Fly the friendly skies

In the current issue of Time Out New York, I interview Clove Galilee and Jenny Rogers, the brains behind Wickets, a clever adaptation of Maria Irene Fornes's play Fefu and Her Friends. Fornes has been in the news in an indirect way recently, thanks to the publication of the early diaries of Susan Sontag, with whom the playwright had an affair. A couple of excerpts, published in the Times two years ago:

November 20, 1959
"I have never been as demanding of anyone as I am of [the Cuban-American playwright Maria] I[rene Fornes]. I am jealous of everyone she sees, I hurt every minute she goes away from me. But not when I leave her, and know that she is here. My love wants to incorporate her totally, to eat her. My love is selfish. … Tonight she went from work to meet Inez at the San Remo. Ann Morrissett [journalist and playwright] was there. After, the Cedar Bar. She came home at 12:00; I was asleep. She came to bed, told me about the conversations of the evening, at 2:00 asked that the light be put out, went to sleep. I was paralyzed, mute, swollen with tears. I smoked, she slept.

December 28, 1959
Till now I have felt that the only persons I could know in depth, or really love, were duplicates or versions of my own wretched self. (My intellectual and sexual feelings have always been incestuous.) Now I know + love someone who is not like me — e.g. not a Jew, not a New York-type intellectual — without any failure of intimacy. I am always conscious of I’s foreignness, of the absence of a shared background — and I experience this as a great release.