A Gritty, Claustrophobic Evening Of María Irene Fornés At The Lenfest Center

Upper West Side NY

14 October, 2021

4:12 PM

Description

Columbia Daily Spectator BY SOPHIE CRAIG OCTOBER 12, 2021 The scene ends abruptly, as though cut off by a kitchen timer. A young man stands up—suddenly quiet, a scream having just barely escaped his lungs—and moves centerstage in the bluish darkness. Before the audience has time to react, he joins hands with the woman he murdered and revives her for curtain call. From Sept. 23 to 26, the Lenfest Center for the Arts presented "Mud" and "Springtime," two short plays by Cuban-born playwright María Irene Fornés. For his directing thesis, Colm Summers, SoA '21, staged the domestic tragedy "Mud" in an unnamed rural town during the Great Depression. He then leaped forward 20 years with "Springtime," a swift and unsentimental love story unfolding in an ambiguous "Eastern city." Gritty and claustrophobic, the plays examine the wounds we inflict on those we love. Throughout the evening, composer Daniel Bindschedler sat on a balcony above the action, accompanying the staccato dialogue with an eerie, subterranean groan on the cello. On the stage below, foster siblings Mae and Lloyd spit words in a bid to humiliate each other. Mae stands at the ironing board, batting around accusations of impotence with perfect posture and sharp, controlled gestures. Meanwhile, Lloyd thrashes in his chair, desperately trying to prove his worth. Cramped and combative—their breathless delivery on the verge of hyperventilation—the play is a baffling, volatile portrait of an abusive family. The dialogue of Fornés' text is brisk and unrelenting, like the needle of a sewing machine. Each scene transition is numbered, descending from 17 as though counting down an explosion. Rapidly and mechanically resetting the stage, the actors also reset their emotions, severing the scenes and releasing hard-earned tensions. In this way, conversations become captions, with each number referring to a figure in a photo album. The effect is stroboscopic—like clicking through a View-Master, rather than observing a continuous story. We have no sense of time passing, nor understanding of our environmental context. For all we know, Mae could run outside and off the face of the Earth—and in a way, she does. She spends the entire play searching for an explanation as to how and why she should live, first in schooling, then in the supposed wisdom of an older man. And when she finally settles on leaving home, she's killed. The finale is overwhelming: The men whine and scream for Mae, reduced to infants wailing for their mother. There are several bewildered laughs among the audience as Lloyd tears through the theater, grabbing a shotgun and running after Mae. We hear two shots, and for a moment, the room is still—until Lloyd returns with Mae's body, shuffling back inside like an obliging duck retriever. Casting Mazvita Chanakira, SoA '23, as Mae—a brilliant Black actress in a typically white role—created productive tensions that the director chose not to explore. Instead, he assigned this analytic work to the audience, leaving us to unpack the coded imagery of a Black woman ironing a white man's trousers. "Director Colm Summers examines America's greatest sin—disparity—in an evening of plays that force us to reckon with our comfort in the safety of the American Dream," notes the program. Yet the combination of an immediately recognizable racial disparity in American history with the spatiotemporal ambiguity of Fornés' play-world skewed rather than clarified the director's intentions. In fact, in order to study the economic and gender disparities at the heart of the text, the audience is forced to ignore systemic racial inequality as a historical reality of the Great Depression and the ways it would inevitably texture the relationships within "Mud." As such, the question arises as to whether Summers is examining racial disparities or inventing a world in which they don't exist. After the murderous tantrums of "Mud," the world of "Springtime" feels almost peaceful. Though the set is crowded and narrow, with a wrought-iron bed pressed up against the edge of the stage, there is a window—and thus a world beyond our characters. Greta and Rainbow's relationship, initially characterized by a kind of hospice care, morphs beyond recognition as Greta recovers. "I like to sit here and see the sun coming in," Greta says. "There are times when I feel disturbed. I feel restless. I feel nasty. And looking at the sun coming in makes me feel calm." The scenes are titled and projected onto the wall like train schedules, displaying brief summaries such as "Greta admires the sunlight." As the two women confront mysterious illness and unaffordable treatment—obstacles that draw them closer together before pulling them apart—we come across familiar questions: Why do we abuse those who care for us? How do we continue to inhabit the same domestic spaces after chaos and catastrophe? For "Springtime," illness and betrayal are not permanent fixtures of the house—they do not line the floorboards and coat the walls, suffocating the theater as they do in "Mud." Fornés does not trap Greta and Rainbow; there is another world outside of their relationship, marked by the sunlit window and the wide-open space upstage. For "Mud," the tragedy is that time has stopped. There is no room for change—the men in Mae's life render each catastrophe permanent. She is not allowed to live, whether she leaves or stays. Deputy A&E Editor Sophie Craig can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow Spectator on Twitter @ColumbiaSpec. 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