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.

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.

Elaine Romero – an accomplished playwright, teacher, and yogi who studied all three practices with María Irene Fornés – uses the tools of dramatic writing to develop a historically informed theatrical exploration of Fornés’s time in Paris in 1954 with her then romantic partner, Harriet Sohmers (an artist, model, and writer who later published memoirs of this period using the surname Zwerling). Here, Romero’s short play – set in the summer of 1954 that the two women spent together in Paris – ruminates on how Fornés’s artistic beginnings stirred during this intimate time with Sohmers. The playscript is prefaced by a brief critical reflection by Romero that details how her own experiences with Fornés inflect her playwriting process and the playwriting exercise Romero offers as conclusion to her play.