María Irene Fornés (1930–2018) remains one of the most influential but least recognized playwrights of the twentieth century. Winner of nine Obie Awards and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Fornés wrote over forty plays during her career, which spanned almost four decades. However, Fornés remains much less known than her contemporaries, who include Edward Albee, Caryl Churchill, John Guare, Terrence McNally, Sam Shepard, and Lanford Wilson. An autodidact, Fornés began her artistic life as a painter and an acting student, leading to a celebrated playwriting, directing, and teaching career that emphasized interdisciplinarity and experimentalism. While eschewing identity politics, Fornés’s positionality as a Cuban American, feminist, avant-garde, and lesbian theatre artist influenced her work. Her theatrical legacy continues through her former students, who include leading US playwrights, directors, and scholars.
Born in Havana, Cuba, Fornés, along with her mother and sister, immigrated to the United States in 1945. They moved to New York City, where Fornés worked and lived until her death in 2018. Leaving formal schooling shortly after her US arrival, Fornés continued to study various art forms including painting, dancing, and acting. While in a relationship with US author Susan Sontag, Fornés began writing plays and eventually became a leading voice in the Off-Off-Broadway movement. Her plays vary widely in tone, theme, and style, yet maintain a distinctive exactitude through her theatrical language and depth of character exploration. Her most celebrated works include Fefu and Her Friends (1977), exploring a group of women in 1930s New England who prepare for an educational fundraiser, Mud (1983), examining the lives of three rural residents as they struggle to educate themselves to survive, and The Conduct of Life (1985), delving into the abusive home of a military officer in an unnamed Latin American country. Many of her plays also included music, most notably Promenade (1969), following two escaped inmates who encounter numerous eccentric elites, with music by Al Carmines, that ran successfully Off-Broadway. Fornés also directed the majority of the world premieres of her plays.
In addition to her playwriting, Fornés maintained a distinguished career as a director and producer. In 1973, she co-founded New York Theatre Strategy, a theatre collective that produced her work and the work of contemporary playwrights including Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Murray Mednick, Sam Shepard, and Megan Terry. She began to direct her own plays during this time, a practice that continued for the duration of her career, including more than seventy-five productions. During her career, she also directed classic works by Ibsen, Chekhov, and García Lorca, as well as several plays by her students.
Fornés taught playwriting in universities, colleges, theatres, and art institutions for over thirty years and deeply influenced US playwriting pedagogy. Her groundbreaking, interdisciplinary playwriting method employed elements from yoga, visual arts, and acting. Beginning with a physical warm-up, she led students through sense memory and visualization exercises to generate characters and new play material. She also employed drawing, collage, and found materials (text fragments and photographs) to inspire the playwriting process. Most notably, through a major grant from the Ford Foundation, Fornés founded and taught the Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab at INTAR in New York City from 1981 to 1992, training fifty playwrights, whose careers have largely shaped US Latiné theatre in the past three decades.Footnote 1
Goals of the Volume
María Irene Fornés in Context invites you to join the process of discovering María Irene Fornés in her many contexts. Each of the volume’s four sections delves into four distinct contextual framings of, respectively, Fornés’s life, work, and legacy. These parts take up, in turn, the influential places and people within Fornés’s life; the overlapping and intersecting theatrical worlds that informed her work; the disparate aspects of identity and community inflecting her work and its reception; and the multifaceted ways her legacy continues to be cultivated. Within each section, our broadly interdisciplinary contributors model multiple registers of critical and interpretive engagement, with many entries adopting the sort of expository prose style typical of scholarly nonfiction even as others offer the sort of experiential or experimental investigations more typical of memoir, playwriting, and performance pedagogy. (We have provided brief prefaces to guide readers’ generative engagement with these experiential or experimental entries.) Additionally, some chapters incorporate original translations, interviews, and transcriptions of previously unplumbed archival materials. In structuring the volume as we have, and by including such an adventurously interdisciplinary constellation of contributions, we hope that this volume aptly reflects the dynamic experimentalism and defiant anti-disciplinarity of María Irene Fornés herself.
