Between Cuba and New York : Maria Irene Fornes’s Sarita and Letters from Cuba
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The use of tableau-like still images on stage is a typical feature of Maria Irene Fornes’s dramatic composition. These are rigorously composed, brief, lyrical scenes with profound affective content. I argue that these scenes owe their power to a unique spatial organization of stage. In Fornes’s stage composition, intimate spaces reflecting characters’ states of mind interweave with geographical spaces, which often refer to different, even geographically distant locations. By doing so, Fornes places her characters at the crossroads of cultures. I propose to examine plays in which the story takes place in or recalls the memory of those places that were Fornes’s two homes: New York City and Cuba. In Sarita (1984), characters struggle with a sense of alienation either as Cuban exiles in America, who feel an overwhelming longing for their homeland, or as second-generation Cubans in America, who need to come to terms with the burden of their Cuban identity. In Letters from Cuba (2000), Fornes’s last and most personal piece, the story unfolds simultaneously in New York and Cuba and exposes two worlds torn apart by the Castro regime and Cold War politics. I will focus on how the composition of stage space shapes the different experiences of being in a place and belonging in a place in these plays. |
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