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.

Lillian Manzor evinces the previously unrecognized continuities in Fornés’s material relationship to Cuba, offering new insights into her life, her work, and even her name. Because María Irene Fornés rarely wrote about Cuba, her connections to the island are usually characterized in the scholarship solely based on her place of birth, rather than on her lifelong dynamic material relationship to Cuba. Manzor argues that Fornés’s Cubanity (in contrast to the Cubanness of those who came to the US after 1959) is informed by Fornés’s heretofore undocumented direct engagement with and cultural and familial ties to the island, including her connections to Cuba, to her family that stayed on the island, to Cuban theater, her travels to Cuba, and her interest in the rhythms of Spanish and Cuban Spanish.

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.