“I don’t know of any playwright more intuitive, more reliant on taking stuff from the unconscious, and letting that create form.” — Edward Albee on María Irene Fornés
Playwright, director, and educator María Irene Fornés will be celebrated this month with the screening of Michelle Memran’s documentary THE REST IMAKE UP at the Museum of Modern Art, and a twelve-hour marathon of readings from Fornés’ plays at the Public Theater.
“Writing plays is not a way of earning a living but earning a life… Learning how to become intimate with your own imagination is more important than finishing a piece.” — María Irene Fornés
Fornés—one of the most influential writing teachers of contemporary theater, and an advocate of an oblique approach to the blank page—prepared her students by immersing them in voice and movement workshops. She was, in the words of playwright Brooke Berman, a former assistant, “someone who had spent her whole life devoted to capturing the truth of a moment in theatrical space.”
THE REST I MAKE UP features extensive footage of Fornés in Greenwich Village and Havana and Miami—dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease—as well as interviews with friends, family, ex-lovers, and colleagues—Ellen Stewart, John Guare, Constance Congdon, Migdalia Cruz and many more.
“Her work has no precedents, it isn’t derived from anything. She’s the most original of us all.” — Lanford Wilson on Fornés
“I was thinking, Ursula said to Quentin, that the difference between a story and a painting or a photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show ‘still.’ You can just show him being alive. He’s alive, Stephen said.” — from “The Way We Live Now” (1986), Susan Sontag
According to Benjamin Taylor—editor of the new collection of Susan Sontag’s short fiction, DEBRIEFING—when it came to work published while she was alive, Susan Sontag had a case of “autobiographophobia.” (The private journals published posthumously tell another story.)
The idea of being shelved categorically—”woman writer,” “Jewish writer,” “lesbian writer”—was abhorrent to Sontag, and most of the characters and events in the eleven stories collected in DEBRIEFING (eight of which were published in I, Etcetera, in 1978) are “veiled”—despite their form, which is often memoiristic, diaristic, documentary.
(The opening story, “Pilgrimage,” is a slightly fictionalized report of the visit a teenage Sontag paid to Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades.)
SUSAN SONTAG—DEBRIEFING: COLLECTED STORIES
Edited and with an introduction by Benjamin Taylor, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.)
“[The black presence in the contemporary art scene] almost feels as though an Occupy High Art movement is happening….How black people have been seen in history continues to influence how they are seen today. Yet the high visibility of blacks in the art world hasn’t done away with the critical defensiveness that made the controversy at this year’s WhitneyBiennial over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till such an embarrassing turf war among the second-rate. Till, age 14, was beaten to death in 1955 in Mississippi for supposedly having whistled at a white woman. The painting has no power unless, or until, you think of the horrific image of Till in his open casket on which it was based.”
From Darryl Pinckney, “The Trickster’s Art” (a piece on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Kehinde Wiley, and the Regarding the Figure show at the Studio Museum in Harlem), New YorkReview of Books LXIV.13 (August 17, 2017): 50.
Pinckney is a novelist, longtime contributor to The New York Review, and partner of James Fenton (who was introduced to Pinckney by Susan Sontag in the Paris Bar in Berlin in 1990). Pinckney’s latest book—Black Deutschland: A Novel—is the story of a young, gay, post-drug-rehab Chicagoan in 1980s Berlin.
“… I remember one summer I worked a lot in Washington Square Park. It must have been about 1966. The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough amazingly hard-core lesbians. And in the middle were winos. They were like the first echelon and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie hippies.
“It was really remarkable. And I found it very scary… There were days I just couldn’t work there and then there were days I could…. I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot… I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them.” — Diane Arbus
DIANE ARBUS: IN THE PARK—at Lévy Gorvy in Manhattan—is the first exhibition to focus solely on Arbus’ photographs made in Central Park and Washington Square, theaters of public interaction that provided fertile territory for the creation of many of her most striking and original images. All of the works on view were made within four miles of where they are now exhibited.*
“A large part of the mystery of Arbus’s photographs lies in what they suggest about how her subjects felt after consenting to be photographed. Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that?” — Susan Sontag
DIANE ARBUS: IN THE PARK, through June 24
LÉVY GORVY, 909 Madison Avenue at East 73rd Street, New York City
“What Camp taste responds to is instant character… [which] is understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one, very intense thing.” — Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’ “*
SALOMEis an opera of instant character, and its exaltation of lust remains undiluted. Bodies and things are transposed, and the protagonists begin and end the narrative as unattainable objects of desire: Herod will never possess his step-daughter Salome, and Salome will never possess the prisoner Jochanaan (John the Baptist).
“Jochanaan, you were so beautiful….Your body was like a garden….You saw your God, but you never saw me.” — Salome
In 1905, Richard Strauss adapted Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of Oscar Wilde’s play (which was written in French), and the first hour of the opera is a modern fever of polyrhythms and bitonality (the “Salome scale”). As the fatal obstinacy of Salome and Jochanaan hardens, the swift pace gives way to measured deliberation. In the current L.A. Opera production, beautifully conducted by James Conlon, soprano Patricia Racette embodies Salome—voice, body, and soul—and brings down the house.
SALOME
Saturday, February 25 at 7:30 pm; Thursday, March 2 at 7:30 pm; Sunday, March 5 at 2 pm; Thursday, March 16 at 7:30 pm; and Sunday, March 19 at 2 pm.
DOROTHY CHANDLER PAVILION, Music Center, Los Angeles.
*”Notes on ‘Camp’ ” was published in the Fall, 1964 issue of Partisan Review, and is included in the Library of America edition Susan Sontag:Essays of the 1960s & 70s.
Note on the illustration: In 2016, the L.A. Opera and the philanthropic initiative GRoW@Annenberg invited students from Southern California colleges to participate in the opera company’s first ever art contest. Marshall Dahlin of Cal State Fullerton was the first place winner, and his design illustrates the cover of the Salome program. The artwork is a less-epicene nod to Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for the first English translation of Wilde’s play (and Marcus Behmer’s for the German edition), and locates the decapitation-as-castration theme of the piece.
Marshall Dahlin, Salome. Image credit: LA Opera
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