Maria Irene Fornés Papers

Maria Irene Fornés is a Cuban-American avant-garde dramatist, director, and teacher of playwriting. Her work, most particularly associated with both the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway movements of the 1960s and the "downtown scene" of New York City in the 1980s, has had a major influence on several generations of American playwrights. Winner of 9 Obies, as well as numerous additional awards and honors, Fornés wrote over 50 works for the stage between 1961 and 2001. Subjects of her work have included women's lives, lesbian love, Cuban culture, poverty, and emigration; and themes have featured social, political, and interpersonal power relationships.

Fornés was born on May 14, 1930, in Havana, Cuba, the youngest of six children of Carlos Luis and Carmen Hismenia (Collado) Fornés. Her father, a self-taught intellectual, worked at modest white-collar government jobs and her mother had been a teacher before marriage. The family was poor, but cultured. Fornés, with less than four years of formal schooling, was mostly educated at home.

At age 15, Irene (as she began to call herself) emigrated to the United States with her mother and a sister. There she worked at a number of routine jobs to support herself, including in a ribbon factory. In 1947 Fornés took a folk-dancing class at New York City's New School through which she was introduced to Greenwich Village's Bohemian arts and culture scene. She soon moved to Greenwich Village, where she continued to live for the next forty years. During the 1950s she studied painting with abstract impressionist Hans Hoffman; from 1954 through 1957 she was an expatriate, traveling in Europe and living in Paris with American writer Harriet Sohmers Zwerling. In Paris she met Susan Sontag and they became lovers. After her return to the United States the two lived together for several years and Fornés worked as a textile designer.

According to Fornés' account, it was through her relationship with Sontag that she began to write plays—accidentally, she claimed, in an attempt to help Sontag begin her own writing by demonstrating how easy it was to start. Fornés' first play, written in Spanish, La Viuda (The Widow), was written in 1961, followed by There, You Died! (renamed Tango Palace)—her first play in English—in 1963, which was immediately accepted and staged by a San Francisco theater company. Fornés, who had heretofore never received any theatrical or dramatic training, joined the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio and took a Method acting course. The years 1965 and 1966 saw the writing and production of Fornés' only commercial success, Promenade, a play with music written by Al Carmines, a colleague at the Judson Poets Theater; and The Office, her only foray into Broadway theater, which closed after previews. After this early turn towards mainstream theater, Fornés' plays were performed exclusively Off-Broadway (and its equivalent venues in other parts of the country as well as in Europe) or in college or university productions. She began to direct most of her own works and directed, adapted, and translated other playwrights' work as well; she also collaborated with composers to create operas. Perhaps her best-known plays, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, are Fefu and Her Friends (1977), The Danube (1983), and Mud (1983). She was honored with awards and obtained artist residencies, grants, and commissioned works. Nearly two dozen of her plays were published, although a significant number of them were performed not more than once or twice or were never staged beyond a workshop performance.

As recognition of Fornés' plays spread, it brought invitations to visit other countries. Her extensive travels to present or discuss her work included trips to Mexico, India, Japan, Germany, North Africa, the Middle East and the Soviet Union. Irene Fornés' work as a teacher of playwriting and mentor to emerging playwrights has been recognized and praised as much, if not more, than her plays. The many workshops, classes, and lectures she presented, including her long association with the Hispanic American theater organization INTAR (International Arts Relations, Inc.) exercised a considerable influence on emerging playwrights, in particular a generation of young Latino playwrights. Fornés' organizational work was important as well. In addition to her service on the council of the Dramatists' Guild of America, in 1973 she co-founded New York Theatre Strategy, a writer-centered cooperative theater production company and spent so much time acting variously as its producer, fundraiser, costumer, publicist and administrator that for several years she laid aside her own writing and directing.

In 2001 illness forced Irene Fornés to retire. Her last completed play (first produced in 2000) was Letters from Cuba; her last working play was27 Rue de Fleurus, a piece about the life of Gertrude Stein.