For more than a decade, filmmaker Michelle Memran worked creatively with Fornés on what would become the award-winning 2018 documentary The Rest I Make Up. The celebrated and widely screened film distilled some 400 hours of footage into a 79-minute exploration of a friendship and creative collaboration that began during the period when Fornés had “stopped writing” but had not yet received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Pearl and Memran’s co-written piece continues the collaborative process of critical reflection and creative compilation that guided the post-production phase of the film, when Katie Pearl joined the project as producer. Interweaving unused scenes from the film – transcribed from the original footage and presented here in “screenplay” form – with their own experiential observations, Pearl and Memran’s experimental memoir “documents” the complexity of María Irene Fornés’s role as “elder” during the last two decades of her life, a period beginning in 2000 and continuing through to Fornés’s death from dementia-related causes in 2018.

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.