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.

Bonnie Marranca is the founding Editor and Publisher of PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and was María Irene Fornés’s publisher throughout her career. In this expansive conversation with performance studies scholar Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Marranca discusses her multifaceted history with Fornés and the importance of publication of both new plays and contemporary arts criticism. The exchange also captures Fornés’s distinctive personality, the complex intimacies of professional friendships, and the value of oral history as a form of performance documentation, while also providing a detailed glimpse into Fornés’s myriad connections, collaborations, and achievements within the downtown New York theatre scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

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.

Although María Irene Fornés is recognized by her peers as one of the great avant-garde innovators of her time, her absence from many critical and mainstream accounts of American playwriting suggests that her experimental techniques were not easily intelligible as part of a movement, even one fabled for the unintelligibility of its creative effects. As a corrective critical gesture, Roy Pérez looks to Art (a short and sparsely documented play from 1986) to understand the role of the avant-garde in Fornés’s larger body of work. Pérez argues that – even as the avant-garde earned a reputation for being fixated on unpragmatic political ideals, aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, or humorless alienation – Fornés wrote plays plays that danced their characters and viewers through spellbinding thought experiments, making lofty questions seem like everyday ruminations, that we might pursue with a sense of play, or at least with authentic feeling.

In 1978, playwright Murray Mednick founded Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop at Claremont College in Southern California, where it would become an esteemed site-specific summer festival where invited artists were allowed to use any space outdoors or indoors except the campus theatre. For fifteen of the eighteen summers of Padua’s existence, María Irene Fornés taught playwriting while creating her own work. Onsted argues that Padua provided a unique venue of experimentation, a place Fornés could explore her painterly theatrical vision and her interest in spatiality to evolve on a vast canvas before adapting her scripts for New York stages. Onstad explores how Padua’s outdoor setting and unpredictable sonic environment informed the distillation of Fornés’s liguistic and visual aesthetic and allowed her to develop and launch some of her most important plays.

Christina León explicates the consequential reverberations of María Irene Fornés’s period of studying Abstract Expressionist painting with Hans Hofmann. León argues that Fornés’s work creating plays and inspiring playwrights crystallized lessons learned from studying painting with Hofmann. León also explores how her time as a painter informed Fornés’s choice of theater as her creative medium and how it activated her interest in limited space in ways that profoundly shifted what could be done on stage. Comparing Fornés to Allan Kaprow (also a Hofmann student who upended the art world away from the canvas and the stage by creating “happenings”), León evinces a genealogical overlap among Hofmann, Kaprow, and Fornés as influential figures forged from crucial milieus of artists who also created matrixial sites for other artists to create their own visions.

On the page, María Irene Fornés’s texts might not look much like “environmental theatre” in the sense theorized by Richard Schechner, yet her mature work as a playwright-director was profoundly attentive to the specifics of her surroundings and to the recyclable raw materials they afforded her. In this essay, Scott-Bottoms argues that Fornés was a maker of events wrought in time and space and that her interest in site-specific productions (in tandem with her resistance to the assumption that writers turn their work over to directors) rehearsed a distinctive mode of theatremaking that cultivated an organic continuity between stage and production. Acknowledging that Fornés herself would have likely resisted the term for thinking about her work, Scott-Bottoms appropriates the term on her behalf and argues for a Fornésian model of “environmental theatre” that is significantly different from but perhaps as enduringly influential as that outlined by Schechner.

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.

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.

Gwendolyn Alker considers particular aspects of Fornés’s work – including the way she asked her students to do yoga before writing, her various exercises developed to bypass the frontal cortex, and her prescient connections to the animal world – to argue for a “Fornésian ecology” and to evince its lessons for our collective futures on a damaged planet. Alker argues that the characters in Mud (alongside many of Fornés’s plays) must be understood through their relationship with each other and with their environment. Alker submits that Fornesian world-making prompts us to see the environment within the world of her plays, to be aware that we are outside that world and will never fully understand it, just as we cannot ever fully understand the animals that we encounter, even as Fornés’s plays challenge us to cultivate empathy for animals, understand their relevance, and believe in their truths, despite their otherness from ourselves.

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.