Plays
About
María Irene Fornés, considered by many to be the mother of Latinx playwriting, was an influential and award-winning playwright, director, and teacher. Born in Havana, Cuba, Fornés, the youngest of six children, immigrated to the United States in 1945 with her sister Margarita, and mother Carmen, a former schoolteacher. Earlier that year, her father Carlos, a low-level bureaucrat in Cuba’s civil service, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three. Fornés and her sister were raised by their mother in New York City, where she resided for the rest of her life. Fornés wrote and directed more than fifty plays that were produced throughout the United States and internationally including in Cuba, Peru, England, France, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and India. Tango Palace (1963) was her first produced play and Letters from Cuba (2000) was her final play. She won an unprecedented nine Obie Awards and her play, What Of The Night? (1990) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Fornés eschewed identity politics yet her work has been described as feminist, Latinx, lesbian, and avant gardist. She was also an influential educator, teaching playwriting across the US, and especially through her founding of the Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab (HPRL 1981-1992), at International Arts Relations (INTAR), a New York City theatre committed to producing works by Latinx writers, where she trained many celebrated Latinx playwrights of the late twentieth century. During her final years, Fornés suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and was cared for by family, friends, former students, and colleagues, while she resided at the Amsterdam House in New York City, where she died in 2018. Her later years are poignantly captured in the award-winning documentary film, The Rest I Make Up (2018), directed by Michelle Memran.