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.

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.