Out of Maria Irene Fornes’ Playwriting Workshop Report No. 33

Factuality

Rabbits are more matter of fact than we give them credit for. They are prepared for their roles and they wait. What do they eat when they are known as the eaten? What can or may their excrement be good for? I am not so familiar externally with the animal. But the obsessive mind referring back and back to the creature by a bush in the rattlesnake canyon. What is the name? That’s not it, that’s the one from my childhood. I’m thinking of the one in Missoula. Violent in the way its path goes wide and then branches, duplicitous somehow.

Sight is irrelevant to the animal, this animal. I need a pronoun for a rabbit, who speaks warmth. The warm dirt of the den, which is wet from the mother, the birther’s fluids which have spilled dramatically and in totality. Our creature feels the loss, tries to grasp the liquids’ remnants of warmth which drain rapidly deeper into dirt, clay, rock. Sharp + violent breath, exposed. We look at their pink, in pink, and pity disgust. The pink of the womb no longer known, though. But a partial relief in all the loss of ejection: claws scraping and padding on dirt. Cartilage still soft will form. A discovery of nostrils, too, finally meeting the evasive noun—the home?—of dirt, which comes in small slips as the quick nostrils flare, so fast we like to laugh and assume speed must be surface, incapable of a deeper meaning. The creature’s unflinching bond with dirt, a bond it knows so well it does not care.

Out of Maria Irene Fornes’ Playwriting Workshop Report No. 13

Down into the circular room, again. I feel my way through the pitch black by sliding my hand along the smooth, cool wall. Soft dents as I make my way down the ramp. Blackness, I wanted to know what was painted on it before we were in such darkness. “In the earth” feels like the right phrase when I reach the circle again, feel the craving, still, even though I’m in it—this tension is the ultimate comfort, I think.

The black tree in front of me, masculine branches reach outward. I always stay on this side, and crossing over to the “front” (the other half of the circle), I feel trepidation. Trepidation at sitting against the trunk of the tree. Protection seems to be when I am on the ground itself.

I prepare for a new phenomenon, a projection, and I see Maddie on the screen, walking on the bluffs I sometimes visited as a kid. Also a woman doing plein air painting near a momentous and smoothly worn log. Eucalyptus scent, the process of rotting you only smell when you’re in person. No one talks about that side of their being. Another tension in craving. Maddie and the woman both carry their arms on these sure shoulders, confident.

As Maddie approaches her you can almost feel the repulsion of two ram-like creatures. Maddie resents the woman, who seems to hold a long list of instructions. What is this word submission? The woman demands a submission– undertaking disguised as reaching out. Rhythmic waters tumble undone and then pull back in and then tumble undone below. Their salt wafts to me. And another smell of rotting– the expectation of a creature cast out.

“Don’t interrupt, then, just wait til I finish.”