The year of 1927 witnesses Martin Heidegger astonishing the German philosophical world with his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, Eng. 1962); half a century later, the important avant-garde dramatist Maria Irene Fornes stirred American theatre with her tour de force Fefu and Her Friends. Notwithstanding the tremendous gap of time and space between the two incidents, the German philosopher's insight revealed in his work may shed light on the American play. In Being and Time, Heidegger's declared purpose is to study what it means for a man to be. The most important of the terms he invented is "Dasein". Literally in the German language, "Dasein" means existence, that is, being there in space and time as contrasted with not being at all. To Heidegger, however, the term refers to human being, the entity whose being consists in disclosing and understanding being, whether the being of itself or that of other entities. (See Sheehan 1998) "To Dasein's Being, an understanding of Being belongs." (Being and Time, p118) Dasein has been cast into the world. In a sense, Descartes' dogma has been inverted like this: "I exist, therefore I think". Unfortunately, Dasein tends to become excessively absorbed in everyday concerns and oblivious to its own being. He loses the sense of its "authentic" self, and becomes one of the "they" (das Man), one of the anonymous crowd, taking the "they" 's values and incorporating its ways of thinking and acting.
