Kenneth Prestininzi served as director of the playwriting program at the Latin American Writers Workshop, where Fornés taught in 1997 and 1998. Here, Prestininzi draws upon their own experiences of witnessing and experiencing the provocation of Fornés’s teaching modality while immersed in the communal intensity of a residential writing retreat in Mexico. As it shifts between the present and past tense, Prestininzi’s contribution emerges as both an exercise in experimental memoir and also as a work of archival excavation. This dual temporal register vividly captures both the context and the experience of María Irene Fornés’s galvanizing pedagogy, particularly its capacity to stir what Prestinzinzi describes as the “unpredictability of our imaginations.”

Founding members of the award-winning theater and media company Fake Friends, Michael Breslin and Catherine María “Cat” Rodríguez are multifaceted artist-scholars who met while studying dramaturgy at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. Breslin and Rodríguez quickly connected over their respectively galvanizing encounters with the plays of María Irene Fornés and the provocations of Fornésian dramaturgy. Here, in both their short play Truffle Pigs and the short author’s note that precedes it, Breslin and Rodríguez deploy the tools of dramatic writing (and the incisiveness of their signature wit) to animate the multivocal mix of fervent disagreement, enthusiastic curiosity, and stubborn uncertainty that typically collide in scholarly and artistic investigations of the ways feminism does – and does not – define the dramaturgy of María Irene Fornés.