Here’s the thing about María Irene Fornés’ Mud, it’s the kind of work that grabs you by the throat not because it’s loud but because it’s so goddamn quiet in its devastation. These photographs from Kellen Hoxworth’s Stanford production in the Nitery capture something essential: poverty isn’t picturesque, and these bodies moving through space understand that bruising truth.
Henry’s monologue about disposability, about using things once because caring requires time we don’t have, that’s not futurism, that’s prophecy fulfilled. Fornés wrote this in 1983 but she might as well have been documenting last Tuesday.
Henry: Soon everything will be used only once. We will use things once. We will need to do that as our time will be value and it will not be feasible to spend it caring for things: washing them, mending them, repairing them. We will use a car till it breaks down. Then, we will discard it.
María Irene Fornés Mud
What makes Mud radical isn’t its politics exactly, it’s that María Irene Fornés’ understood theatre could be as stripped down and essential as one of those folks sons Alan Lomax recorded. No fat. No bullshit. Just Mae caught between two men in a shack that might as well be the entire universe, education as the only possible escape route but even that’s compromised, contaminated.
Kellen gave this text what it deserves: not respect, exactly, but that rarer thing, genuine attention to the way survival grinds people down into something simultaneously harder and more fragile than they started.