SOURCE: Kiebuzinska, Christine. “Traces of Brecht in Maria Irene Fornes' Mud.” The Brecht Yearbook 18 (1993): 153-65.

In the following essay, Kiebuzinska discusses the influence of playwright and dramatist Bertolt Brecht on the feminist elements of Mud.

The plays of the Cuban-American playwright and director, Maria Irene Fornes, illustrate effectively Andrzej Wirth's observation of the paradoxical situation of “Brecht reception without Brecht.”¹ Fornes comes to the theater with a background in the visual arts and traces her interest in the theater from the time she saw Roger Blin's production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot as an art student in Paris. This experience led her to Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio where she studied playwrighting and directing. Though the aesthetics of the Method seem rather remote from Brechtian theatrical practices, Brecht's techniques of Verfremdung have become the universal language of contemporary theater, irrespective of ideological contexts in which montage, epic narration or...