SOURCE: "Still Playing Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 167-85.

In the following essay, Worthen explores "the operation of the mise-en-scéne on the process of dramatic action" in Fornes' plays.

Isidore, I beg you.
 Can't you see
 You're breaking my heart?
 'Cause while I'm so earnest,
 You're still playing games.
                                                   Tango Palace

A clown tosses off witty repartee while tossing away the cards on which his lines are written; a love scene is played first by actors and then by puppets they manipulate; the audience sits in a semicircle around a woman desperately negotiating with invisible tormentors: the plays of Maria Irene Fornes precisely address the process of theater, how the authority of the word, the presence of the performer, and the complicity of the silent spectator...