Writer Gains Something in the Translation of Play : Stage: Maria Irene Fornes had her doubts when the San Diego Rep asked her to put ‘Abingdon Square’ into Spanish. But what she got made her happy.

Maria Irene Fornes was surprised when the San Diego Repertory Theatre asked her to translate her play “Abingdon Square” into Spanish. But the result pleased her. And it taught the seven-time Obie winner a few things about her work in the process.

When the Cuban-born writer, director and teacher wrote the play nearly half a dozen years ago, she had visualized the characters as American WASPS.

“I liked the idea of translating the play, but I thought it was odd,” the slightly rumpled-looking Fornes said in her soft, Cuban-accented voice in a San Diego Rep conference room. “I thought it was a play that would be peculiar in Spanish, because it’s not a Latin world.”

But once she started translating, a remarkable thing happened.

“The people became Spanish. At first I thought, ‘How odd to hear these words in Spanish.’ And then I thought, ‘Indeed--perhaps because I wrote it and I’m of Spanish origin, there are aspects that are very Catholic rather than Protestant--such as the way the lady thinks she is unfaithful because she has had unfaithful thoughts.’ ”

Fornes, 60, will direct the California premiere of “Abingdon Square” in English at the Lyceum Space beginning Wednesday, as well as the world premiere of the Spanish translation (as “La Plaza Chica”) for six public performances during the course of the run. (There will be two additional Spanish matinees just for students.) The bilingual production is part of the Rep’s annual “Teatro Sin Fronteras” program--”Theater Without Boundaries.”

At the heart of “Abingdon Square” is the story of a young girl who marries a man 30 years older, with tragic results. The tragedy is not just for obvious reasons.

These two people genuinely care for each other. Because both characters are sympathetic, when problems occur between them, there are no clear-cut solutions.

“To me, it’s a tragedy because he’s so sweet and so good,” Fornes said. “It’s a story of two people who have a profound affection for each other and owe their lives to each other. There’s a wonderful feeling, but you know there’s a faulty column and the building will collapse. As beautiful as it is, it will not work because she has not matured.

“And he’s so naive that he doesn’t realize it would never work--that the difference in age was too great,” she said.

Fornes smiled when asked what attracted her to the story.

The play, she explained, did not start with an idea. Rather it was an image, an image of a young girl, whom she called Marion, that kept pursuing her. The story itself came much later.

“It came from a writing exercise from my workshop at INTAR,” she said, referring to her seminar at International Arts Relations in New York, where she has lived since she emigrated from Havana at 15.

“I wanted to make my students aware of how you can create imagery without writing. I asked them to think of the writing of other students in the class. I asked everyone to take a character someone else wrote and put it in an entirely different environment.”

Fornes, who usually participates in the class assignments, chose a character one of her students had created: a young girl in 1910 who had just auditioned for a part in a play.

Then she put her into a very small room, leaning over a table, also in 1910.

“She had been crying, and a young man was standing next to her wearing a military uniform. She was saying, ‘I will not take the money. I will stay with my child.’ And she called the young man, ‘Son,’ even though they were the same age. I thought, ‘Why does she call him Son?’

“But I just kept writing.”

Days and weeks after the exercise ended, the character kept returning to her, revealing more of her story. Eventually Fornes realized that the young woman called the young man her son because he was her stepson--she was married to a much older man who was the boy’s father.

“What interested me was the clarity of the way the scenes came and the dialogue came. I felt I didn’t have to contrive to create a character, but the character was clear. I didn’t have to push it. I would just tune in and something would happen. It was obvious that that was what I had to write because that was what I was writing.”

“Abingdon Square” had its world premiere in 1987 at the American Place Theatre in New York.

But, in an odd way, the show’s love-hate conflict between young and old has parallels to the very first play Fornes wrote--nearly a quarter of a century before.

She was 29 and a painter. But she was gradually losing interest in art. She had even come to the point where she had to force herself to paint.

“I never thought I wanted to write, and one day--I don’t know how it happened--suddenly I was obsessed with writing a play about an androgynous old man who loves tormenting a young man. He gives him ideas that he has to kill him to free himself.”

The play, called “Tango Palace,” was produced by the Actors Workshop in San Francisco in 1963.

With that bold stroke, Fornes killed off the painter in herself and became a writer, later developing into a director and teacher as well.

Along with Sam Shepard and George Chaikin, Tom O’Horgan and, later, Andrei Serban, she became one of the founders of what would become a thriving Off Broadway movement.

She has since written more than 20 plays varying widely in subject and style, from the intimate drama of “Fefu and Her Friends” to a musical called “Promenade” to “The Conduct of Life,” which is set in a Latin-American dictatorship.

Although much honored, with Obies (Off Broadway’s version of the Tony) and Guggenheims, a Rockefeller Foundation grant and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she has rarely been invited to do her work in California.

This invitation from the San Diego Rep is a welcome exception.

“Why is it that theaters in the California area don’t ask me to do my plays?” she asked.

She credits Mac Wellman for generating local interest in her work. Wellman wrote “7 Blowjobs,” a successful world premiere by Sledgehammer Theatre that is still playing at the 10th Avenue Garage in San Diego.

“I got a call from Doug (Jacobs, the artistic director of the San Diego Rep) who told me that Mac Wellman--who is a wonderful friend of other playwrights--had brought ‘Abingdon Square’ to his attention.”

Fornes dismisses the idea that she has a reputation for doing things in her own, idiosyncratic way.

True, she insisted on directing the 1988 production of her short play “Drowning” with large puppets on a miniature stage as part of the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival, which she co-founded in 1978 and which is now based at Cal State Northridge.

But that was an exception. “The puppets were unusual,” she said.

“I enjoy acting that I can believe in, when I can believe what’s happening to the characters is really happening,” Fornes said. “When something is very large and very dramatic and bizarre and I still believe it, I love it all the more.

“But I love realism. And the minute I believe the actor is faking it, I lose interest,” she said.

And that’s why Fornes loves the proficiency of her “Abingdon Square” cast in both Spanish and English. Her biggest fear, she said, was that a cast fluent in Spanish would speak English with an accent and imbue their English performances with Latin attitudes. This cast doesn’t, she said. In that way, she has literally gotten the best of both worlds.

“I feel I have a cast that I would choose even if this wasn’t a bilingual production. I didn’t want to jeopardize the Anglo Saxon mentality (in the English version), and I haven’t. They are perfectly bilingual and there are no accents.”

Performances of “Abingdon Square” are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday , with Sunday matinees at 2 through Feb. 9. Special performances in Spanish on Jan. 19, Jan. 31, Feb. 8 and Feb. 9. Tickets are $19-$22. At the Lyceum Space, Horton Plaza. Call 235-8025.