Fornes says she begins each class with thirty to forty-five minutes of yoga. It’s clear that she sees the basic building block of a production as its actors, that she sees the fundamental building block of a play as character. She starts her students there. Her assumption is that “life is interesting, and life doesn’t have an Aristotelian Structure, so why should plays.”
I don’t know that I agree with that...not that life isn't interesting, but we don't ask people to pay for the privilege of sitting in the dark for two hours without going for the bathroom during the course of normal life -- theater is, as Dietz says, a time-based medium, and while a structure doesn't have to be Aristotelian, the argument "life is interesting" sounds great over a glass of wine, but doesn't get you as far when tickets go from anywhere from fifteen to a hundred and fifty bucks a pop. If all theater were free, well, that argument might go further with me.
Most of her in-class work with students seems to revolve around generating pages. Getting them into a very open state with yoga. Leading them through visualizations of their characters, of the spaces those characters inhabit. Having them write scenes with those characters at different points in time.
She says she absolutely believes in structure, but that that comes LATER, that so much of a play is about structuring it, and rewriting it. But in these pages, she really only talks about generating pages. She doesn’t indicate how, once students have generated pages, she helps them with shaping those pages. Maybe that's simply harder to talk about? Or maybe that, for her, is the easier part? Or the hard part?
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