In this paper two woman dramatists are going to be compared and contrasted as far as their cultures and reflection of cultures on their plays are concerned. Two women playwrights, the Turkish Adalet Ağaoğlu (1929-2020) and the Cuban-American Maria Irene Fornes (1930-2018) are contemporaries and hence are the products of the same historical era.
Ağaoğlu and Fornes had started writing plays in almost the same years. Ağaoğlu was born in 1929 (in Nallıhan, near Ankara) and she entered the world of drama and performance arts in the 1960s. Quite similarly, Fornes was born in 1930 (in Havana, Cuba) but immigrated to the US in 1945. Although they came from different countries and have different cultural backgrounds and codes, they both experimented with innovative dramatic devices and focused on the issues of women. Fornes is involved in the early days of the off-off Broadway in the 1960s. She had used unusual dialogues, unconventional dramatic structures and stage design under the impact of Samuell Beckett. Yet it I difficult to characterize the plays of Fornes but Patricia R. Schoeder locates her within the traditions of realistic theatre and reevaluates the “realism” of Maria Irene Fornes in terms of cultural feminism (1).