Pattern Recognition, Reconstructed: The Unlikely Return of Fornés’s ‘Evelyn Brown’

AMERICAN THEATRE: The great American playwright María Irene Fornés loved flea markets, secondhand shops, thrift stores—anywhere she might find a discarded object that for her exuded a simple charm or raw beauty. On occasion, one of these hidden gems inspired her work on a new play, and none more so than the 1909 diary of a small town New Hampshire housekeeper named Evelyn Brown. Fornés came across the diary in a Massachusetts antique shop in the late 1970s and became so fascinated by its matter-of-fact accounts of daily routines—chores completed, visits made or received, news about the locals—that she decided to use portions of the diary as the text for a theatre piece featuring patterned movement, outbursts of music and dance, even breadmaking.