Although music theatre is typically associated with composers, a closer look at the unusually prominent place of music in the Fornésian catalog demonstrates how her work as a lyricist and librettist establishes Fornés as a formidable force within the ever evolving form of music theatre. Trevor Boffone’s essay surveys Fornes’s use of song and dance to punctuate or drive works as as varied as Promenade (1965), Molly’s Dream (1968), The Red Burning Light or Mission XQ3 (1968), Aurora (1972); Cap-a-Pie (1975), Sarita (1984), Lovers and Keepers (1986), Terra Incognita (1992), and Balseros/Rafters (1997). Boffone’s essay also explicates how Fornés’s many works of music theatre open the question of what a Fornésian musical might be, even as her legacy of experimentation continues to prompt innovative new ways of making music theatre.

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.