A twist in the approach

Which is how The Successful Life of 3: A Skit for Vaudeville came to be. Back home one day, after a hard day’s work, she had put up her feet, picked up her sewing and was listening to the Goon Show on the radio. The play was very dumb and funny, but the humour was sophisticated.

"Suddenly, I felt two characters from the play talking among themselves in my mind. I had no will over it and I did not plan it," says she. The play, a romantic spoof for which Fornes received her first Obie Award, features characters named He, She and 3, who meet at a doctor’s office and become involved in a love triangle. "By now I knew that the logical mind was the enemy. I could not let that interrupt my work," says she.

So, for her next Obie award winning play, Promenade, she chalked a method of madness. She piled up three stacks of cards with names of locations, people and situations, shuffled them and picked out one from each stack. What emerged from these random thoughts was a musical with the strongest of social criticism.

Her other notable works have been Molly’s Dream, Fefu and her Friends, Mud, The Danube, and two other Obie award winning plays, The Conduct of Life and Abingdon Square. That places her in the ranks of Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard.

In fact, the 67-year-old Fornes turned from painting to playwriting after watching Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1954. She did not understand a word of French and had not read the play in English. "The play was wonderfully acted. And then, it was like a dream that stays with you. When I left that theatre I felt that my life was changed. I was seeing everything with a different clarity," she recalls.

But while Beckett was the turning point of her career, she resists depending on the classics. She’d rather source from her understanding of the world around. For instance, her first play, Tango Palace, was the result of a young person’s bitter confrontation with the rules of life.

And, on the first day of her three-week creative workshop at the NCPA, Fornes applied her tried-and-tested method (she has taught at Yale and NYU). She got the two groups of eight to 10 participants of actors and directors, to pool their ideas and rethink a piece of work. When one of the playwrights at the workshop voiced his dissatisfaction with the finale of his play, Fornes got the entire group to write the last scene. "Although his idea was good, for a larger impact he required a monologue and by the end of the session, he felt good about the one that he wrote himself," she says."What I expect from this exercise is to see a method of writing to emerge where the creator could gel more intimately with the characters. As a result, the character has his own determination," says she. In fact, if Fornes could have her way, she would also get the set designer and the light boys to put their imagination in words.

"Writing is the easiest method of communication, as opposed to painting which I gave up since it lacked the immediacy of the written word," she says. Fornes might have cast aside her brush, but what she retained from that technique was the visual aspect. She is very aware of the picture of the stage, its composition, the movement and placement of things. "I work very closely with the set designer, so I feel strengthened when I get the aesthetics of the design clear," she says.

There may not be too many stage hands here willing to go with her wish on thinking aloud about the production that they are involved in, but post-workshop, some actors and directors might clear the air between them, having been on both sides of the fence.