In 1978, playwright Murray Mednick founded Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop at Claremont College in Southern California, where it would become an esteemed site-specific summer festival where invited artists were allowed to use any space outdoors or indoors except the campus theatre. For fifteen of the eighteen summers of Padua’s existence, María Irene Fornés taught playwriting while creating her own work. Onsted argues that Padua provided a unique venue of experimentation, a place Fornés could explore her painterly theatrical vision and her interest in spatiality to evolve on a vast canvas before adapting her scripts for New York stages. Onstad explores how Padua’s outdoor setting and unpredictable sonic environment informed the distillation of Fornés’s liguistic and visual aesthetic and allowed her to develop and launch some of her most important plays.

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.

Kenneth Prestininzi served as director of the playwriting program at the Latin American Writers Workshop, where Fornés taught in 1997 and 1998. Here, Prestininzi draws upon their own experiences of witnessing and experiencing the provocation of Fornés’s teaching modality while immersed in the communal intensity of a residential writing retreat in Mexico. As it shifts between the present and past tense, Prestininzi’s contribution emerges as both an exercise in experimental memoir and also as a work of archival excavation. This dual temporal register vividly captures both the context and the experience of María Irene Fornés’s galvanizing pedagogy, particularly its capacity to stir what Prestinzinzi describes as the “unpredictability of our imaginations.”

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.

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.

María Irene Fornés is likely the most well-known Latiné playwright in the US. It is also widely known that Fornés is a lesbian, yet, her sexual orientation is rarely, if ever, at the forefront of her plays. Fornés also famously resisted these labels, which she considered limiting and reductive. The authors argue that challenges in labeling Fornés stem not only from her personal resistance to limiting categories, but also her specific biography, aesthetics, and politics as well as her active resistance to sanitized institutional multicultural frames adopted by predominantly white mainstream cultural institutions that attempted to categorize these experiences in ways convenient for social scientists, policymakers, and the market. The authors query whether and how Fornés prompts contemporary readers to resist the desire to read her work as ethnographic portraiture or testimonial literature and instead as an articulation of creative worlds within and through a distinctively Latiné sensibility.

Olga Sanchez Saltveit reflects on how communities of people who worked with María Irene Fornés, trained with her, and worked on her plays (as well as fans of her work and words) have collaborated in advocacy for and with her legacy to create circles of care around Fornés’s legacy, even as they and others were creating circles of care around Fornés herself. In this essay, Sanchez Saltveit notes how this model of “community-based advocacy” inspired the formation of the Latinx Theatre Commons’s Fornés Institute in 2013 and offers more detailed histories of three noteworthy community-based examples: the 2016 Festival Irene in Los Angeles, Rose Cano’s 2017 staging of Mud/Barro in Seattle, and the 2018 María Irene Fornés Marathon in New York City. These projects were brought to fruition through engaged leadership and collaboration, the leveraging of institutional resources, and a focus on advocacy.

In a certain sense all theatre is an act of translation. We translate written and devised texts into stage action, characters are translated into beings, images are translated into physical spaces. In this essay, Adam Versényi explains how, because she was a playwright writing primarily in her second language throughout her career, María Irene Fornés was simultaneously writing and translating, with each practice inextricably linked to the other. Drawing upon his on own professional practice as a dramaturg and translator, Versényi argues that not only does an understanding of translation provide greater access to Fornés’s creative process but also that a careful reading of Fornés’s work informs the topic of translation itself. As example, Versényi explores how Fornés’s playwrighting method and the process of theatrical translation affect two notably distinct translations of Fornes’s The Conduct of Life (1985).