, I’d never get it on. I explained that I was like a painter who simply wants to paint something, not sell it to a gallery.

I wanted to write merely for the pleasure of writing. That concept seems foreign to us, I don’t know why. Even the writing of a message to a friend on a birthday... even people who are excellent writers, or if not have a beautiful imagination, feel they have to go out and buy a card. It’s incredible that people no longer feel like writing, like communicating one’s inner self to a friend.

Anyway, I wrote my play like that. I was obsessed with the idea, but I didn’t start writing immediately. One Saturday I started writing. I wrote all day, and it was very difficult for me to go to sleep, because I didn’t want to stop. When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t have breakfast, I just continued to write. I kept on going, and on Monday I called the place where I had a job and told them I wouldn’t be in but would come back as soon as I could, maybe the next day. I kept going for nineteen days. My roommate was on vacation, visiting her parents, so I had to go outside to get groceries when I ran out, but otherwise I didn’t leave the house.

Schreiber: Do you usually write like that?

Fornés: I try to find that inner source of inspiration, and in workshop I try to teach others to find it, rather than teaching how to structure a play. It’s a way of finding a technique, an initial impetus.

We should go to the playwriting workshop to work rather than to talk about work. In the teaching of other arts, you go to class to practice the art. You go to drawing class to practice drawing, not to talk about it; the teacher’s comment is minimal— you learn by doing, more than by being told what is excellent and what isn’t. Of course there is an element of guidance, but it’s only guidance, not dedicating a whole class period to talking about the art of playwriting. A dancer spends most of the time at the barre, not talking about dancing. In painting class, you don’t talk, you paint.

At any playwriting workshop I’ve visited, they talk about writing. They may be talking about a specific play, but they’re talking while everybody’s listening. You write at home and bring your work in to be criticized. But there’s an enormous difference between being criticized and being helped to do it. Criticism is helping you fix something that’s already there.

The teaching of acting, for example, is teaching you to find resources in yourself, to develop a wide range for creating all kinds of effects from the knowledge of life that you have, through inspiration or your own emotional experience; to invoke all of that so you can produce a theatrical performance. But the director tells you, “I want a little more here, it should be a little longer, don’t laugh so loud,” and so forth, fixing it rather than helping the student directly to locate the possible sources from which to build the work.

In an art class, twenty or thirty people are together in the same room, drawing or painting the same model, in silence. It’s most inspiring, because all these energies are concentrated on the same thing. It’s a little like what you feel in a public library, everybody quiet, each person concentrating. There is an energy i this concentration that helps you be more creative than when you are alone. Some people are distracted unless they’re working alone, but it’s a good thing to learn how to use this group energy if you can.

Schreiber: Is it difficult for your students to learn how to do this?

Fornés: Some tell me they don’t think they can do it. I realize that the most valuable source of energy occurs at eight o’clock in the morning, even if you’re a little bit sleepy. The evening energy is just nerves. I realized when I had to work around the clock against a close deadline, at the moment I opened my eyes the amount of solutions, of revelations that would come to me was surprising. I said to myself, if that happens when I’m pressed for time, it would probably be more productive under ordinary circumstances to work at that hour.

So I tell my students we start by nine o’clock and first do half an hour or forty-five minutes of pure exercises. Then we start writing with visualization exercises, visualiz-ing a character with your eyes closed, or visualizing a personal situation, not just the emotional impact but where you were, what you were wearing, the colors, the sounds. You allow that personal experience somehow to influence the mood. You’re not necessarily writing directly about that. It’s simply a means of putting yourself in contact with something that is personal. At the same time, it’s mysterious, because, as you know, our own life is a mystery to us. Reality is a mystery. And when we try to write single-mindedly we take away the mystery and the themes become flat, because we haven’t gone deep enough into our imagination of what is the reality of life and the complexity - even - of space, of how a room is not just a room but a thing of comers, colors, lights, windows where the light comes through.

Some say, “I cannot write in the morning, I write only at midnight, and I cannot write when there are people around,”·or, when you don’t want twelve typewriters going in the room, “I cannot write by hand with pen or pencil.” In two or three weeks of class, they can’t write at any other time in the morning, they can’t write on a typewriter, and they can’t write alone. It feels so easy and so wonderful to do it our way, they can’t do it at home. They forget that they ever did it any other way.

Schreiber: Let’s go back to the beginning when you were writing your first plays. They eventually were produced, weren’t they?

Fornés: Those nineteen days that shook the world were in 1961. I finished that play (Tango Palace) and started another one. I had received a letter in which the Castro government was announcing these literary contests, including prizes for playwriting. This was before I had entirely finished my nineteen-day play, and as soon as I did, I wrote another one in Spanish (The Widow). There were three prizes and some honorable mentions. I won an honorable mention, and the play was published.

