In this pedagogic exercise, theatre director Juliana Frey-Méndez invites the reader to apply Fornésian techniques of exploratory experimentation within the practice of script analysis. Drawing from Fornés’s own deployment of serendipity and surprise as a foundational compositional technique, Frey-Méndez introduces “The Fornésian Shuffle” as an analytic tool for both scholarly and artistic exploration. In her own “how to” demonstration of the Fornésian Shuffle technique, Frey-Méndez also demonstrates the ways that working in the Fornésian tradition – whether as a student, as an artist, or as a scholar – encourages the practitioner to enact a form of postdramatic performance art.

Lesbianism figures into María Irene Fornés’s writing in every decade of her career but bears significantly on only a quarter of her more than forty published plays and manuscripts. Through close readings of four plays (Tango Palace, Fefu and Her Friends, Enter THE NIGHT, The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus), Nicole Stodard evinces the the evocative stylistic ways that Fornés’s embodied queerness becomes visible in her body of work through characters’ gender and sexual embodiment, romantic triangulation, shapeshifting categorization, and queer suffering and joy. Stodard argues that Fornés’s work embodied a sexual philosophy that was more expansive and connected with a larger life quest. From depicting couples, queer and straight, to queering coupling through the representation of triangular affection, her legacy ultimately advances an abundant love that is plural, communal, uninhibited, transcendent, and joyful.