Part I (Places and People) contextualizes the cities, artistic institutions, and individuals who most shaped Fornés’s life and work. This section first considers Fornés’s connections to Havana, New York City, and Paris and how each city influenced her personal and professional trajectories. Next, essays take up Fornés’s involvement in diverse artistic institutions, including those based in New York City (the Actors Studio, Judson Memorial Church, and INTAR) as well as those housing her significant engagement in California (the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival) and Mexico (the Latin American Writers Workshop, held in Taxco, Mexico). The final few entries in this section excavate Fornés’s connections to Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), with whom she studied, writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004), her romantic partner in the later 1950s and early 1960s, and Carmen Collado Fornés (1891–1996), her Cuban Spanish mother, a former schoolteacher who brought Fornés to New York City in 1945, where they both lived until Carmen’s death at one hundred and four.
Part II (Theatre) delves into the diverse theatrical contexts in which Fornés wrote and directed her plays, as well as how she influenced subsequent generations of playwrights. This section engages distinct theatrical movements and traditions that point to Fornés as a key influence or figure. The section begins with an examination of Fornés’s practice of directing most of her world premieres, while nurturing long-term collaborations with theatre designers. Next, we turn to a reflection on Fornés’s influence as a foundational voice in the Off-Off-Broadway movement. Then, in contributions engaging Fornés’s engagement with environmental theatre, music theatre, performance art, and translation/adaptation, authors evince how practitioners in each of these contexts point to and often claim Fornés as one of their own. Yet when considered in constellation, the components of this section demonstrate both the breadth and depth of Fornés’s impact within these distinct circuits of theatrical experimentation in the later twentieth century.
Part III (Culture, Society, and Politics) explores the cultural, societal, and political contexts that informed both the creation of Fornés’s work and also those creative and interpretive communities that took up Fornés’s work as central to their own projects. This section begins with a consideration of Fornés’s complex connections to Cuba, the country of her birth that continued to inform her life and work. Living in New York City from age fifteen until her death at age eighty-eight, Fornés contended with what it means to be Hispanic/Latinx/Latiné in the United States, both before and after she became recognized as one of American drama’s leading Latina dramatists. As she began her theatrical career based in experimentalism, Fornés’s work consistently engaged topics, themes, and forms central to those invested in avant-gardist and/or environmentalist performance. As a queer, female playwright working in US theatre, her work was readily embraced (and critiqued) by lesbian and feminist interpreters. And as her experience of Alzheimer’s disease came to define the final decades of her life, Fornés inhabited the role of elder in unexpected ways. Ultimately, this section takes up the many identities that Fornés might have claimed, but which she rarely did, as well as the disparate communities that find themselves within and through her work.
Part IV (Legacy) considers the evolving contexts in which Fornés’s legacy continues to thrive. Fornés developed an innovative playwriting method that continues to be taught at universities, theatres, and arts organizations by alumni playwrights, those who trained with her. Yet, Fornés’s work as a theatre artist and teacher based in orality and embodied practice presents unique challenges for documentation. However, many of Fornés’s major works have entered the archive through her longtime publisher, PAJ Publications. When Fornés ceased writing plays due to her struggle with Alzheimer’s, she left several incomplete texts that scholars and artists are working to recover. This recuperation process is connected to community-based advocacy movements that aim to preserve and advocate for the Fornés legacy. The essays in this section highlight the disparate contexts in which distinct aspects of the Fornésian tradition continue to be cultivated for subsequent generations of artists, students, and scholars.
Our Editorial Approach
As we invited authors to contribute to Fornés in Context, we asked each writer to evince the contextual significance of the keyword framing their contribution and, at the same time, to make María Irene Fornés the “star” of each chapter’s story. To that end, we did not pose any additional topical, thematic, or temporal limits on our invited contributors. Our vision was that these many micro-portraits might contribute to a larger composite or mosaic portrait of María Irene Fornés. Attentive readers will notice that particular topics, figures, episodes, and experiences recur across different volume entries, with sometimes distinct claims of significance emerging within the different renderings. Some readers might also note Fornés’s interest in how humans live in times of economic or ecological catastrophe, how they are shaped by carceral or dictatorial states, or how they inhabit the structural violence of poverty and ignorance. Others might observe how many of Fornés’s early experiments with theatrical styles, compositional form, and dramatic techniques have become central to the techniques deployed by twenty-first-century dramatists. We have embraced the many points of overlap, intersection, and serendipity among the entries as proof of the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable constellation of contexts configuring María Irene Fornés’s life, work, and legacy.
