SOURCE: "Hen in a Foxhouse: The Absurdist Plays of Maria Irene Fornes," in Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Conn, The University of Michigan Press, 1990, pp. 203-20.

In this essay, Zinman detects elements of the theater of the absurd in several of Fornes' plays.

"Where do female playwrights stand in relation to the tradition of the theater of the absurd?" This question was posed to me by the editors of this volume. Never mind its invitation to tokenism. Never mind its invitation to specious, gender-based generalizations. Better to say something than nothing.

I went back to Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd to find some clues; scanning the index yielded only one female playwright's name: Gertrude Stein, and she is described as a precursor, linked to dadaism and surrealism rather than absurdism, and Esslin points out that the...