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.

The author details the cycle of encounters that María Irene Fornés had with the Actors Studio during the 1960s. With no structured curriculum, no attendance requirements, and no formalized term assessments, the instructional culture of the Actors Studio afforded Fornés a perhaps unique opportunity both to be recognized as a playwright but also to study the making of theatre. Herrera argues that María Irene Fornés’s encounters with the Actors Studio ethos gave her the opportunity to think with and against some of the most influential voices in American theatre at midcentury even as those experiences also provoked Fornés to devise her own techniques for crafting “moment to moment” realities onstage; her recalibrations of theatrical authority; and her innovations in arts pedagogy.

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.