Our contributors include both emerging and established scholars and theatre artists from the US and UK. Some authors have published widely on Fornés while others are wading into Fornésian waters for the first time. Some contributors worked closely with Fornés during her lifetime while others gained experiential knowledge of Fornés through the different intimacies of the classroom, the rehearsal room, and the archive. Some are playwrights, directors, and dramaturgs who have collaborated on productions of Fornés’s work while others are translators of her work. Additionally, many writers in this volume are members of the Fornés Institute,Footnote 2 an initiative of the Latinx Theatre Commons,Footnote 3 that aims to preserve and to amplify Fornés’s legacy as a teacher, mentor, and artist, through workshops, convenings, and advocacy.
Our overarching philosophy throughout the process of building this volume has been to appreciate inconsistency or uncertainty as abundance and to resist the editorial impulse to “decide” what is definitively “correct.” With regard to matters of terminology, spelling, and diacritics, however, we did need to identify several guiding principles for contributions to this volume. For example, we have chosen to trust each contributor’s decision on whether and how the use of Cuban, Hispanic, Latina/Latino, Latinx, Latiné, or some combination thereof is most apt in the particular context of their engagement with Fornés. (For additional discussion of the political, historical, and cultural valence of each of these terms with regard to Fornés, please see the contribution from Jon Rossini and Patricia Ybarra in Chapter 18 of this volume.) Likewise, though we have generally encouraged contributors to refer to Fornés by full name or surname, we have respected the impulse among some contributors – especially those who knew Fornés well – to use the more familiar “Irene” when referring to her. (We might also note that every indication suggests that Fornés was content using the pronouns “she” or “ella” in relation to herself, so we have followed that convention within the volume as well.) Finally, with regard to the more confounding question of diacritics – or whether accents should be used when spelling her name – we note that Fornés’s own use of diacritics when spelling her name was inconsistent, sometimes depending on who she was writing to (and when) and whether she was writing by hand or by typewriter. (Please see the contribution by Lillian Manzor for an account of the dynamic history of Fornés’s many given names.) At the same time, we recognize the relatively recent shift toward the use of diacritics by journalists, producers, and academics when spelling her name. To accommodate this complexity, we have asked contributors to include diacritics in their own spelling of Fornés’s name but to not “correct” prior spellings when quoting or citing previously published works.
How to Use this Volume: or, Pathways through the Fornésian Forest
During a playwriting workshop in the early 1990s, Fornés observed, “The key to playwriting is not exclusively conflict but it is about paths. Paths going through a forest … what makes you go a certain way … what is driving you down this path?”Footnote 4 Likewise, this volume provides a variety of paths through the Fornésian forest. In addition to the thematic journeys plotted by the volume’s four parts, there are other, less immediately legible pathways that we would like to highlight to prompt additional strategies for navigating this volume’s contents. These pathways include experimentation, pedagogy, bilinguality, networks, archival discoveries, and choose your own adventure.
Experimentation. For those seeking to experiment with Fornésian playwriting, consider Elaine Romero’s play that reflects on Fornés’s relationship with Harriet Sohmers in Paris 1954, and respond to her concluding prompt to experiment with Fornés’s use of found materials. Engage Juliana Frey-Méndez’s reflection on Fornés’s connections to performance art and the postdramatic, and experiment with her “Fornésian shuffle” that applies Fornés’s playwriting method to analyzing the Fornésian canon. Further, delve into Migdalia Cruz’s reflection on her time at INTAR’s Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab, then experiment with her Fornés Playwriting Method exercise. As you experiment, allow yourself ample time to generate your own Fornésian creative process.
Pedagogy. For those seeking classroom engagement, consider casting, reading, and discussing the two short plays in this volume: Romero’s Harriet and Irene: Infinite Muses and Truffle Pigs by Michael Breslin and Catherine María “Cat” Rodríguez, which explores a group of students preparing for an exam on Fornés and feminism. Additionally, students could read aloud the filmic scenes in the experimental nonfiction piece by director Michelle Memran and producer Katie Pearl, that charts their relationship with Fornés while creating The Rest I Make Up, their award-winning 2018 documentary. As you discuss, consider the following questions: How does this piece of dramatic writing illuminate Fornés’s life and work? What aesthetic strategies do these artists employ to contextualize Fornés? How is this play or screenplay reflective of the Fornésian tradition?
