SOURCE: Rabillard, Sheila. “Crossing Cultures and Kinds: Maria Irene Fornes and the Performance of a Post-Modern Sublime.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9, no. 2 (spring 1997): 33-43.

In the following essay, Rabillard argues that Fornes's plays combine postmodern techniques of distancing the audience with dramatic scenes of emotional transcendence.

Maria Irene Fornes' recent play, Enter the Night, is situated in the intersections between “high art” and “popular culture”; “mediatized” and “live” performance; cultural assimilation and nightmares of miscegenation. While such intersections have become familiar territory for post-modern interrogation, Fornes draws from the ruptured boundaries of late capitalism a means to rearticulate a language of desire in the face of human suffering. The most striking manifestation of Fornes' delicately transgressive dramaturgy is her binding of post-modern techniques that point out the limits of representation to her concern with classic questions of constructing an emotional sublime. This is the curious conjunction...