SOURCE: Gargano, Cara. “The Starfish and the Strange Attractor: Myth, Science, and Theatre as Laboratory in Maria Irene Fornes's Mud.” New Theatre Quarterly 13, no. 51 (August 1997): 214-20.

In the following essay, Gargano comments that Fornes's theatrical technique in Mud is analogous to ground-breaking developments in scientific theory. Gargano asserts that Fornes “uses the paradigm of the theatre as potential to demonstrate the inevitable connection between our art, our learning, and our social artifice.”

What we are discussing … is the relation between theory, experiment, and nature. … Nature is too big, too complicated, too intricately structured, too subject to uncontrollable forces, for us to understand it in one go. The laboratory experiment is the intermediary between reality and theory—between the natural world and humankind's mental picture of how the natural world works. The aim of a laboratory experiment is to isolate some small fragment of theory and test it to...