Imagining the Stage as a Painting : Beckett and Fornes
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In 1954, Maria Irene Fornes attended the production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, to which she referred years later as an experience that had profound influence on her playwriting. Scholarly studies on Fornes have connected her with Beckett focusing on the absurdist (or postabsurdist) elements of her plays. However, when Fornes saw the production, she did not imagine herself as a playwright yet but pursued a career in painting. The reason for which she might have felt a real affinity with Beckett could be an artistic vision that imagines theater along similar lines as a painter does a painting. Both Beckett and Fornes – the former as an art connoisseur, the latter as a painter–felt intimately connected with the visual arts throughout their lives. This artistic inclination gives rise to their unconventional theatrical aesthetics. In the light of phenomenological studies on Beckett’s drama, which recognize the central importance of the staging of the body in his work, I argue that the power of the mise-en-scene in Fornes’s theater derives from the interplay between the visual and other–mainly tactile and olfactory–sensorial perceptions. Fornes thus creates a corporeally conceived stage space, which compensates for the absence of psychological characterization of realistic drama. |
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