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- Anurag Chauhan
In Search for Life in the Theatre of Reality: María Irene Fornés and Emma Sheridan Fry
Goodness, pity and conscience are as deep and resistant to external influences as are cruelty and egoism.
There are two Mexicans in sombreros sitting at a bullfight and one says to the other, ‘Isn’t she beautiful, the one in yellow?’ and he points to a woman on the other side of the arena crowded with people. The other one says, ‘Which one?’ and the first takes his gun and shoots her and says, ‘The one that falls.’
This is an old Mexican joke which ignited visionary Cuban American dramatist María Irene Fornés with an idea to knit a play which was going to be uncomfortable to the society of the time, which was still coming to terms with the sexual revolution of the 1960s — a revolution some historians claim has actually been going on since the 1920s.
“Fefu and Her Friends” was first produced by the New York Theatre Strategy at the Relativity Media Lab, New York City, on May 5, 1977. It was directed by Fornés.
And within six months, it won an Obie award (Fornés's second) and was remounted at the American Place Theatre, New York City, on January 8, 1978.
It is quite perplexing at first to understand what all the play is exactly about when one looks at it with a superficial frame of mind, but as you hold on for a little more, you start to see the subtle layers of the genius of María Irene Fornés. The thematic eminence of “Fefu and Her Friends” has exceptional levels of revelations, particularly in the form of a critique of modern society and how, essentially, the human behavior enacts variedly under the attires of “gender roles” and “sexuality”.
As Fornés used to say, “To me, writing plays is not a way of earning a living but it is a way of earning a life.”
In 2018, the documentary “The Rest I Make Up” was released, which avers to be a film about María Irene Fornés and her unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran. The New Yorker calls it “One of The Best Movies of 2018.”
These two women — one young and one old, both lost in their own lives but with a shared urge to create — came together in a journey that revealed how the creative spirit continues to thrive even as one’s ability to create is compromised.
Listen to an interview with Director Michelle Memran and Rachel Shelley from Radio DIVA
Michelle Memran
...to say, it stills somebody to their essence,
it's what happened with Irene
- that joy crystallized
and being in the moment,
so much with five minutes of short-term memory
became her creative process in a lot of ways
…
to think we can flip the lands
on how we see this as this is
The Summons
Out of all the light, what attracted my attention, in particular, was a monologue by the character - Emma Blake. In part III of the play, where the characters organize a stage and come to give their respective speeches, Emma quotes an excerpt from the prologue to “Educational Dramatics” (1917) by Emma Sheridan Fry, known as the founder of The Science of Educational Dramatics.
In “Educational Dramatics”, Fry talks at length about the nature of the Dramatics and Human Life Activities that affect and in turn, are affected by the Dramatic Expressions and Instincts to varying degrees.
The prologue, that in 1917 edition of the book is a chapter named “The Summons”, Emma Blake starts the speech with a dramatic pose and interpretive gestures —
Environment knocks at the gateway of the senses. A rain of summons beats upon the day and night… We do not answer. Everything around us shouts against our deafness, struggles with our unwillingness, batters our walls, flashes into our blindness, strives to sieve through us at every pore, begging, fighting, insisting. It shouts, “Where are you? Where are you?” But we are deaf. The signals do not reach us.
Emma Sheridan Fry here discovers eloquently the human ignorance and the irony of inwardness in terms of outwardness of human activities. She insists on reiterating that what we have, receives no heed from us; we rather indulge ourselves in acquiring things we desire, in the hope to make our future better than what it is today without mulling over the fundamentals of our existence. Emma Blake, then further illustrates this and enacts,
"Society restricts us, school straight jackets us, civilizations submerge us, privations wring us, luxury featherbeds us. The Divine Urge is checked. The Winged Horse balks on the road, and we, discouraged, defeated, dismount and burrow into ourselves. The gates are closed, and Divine Urge is imprisoned at Center. Thus we are taken by indifference that is death.
…
Environment finding the gates closed tries to break in. Turned away, it comes another way. Kept back, it stretches its hands to us. Always scheming to reach us. Never was suitor more insisting than Environment, seeking admission, claiming recognition, signaling to be seen, shouting to be heard. And through the ages, we sit inside ourselves deaf, dumb and blind, and will not stir…"
Emma Sheridan Fry illuminates the senses and supplements,
… Maybe you are not deaf. … Perhaps signals reach you. Maybe you stir. …The gates give… Eternal Urge pushes through the stupor of our senses, making paths to meet the challenging suitor, windows through which to see him, ears through which to hear him. Environment shouting, “Where are you?” and Center battering at the inner side of the wall crying, “Here I am,” and dragging down bars, wrenching gates, prying at portholes. Listening at cracks, reaching everywhere, and demanding that sense gates be flung open. The gates are open! Eternal Urge stands at the threshold signaling with a venturous flag. An imperious instinct lets us know that “all” is ours, and that whatever anyone has ever known, or may ever have or know, we will call and claim. A sense of life universal surges through our life individual. We attack the feat of this table with an insatiable appetite that cries for all.
Fry’s words seem like the arrows breaking the high-flying balloons of our sense of egotism and meanness. And what I earlier referred to as “the irony of inwardness in terms of outwardness of human activities” has ostensibly found the valid identity of being the exegesis of human predicament with what Fry expounded.
What Are We?
Fyodor Dostoevsky has always been critical and enlightening about the condition of humanity and the social credos and systems it tends to align itself with. He once wrote that, “Human nature is not only something dark and cruel, but also something bright and exalted."
That, “Goodness, pity and conscience are as deep and resistant to external influences as are cruelty and egoism”, years before Emma Sheridan Fry’s statements showed parallelity to them -
What are we? A creation of God’s consciousness coming now slowly and painfully into recognition of ourselves. What is Personality? A small part of us. The whole of us is behind that hungry rush at the gates of Senses. What is Civilization? A circumscribed order in which the whole has not entered. What is Environment? Our mate, our true mate that clamors for our reunion.
…
We will meet him. We will seize all, learn all, know all here, that we may fare further on the great quest! The task of Now is only a step toward the task of the Whole! Let us then seek the laws governing real life forces, that coming into their own, they may create, develop and reconstruct. Let us awaken life dormant! Let us, boldly, seizing the star of our intent, lift it as the lantern of our necessity, and let it shine over the darkness of our compliance. Come! The light shines. Come! It brightens our way. Come! Don’t let its glorious light pass you by! Come! The day has come!
(Emma throws herself on the couch) “Oh! It’s so beautiful.”
The Gates of Senses
The man's refusal to look at what he is cutting with his axe of mind has taken too much of a toll on himself, the environment and other creatures, and has taken too long to realize that it is nothing else but the same branch of the tree he is sitting on. It won’t take much when he shall be on his face in the lap of the indignant mother.
Dostoevsky’s stress on the “...resistance to external influences of cruelty and egoism” is beeping up sharper than ever, but “the man is still deaf… he is still not stirred.”
We need to revisit our “certain” pipe dream plans for our “uncertain” future and relook at the bespeaking history of humanity from the abyss of our abject present. We need to stop being deaf anymore and listen to the screech of the sobbing rivers amongst the noise of our unabating ambitions. We need to fling open our gates of senses and let the breeze of Goodness, Pity and Conscience break into the home of our unitary intelligence like the light at the end of the tunnel.
Read and Contemplate on the Hannah Arendt's philosophical view of the leap of humanity from tradition to modern age, and then the James Allen's spiritual transformation in the world of thoughts.
Get your own copy of María Fornés's “Fefu and Her Friends”, and Emma Fry's “Educational Dramatics” from here.