Then I applied for a Whitney Opportunity Fellowship for Hispanics, Blacks, Native Americans, Appalachians, the “Third World” of American territory. I got this grant of $2,500 at a time when there were very few people interested in writing plays, except for those writing for the commercial theater in Broadway style. The only other plays in New York City were at the Actors Studio. It was the avant garde place. They were a hundred percent directed toward doing Broadway plays, but their manner of working was completely revolutionary: expanding your “instrument.” Lee Strasberg used to call it an “instrument,” and others would call it “my instrument,” and I realized of course that any artist is an instrument for a higher force, allowing this force to pass though. The highest honor a human being can have is to be able to say, “I am an instrument of my art” rather than “I am the artist.”

The Actors Studio was one of the very few places that had a fever for innovation, for real theater art, at that time in the early 1960s. In San Francisco, Herbert Blau was putting on The Taming of the Shrew at the Geary, but he also had a little theater, and he asked a friend of a friend of mine, “Do you know any playwrights?”—he felt like doing a new play in the small house. Can you imagine the artistic director of a major theater saying, “Do you know any playwrights?” Well, the word got back to me to send my play (Tango Palace, then called There! You Died) to Herbert Blau. He liked it and decided to do it, and I went out there. As a director, he was heaven. I sat there watching rehearsals in total agreement and in wonderment.

So the play was done. I wanted to be very cool, I didn’t want to appear interested in reviews. I wanted to act as though all of this was familiar to me (and I knew from the movies that on opening night there are reviews), and so I didn’t ask any questions after I bought all the papers the next day and there were no reviews. But then, one night before the show, I went to the newsstand, bought a paper, and there’s a review, with the name of the play and my name right there in print. It was a terrible review, just terrible, but I was so happy. I went to the theater, so happy, and the first person I met said to me, “Don’t worry about a thing, the critics -are idiots, they don’t know anything.” So I nodded and looked reassured. At least I knew I wasn’t supposed to be happy.

Three years later I wrote another play (The Office), a comedy, and a scene from it was read at Actors Studio. As a result of this I was taken on by an agent, who placed it with an off-Broadway producer, who never put it on. But while we were looking for a director we sent the play to Jerome Robbins. He decided to direct it on Broadway, with a cast that included Elaine May, Ruth White, Jack Weston, and Tony Lo Bianco. There I was with my second play, on Broadway—but the second part of it did not work, and it closed before it ever opened. The audiences were booing, and it was the first time the people in the show ever remembered Broadway audiences booing. Jerome Robbins was wonderful to me - each night he apologized to me because he felt it was his doing. So I thought, “They’re booing him, they’re not booing me.” I’ll always be grateful to him. But later I decided it was really my fault, because the second half of the play was weak.

Schreiber: Did you ever work on it later?

Fornés: A little bit. But then I became interested in other things. I suppose I should finish it. Wouldn’t you say it was a rare thing to have two people each blaming themselves for a failure? And there were many people who saw it who thought the failure was the producer’s for closing it before opening, believing people were booing only because they were seeing something that was so different.

Schreiber: What about all the work you did at Judson Poets and Caffe Cino?

Fornés: That was later. One Friday I received an offer to do my play The Office, and that Sunday I got a phone call from Judson saying that Al Carmines wanted to do my musical Promenade. The senior minister there at the Judson Church was politically ahead of his time, advising on legal draft avoidance and later setting up an abortion clinic. The junior minister, Al Carmines, wrote this incredibly beautiful music for a theater they had there. They had an art gallery where Red Grooms and other top painters were showing. The Judson Dancers were doing experimental choreography. They were in the dance world, but as far as I could see that was the beginning of what we now call performance art. It wasn’t just bodies making motions, they did all kinds of things, and at the same time the painters were doing happenings. One painter did a happening where all the rooms of a store front and the apartment in back were painted to create an environment in each of them. There would be people in the room, and words spoken. The happening took place over the weekend, and then on Monday the painter would take it all down, thinking of the next thing he was going to do. On Tuesday and Wednesday he had people there working with some sort of script. By the weekend there would be an entirely different happening—he did a series of these. I asked if I could be in one, and I was. It created a sense of theater, opening to me new possibilities of theater.

Painting had already been liberated by abstract expressionism and had turned to action painting, with the artist throwing paint at the canvas, an aggressive action, no doubt about it. Out of that came a more formalized version - really, completely, theater, but without what we think of as theater with characters and involved relationships. But there were persons—not just automatons—acting there in an environment which was theater.

