INTERVIEW: Lost play by María Irene Fornés revived at La MaMa
Photo: Evelyn Brown (A Diary), a dance-theater show by María Irene Fornés, receives a rare revival at La MaMa in New York City. Photo courtesy of Steven Pisano / Provided by Everyman Agency with permission.
Evelyn Brown (A Diary) finishes up its first-ever revival this weekend at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theatre in the East Village of New York City. The production has taken an unbelievable and improbable journey to the stage. The play is considered a “lost work” by María Irene Fornés, a nine-time Obie Award winner who died in 2018. She was born in Havana, according to her official biography, and had a major impact on the off-off-Broadway scene, penning works like The Conduct of Life, Mud and Sarita, among many others. Her script for Evelyn Brown (A Diary) was considered lost, but has now been recovered by dramaturg Gwendolyn Alker.
Alker, an associate arts professor in the department of drama at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, spent five years piecing together Fornés’ words, working alongside the playwright’s longtime designers, Donald Eastman and Gabriel Berry, according to press notes. Together with director Alice Reagan, they revived the play, which is based off an actual diary from a woman named Evelyn Brown, a housekeeper in rural New Hampshire in the early 20th century. Press notes indicate that Fornés created a show that is part dance and part theater, highlighting the physical cost of women’s domestic labor and the possibilities of mental/spiritual escape.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Alker, who is a Fornés expert, having “taught and advocated” for the playwright’s work over the last two decades, according to her biography. Alker has assisted on many Fornés-centered projects over the years, including the New York Fornés Festival in 2010. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How did you get attached to this project and ultimately piece together this play?
I think it would be more accurate to say that Evelyn Brown (A Diary) got attached to me. In 2018, Scott Cummings and I decided to bring together the remaining cast and crew from the original Evelyn Brown — which had only been performed in 1980 — to see if we could piece together what had happened. We had a great day talking about the show and decided there was definitely a there there, even though no finalized version of the script presented itself. I kept sniffing around, and two years later I found a more recent version of the script. Ironically, the person who had it didn’t even know he had the most recent one!
Soon thereafter I invited Alice Reagan on as a collaborator, and I kept throwing a lot of questions at the original artists — and voila! A few years, a class at NYU, and a workshop at Princeton later, we were ready to pitch it to an NYC theater. Donald Eastman, who designed the original set in 1980 and had been with the recovery project since 2018, was our bridge to La MaMa ETC, where he is a resident artist. They immediately picked up the piece. I remember Mia Yoo, the artistic director at La MaMa, saying it shouldn’t go anywhere else.
What was the process like recovering this lost script?
Like the play itself, it was both laborious and strangely fascinating. I’ve read a lot of plays by Irene Fornés — I’ve been teaching her work for more than two decades. But this was different. First of all, she didn’t write any of the words: all of the text is from found objects — things originally written by other people that Irene collaged into her play — and it’s filled with these weird little drawings, arrows and odd stage directions like “grimace” and “shake.” And I will add that interviewing older folks about something that happened 40 years ago does not get you consistent answers! In fact, they shared totally different versions of the same event and with complete certainty.
Even after we had found the basic structure of what we wanted to do, we kept switching between differing versions to find the best map until literally two nights before we opened. One thing I’ve learned from having Irene in my head is that you have to go with your gut. Even after all of the research and recovery, you have to go with what feels right for that performance, in that theatre, in that moment.
How much of the final product is original to María Irene Fornés and how much needed to be filled in?
We were faithful to the script — or, I would say, faithful to at least one iteration of the script — at all times. We added a few things — the song where the actors do a little dance is new, but it’s similar to the original song. And we used a blindfold a bit more liberally in one scene. But everything else is found in the script in some way, even if we did have to interpret it. For example, when the script says to bring the diary closer or farther away, we ran with that and made it bigger, even having one of the actors walk from really far away and then crouch over the diary to get close. So it wasn’t so much that we needed to fill things in — it was more about cutting things and interpreting really bizarre things that weren’t clear.
What do you like about this show, with its exploration of this woman from New Hampshire in the early 1900s?
What originally attracted me to this piece was the way it showed Fornés’ obsession with women’s work, which shows up in smaller ways in her later, more well-known works. I’m a big fan of thinking about the work that we do — how we do it and why. With Evelyn Brown, what was super cool is that Irene was trying this weird experiment with making the work of the theatre — what most people see as make-believe — a form of authentic labor.
For example, she went to New Hampshire with her two actors to interview people and find out how Evelyn Brown lived, and then made their costumes using authentic methods from the early 20th century, dyeing the cloth with spinach and onions. Really weird stuff! So, yes, it is about women from New Hampshire in the early 1900s, but it’s also about women in the 1980s (when it was originally staged) and women who make our clothes today. And it makes sense because this show is really about being present to the work that we still have to do, or someone has to do, even now that we have dishwashers and washing machines and sewing machines and all of that. Someone, somewhere, is doing the work. And this was Irene’s way of saying that we should have respect for the workers that most people do not consider important.
You’ve said that reconstructing this script is the highlight of your career. Can you explain why?
In the theatre community, it’s a rare blessing to be able to refine one work again and again. It’s also rare to find something that is worthy of such time and care. Having worked on this since 2018, I can honestly say that I am still learning from Evelyn Brown (A Diary). Just the other night at a performance, I was still seeing new things. Fornés is like that for me. She remains relevant, and she constantly unfolds.
I’m also lucky to have collaborated with so many people who have brought all of their talents to Evelyn Brown — most recently our fabulous actors, Ellen Lauren and Violeta Picayo. Finally, I think recovering the play has made a contribution to the larger theatre community. On opening night, we had a lot of diehard Fornés fans in the audience — people who really knew her. And they were gobsmacked that they had never seen this play. And I could see the puzzle pieces in their head shifting to a different place, post Evelyn Brown. For these moments of repetition and change, I am grateful.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Evelyn Brown (A Diary) by María Irene Fornés continues through Sunday, June 4 at La MaMa’s Downstairs Theatre in the East Village of New York City. Directed by Alice Reagan. Dramaturgy by Gwendolyn Alker. Click here for more information and tickets.