Bilinguality. For those who want to delve into Fornés’s relations between Spanish, her first language, and English, her second language, begin with Eric Mayer-Garcia’s reflections on Fornés and the Cuban avant-garde. Next, with Anne García-Romero’s consideration of Carmen Collado Fornés, learn about Fornés’s bilingual beginnings. Following that, delve into Lillian Manzor’s investigation of how Fornés’s Cubanity perpetually informed her linguistic and artistic journeys. Finally, examine Adam Versényi’s close reading of Fornés’s translation of her play, The Conduct of Life.
Networks. For readers interested in those who collaborated directly with Fornés, begin with four of her former students: playwright Caridad Svich’s reflection on INTAR, playwright Andréa Onstad’s experience at the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival, writer/director Kenneth Prestininzi’s account of the Latin American Writers Workshop in Taxco, Mexico, and playwright Luis Alfaro’s reflection on alumni playwrights at the Mark Taper Forum. Next, consider her former agent Morgan Jenness’s memoir about Fornés’s foundational presence in the Off-Off-Broadway movement. Subsequently, read the interview between Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and Bonnie Marranca, Fornés’s longtime publisher. Finally, engage the experimental nonfiction piece by director Memran and producer Pearl, which charts their relationship with Fornés while creating The Rest I Make Up, their award-winning 2018 documentary that chronicles Fornés in her later years.
Archival discoveries. For those interested in tracing how scholars have identified new pathways within the Fornés archive, start with Brian Eugenio Herrera’s consideration of Fornés’s time at New York City’s acclaimed Actors Studio, informed by newly discovered interviews between Fornés and writer Peter Manso. Next, delve into Lillian Manzor’s in-depth consideration of the largely untapped, Spanish-language Fornés archive, including correspondence, archival footage, and plays. Following that, engage Roy Pérez’s analysis of Fornés and the avant-garde, specifically his reflection on her short play Art, part of INTAR’s Box Plays, whose script recently resurfaced in the archive. Finally, engage Anne García-Romero’s chapter on Carmen Collado Fornés for access to genealogical and epistolary revelations as well as her chapter on recovering The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus, through oral histories and a newly discovered critique contextualizing the 2001 production of Fornés’s final, incomplete play.
Choose your own adventure. Lastly, you might enact some of the practices of creative spontaneity that were Fornés’s signature by choosing your own pathway through the volume. Select two or three chapters from the table of contents, perhaps at random. As you engage each author’s contribution, consider some of the following questions: What threads connect these disparate chapters? What differences or distinctions are highlighted? What affinities do you notice among the authors’ respective compositional strategies? How do these authorial choices inform or activate distinct perspectives on Fornés? What questions do these chapters raise for you and how might these questions prompt your own Fornésian explorations or discoveries? We might also encourage you to engage the Further Reading list or to use the volume’s index to plot your own pathways through the Fornésian forest.
A Word of Welcome
Our hope is that Fornés in Context will inform and inspire its readers in equal measure. As guided by the expertise of each contributor, each entry both evinces valuable new insights and develops provocations for further intellectual or artistic excavation. As scholar Maria M. Delgado reminds us in the volume’s final chapter, “The Fornésian invites the spectator to engage and to enter a world that always has something of the unfamiliar about it. It is unpredictable but it contains possibilities – a what if element.” Most critical anthologies in this series synthesize scholarship. Fornés in Context performs this invaluable work even as each chapter opens a particular window – a distinct “what if” – within the life, work, and legacy of María Irene Fornés. We therefore offer this volume as an invitation to you – to join the creative, critical, and scholarly conversations still stirred by María Irene Fornés. As the world continues to discover the artistry and relevance of her plays and her pedagogy, we welcome you to the process of discovering your own “what ifs” within the many as-yet-to-be-told stories of María Irene Fornés in her many contexts.
1 Paola Hernández and Analola Santana, Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 69–7210.4324/9781003144700-14.
2 Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Evanescence: Three Tales of the Recent Queer Theatrical Past,” Theatre Topics 26.1 (March 2016), 50–5110.1353/tt.2016.0019. See also the organization’s website: fornesinstitute.com.
3 Teresa Marrero, “The Latinx Theatre Commons: A Commons-Based Approach Movement,” Theatre Topics 27.1 (March 2017): E11–E1910.1353/tt.2017.0013. See also the organization’s website: howlround.com/ltc.
4 María Irene Fornés, “MFA Playwriting Workshop” (Anne García-Romero’s notes, Yale School of Drama, September 12, 1992).
