However, its seeming slightness did not betray its wisdom and grace, which accumulated over the play's duration to produce an almost overwhelmingly emotional feeling in the audience. Once again, Fornes, through her meticulous staging, her eye for gestural detail, and her ability to elicit open, honest performances from her actors had worked slender theatrical magic. Letters from Cuba is as much a reflection on the act of creation, as it is on memory and how it inhabits a mental space that is active despite an individual's choice to acknowledge it or not. She expresses herself almost exclusively through movement. Her body is her text, and through it we see a whole life, a history of yearning and buried pain.
Memory is in the body, in the sinews of the flesh.
Art, then, becomes the conduit for personal communication, for expressions of private thought. Throughout the play, the question that is asked at the beginning is answered several times over. A poem can be written in many ways and forms. It can serve many purposes, but what is important is that it is breathing. It is a classic triangle, which Fornes has often explored in her work from Tango Palace to Mud to Abingdon Square .