Playwright and teacher Migdalia Cruz was among the first participants in María Irene Fornés’s Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory at INTAR in the early 1980s. In the decades since, Cruz has become not only one of the most influential Latina playwrights in the United States but also a central figure in guiding new generations of writers, scholars, and artists through the foundational principles and practices of the Fornés playwriting method. Here, Cruz balances the reflective impulse of memoir with the more didactic priorities of instruction as, first, she outlines core principles of Fornés’s pedagogy (including direct quotations from some of Fornés’s teaching sessions in italics) before guiding the reader through an in-depth demonstration of a representative Fornés playwriting exercise, followed by some optional homework for future writing sessions.

Playwright, publisher, and teacher Caridad Svich was among the first participants in María Irene Fornés’s Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory at INTAR in the 1980s. In the decades since, Svich has become not only one of the most influential and widely produced Latina playwrights in the United States but also a central figure in documenting and preserving the Fornés legacy. Here, Svich offers a summary history of INTAR that considers how Fornés and INTAR have shaped the trajectory of Latiné theatre in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Svich’s account is also animated by her own memoiristic reflections on the experience of learning with and from Fornés at INTAR.

María Irene Fornés is likely the most well-known Latiné playwright in the US. It is also widely known that Fornés is a lesbian, yet, her sexual orientation is rarely, if ever, at the forefront of her plays. Fornés also famously resisted these labels, which she considered limiting and reductive. The authors argue that challenges in labeling Fornés stem not only from her personal resistance to limiting categories, but also her specific biography, aesthetics, and politics as well as her active resistance to sanitized institutional multicultural frames adopted by predominantly white mainstream cultural institutions that attempted to categorize these experiences in ways convenient for social scientists, policymakers, and the market. The authors query whether and how Fornés prompts contemporary readers to resist the desire to read her work as ethnographic portraiture or testimonial literature and instead as an articulation of creative worlds within and through a distinctively Latiné sensibility.