It was a wonderful time, the rise of the off-off-Broadway theater. I think Caffe Cino was first, and LaMama and Judson came along a little later. At that time, a year was like a decade. To me, the writers who came along three years after I did were the next generation. So much happened from one play to the other. We all went to see everything, and there were such exciting things happening, some kind of revolution. There are those who believe it was a national movement, or, if not national, by the whole city of New York. The audience was for the most part composed of people who were interested in the arts and took them very seriously, but it wasn’t big. Then other writers started noticing and learning a great deal from what was being done off off Broadway and bringing it to Broadway. That created a big change in the Broadway theater, but it wasn’t direct, it wasn’t as though any of those downtown writers came uptown, the only playwright I remember from that time who made it on Broadway was Lanford Wilson. It wasn’t that they went to Broadway, it was that their work had an enormous influence on how plays were done and what kind of plays were done.

Schreiber: How do you feel about directing your own work?

Fornés: It’s something that every writer wants to do, or maybe it’s just that they don’t want another person to direct their work. They say the writer-director relationship is like a marriage, but I think it’s like a bad marriage. Of course there are people who have a very happy relationship with their directors. There are famous teams, and it’s said that they get along very well. But everybody I know is always looking for a good director, or being quite unhappy about a present relationship.

The first time somebody else directed a play of mine, we weren’t five minutes into rehearsal before I instinctively reacted against what was being done, and I could tell by looking at the actors’ faces that I had done something very wrong. I was frightened and humiliated, and the director came to me and very kindly said, “Sit here and watch, and when there’s something you have thoughts about, write them down in a notebook—I’ll give you one— and then afterwards you and I will go and have a cup of coffee, and you’ll tell me all about it.” That’s like sitting down to what you think is going to be your meal and then having somebody say, “You go sit over there, and when we’re finished eating we’ll call you.” You don’t start an argument, because you don’t fight with insane people.

I could see that I was the only one who felt this way, so I said to myself, “That’s how it is,” and afterwards we went to a cafeteria. I knew how to do the play, and I would tell him. I took out my little notebook and started, ‘‘you know the moment there where the actor ... “ He didn’t even remember the moment I was talking about. How could I possibly talk to him about something if he didn’t even know what I was referring to? The next day at work he quoted a couple of things that I had said, but. obviously there was no way that this was going to work. I just sat there and watched and was miserable.

I began to notice that people were saying, “Playwrights cannot direct.” I took a course in directing during which I got to direct actors in a play—not mine, somebody else’s. I had been frightened by people telling me things like, “In order to direct, you have to know actors’ language.” Fortunately, I found that actors talk English. There are certain things you have to know about how an actor works, but that has nothing to do with language. For example, you have to know that an actor can get to a moment very fast and naturally if it comes from inside him, but otherwise you have to be patient and let things evolve gently. You have to know how it happens, you begin to know when it’s happening, like you have to identify germs. And you must have patience. If it’s happening in the wrong direction, you have to divert it, move it in the right direction, but don’t expect to see the final thing instantly.

My work appears to be very un-Method, but it isn’t. I worship Method, and I’m very glad I had that kind of training, because it’s a beautiful technique, a way to an inner sense.

Q: Has there been a basic theme to your plays, and if so, what is it?

Fornés: Somebody pointed out to me, and I think it is true, that my plays deal very often with the oppressed and some kind of oppression, emotional or political, plus the desire to free one’s self from any kind of oppression. It takes many shades, and I hadn’t even realized it until someone pointed it out to me.

Q: Do you have a checklist—theme, conflict, character, climax and so forth—or do you just write?

Fornés: There’s probably no set format for writing a play, I say “probably” because I haven’t checked it out. But when I do playwriting exercises I pose questions to myself about the characters. I present them with situations that they are unlikely to be in. I always allow the characters to behave as they please, so that I’m saying to them, “Tell me what is happening and what you are like, what you want.” In imagining all kinds of unlikely situations for them, it could be that I’m actually going through some sort of checklist, but it’s certainly not a formal checklist.

Schreiber: Are you still writing plays in an experimental style?

Fornés: There have been changes in my style, but everything I write comes from within myself. It may not be something that has never been done before, but it is always something I haven’t done before. Having others appreciate my work isn’t what gives me the energy to work. It is the creative process, the work itself that excites me. I enjoy people coming to see my work, and I am very happy if they enjoy it, but I don’t think of them when I write. If I like the _work, I assume they will like it. If you’re a good cook, you cook to cook, and if it tastes good to you, you assume others are going to like it.

Sometimes it could be that I’m unhappy because it isn’t really right yet, and other people don’t even notice that. And I worry until I find out what is wrong with it. When you have that relationship to the work instead of depending on other people, you always have the energy to write. I’m interested in the longevity of my writing, not in financial awards or public acclaim. I’m interested in my love for it and my excitement in doing it. My mother is 98 years old and full of energy, and if I live that long I want to be enjoying writing. ★