Each of Halcyon Theatre’s previous two Alcyone Festivals showcased plays by a number of women. This time around it’s dedicated entirely to the work of a just one female playwright, Maria Irene Fornes. Though not as well known as she should be, Fornes, who turns 80 this year, has had a huge impact on since the 1960s. The influence of her work—with its fragmented storytelling, profound empathy, clear yet undidactic politics, and healthy dose of weird—can be seen in the plays of such disparate writers as Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, and Nilo Cruz.
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In her dreamlike, semi-autobiographical Letters from Cuba (2000), the Havana-born Fornes juxtaposes a Cuban-American dancer’s bohemian life in New York with the lives of her impoverished family back on the island. Based on actual correspondence from Fornes’s older brother, the piece is suffused with tenderness and longing. But director Juan Castañeda’s static, poorly paced production fails to capture the immigrant’s almost surreal sense of existing in two places simultaneously.
Originally an opera libretto, the bilingual text of Manual for a Desperate Crossing (1996) is based on interviews with some of the thousands of Cuban balseros (“rafters”) whose economic desperation drove them to set out for Florida on homemade rafts in 1994. To describe the difficult journey, Fornes transforms the everyday speech of the refugees into surprisingly poetic, incantatory choral passages. Marooned on a small platform in the center of a blank stage, the cast of seven in Coya Paz’s staging present a moving picture of human dignity amid suffering.
