Morgan Jenness served as María Irene Fornés’s theatrical agent, as well as her dramaturg, and finally as her caregiver and advocate. Here, working within the genre of autobiographical life-writing, Jenness draws upon her own experiences of witnessing and collaborating with Fornés to frame her critical and historical contextualization of Fornés’s foundational role in the early years of the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the early 1960s, when an emerging generation of theatremakers centered experimental and avant-garde techniques in often irreverent defiance of the perceived commercialism of the mainstream American theatre.

Although María Irene Fornés is recognized by her peers as one of the great avant-garde innovators of her time, her absence from many critical and mainstream accounts of American playwriting suggests that her experimental techniques were not easily intelligible as part of a movement, even one fabled for the unintelligibility of its creative effects. As a corrective critical gesture, Roy Pérez looks to Art (a short and sparsely documented play from 1986) to understand the role of the avant-garde in Fornés’s larger body of work. Pérez argues that – even as the avant-garde earned a reputation for being fixated on unpragmatic political ideals, aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, or humorless alienation – Fornés wrote plays plays that danced their characters and viewers through spellbinding thought experiments, making lofty questions seem like everyday ruminations, that we might pursue with a sense of play, or at least with authentic feeling.

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.

A critical overview of the lost, unfinished, or incomplete works that María Irene Fornés left behind. Detailing those works ripe for reconstruction or recuperation (Evelyn Brown and The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus) alongside those caught in limbo (The Office and The Widow), this contribution offers extended attention to the methodology of researching and restoring works that exhibit the hallmarks of Fornesian playwriting and merit wider recognition.

Scott Cummings argues that María Irene Fornés, who is perhaps best known as a playwright, approached theatremaking as much as a director and designer as she did as a writer and that these seemingly disparate compositional practices were essential to her creative process. Though her earliest productions were directed by others, over the course of the 1970s, Fornés established herself as the initial director of her work, often starting a workshop or first production before a script was finished and then completing and revising the play during rehearsals and even while directing the second (or third) production. While writing and directing are different processes – one is solitary and private, the other is social and interactive – for Fornés they were part of a single effort to use words, images, and characters to create stage pictures evocative in their composition, resonant in their lyricism, and marked by silence and stillness.

Carla Della Gatta considers the relative abundance of the Fornésian archive – several dozen published scripts, very few “lost Fornés plays,” and an artistic practice that is nearly as documented as the productions and plays themselves – in tandem with the disproportionate lack of scholarship on someone so influential to the American theatre. To explain, Della Gatta evinces the challenges posed to documentarians by a bilingual, bicultural artist such as Fornés and argues that the task of documenting Fornés requires an unusually comprehensive sense of her entire canon in order to develop meaningful analysis, context, and criticism. Della Gatta also details the emerging tradition of Fornésian documentation that has evolved since the 1990s, and that not only includes the balance of archive formation, critical analysis, and artmaking necessary to draw forward the integration of Fornésian styles, forms, and perspectives, but also prioritizes a distinctive ethics of care.

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.