María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director, who was a leading figure of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Always an iconoclast, each of Fornés's plays was its own world, all vastly different from each other. Whereas contemporary playwrights developed a signature style, the critical factor identifying a Fornés play is not tone or structure, but an intense, relentless and compassionate examination of the human condition — especially the way intimate personal relationships are affected and infected by economic conditions.
In 1965, she won her first Distinguished Plays Obie Award for Promenade and The Successful Life of 3. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with her play And What of the Night? in 1990. Other notable works include Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, Sarita, and Letters from Cuba. Fornés became known in both Hispanic-American and experimental theatre in New York, winning a total of nine Obie Awards.
Fornés is also recognized as a brilliant and exacting director and one of the most significant teachers of playwriting of her time. Her methodology was influenced by acting exercises she encountered at the Actor's Studio, and focused on getting writers into their bodies and creative unconscious minds to become intimate with their imaginations.
A documentary feature about Fornés called The Rest I Make Up by Michelle Memran was made in collaboration with Fornés, and focuses on her creative life in the years after she stopped writing due to dementia.
