Alisa Solomon excavates the fragmented evidence of María Irene Fornés’s intimate relationship with noted public intellectual Susan Sontag. Arguing that the two came together at a pivotal time in their lives, Solomon demonstrates how Fornés and Sontag galvanized each other as they embarked on their disparate professional careers as writers, producing a persistent synergy in spite of their radically different backgrounds and career trajectories. Carefully charting how Fornés and Sontag cryptically acknowledged and deliberately effaced their history as romantic and creative partners, Solomon argues the relationship was foundational to both writers as not so much a matter of mutual influence as confluence rippled through both of their careers long after their romantic relationship ended.

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.

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.