In the fall of 2018, Gwendolyn Alker invited me to partner with her in reviving Evelyn Brown (A Diary) for the first time since its premiere in 1980 at Theater for a New City. Maria Irene Fornes is the most important writer in my directing career, the one I return to again and again for always bracing encounters with formalist experiments and hearts on fire. I immediately said yes.
As Alker describes in her essay on excavating this work, the text of the “play” is drawn primarily from short diary entries written by a domestic worker in early 1900s New Hampshire. Only incomplete versions of the original script remain, along with seventy or so rehearsal photos taken by Sylvia Plachy. Luckily, Fornes had passed a mostly complete script on to the theatre scholar Marc Robinson; we worked primarily from those pages and added some bits from other drafts. The text...