Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting

in the Twenty-first Century

Anne García-Romero

Theatre Topics, Volume 31, Number 2, July 2021, pp. 87-97 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2021.0024

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802101

[ Access provided at 20 Oct 2021 03:35 GMT from UW-Madison Libraries ]

 Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian
Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century

Anne García-Romero

In the mid-1980s, a middle-aged, Cuban American playwright answers the telephone in her
New York City apartment. After a brief introduction, the person on the other end eventually asks,
“So, what are you doing to support yourself these days?” The playwright replies, “I’m painting textiles
for a fabric company.” The incredulous individual exclaims, “But you’re an Obie award–winning
playwright who’s been produced on Broadway, off-Broadway, and beyond. You must come teach at
Princeton.”1 With this apocryphal anecdote, so begins the university teaching career of María Irene
Fornés (1930–2018), the nine-time Obie award–winning, Cuban American playwright and director.
For over thirty years Fornés (who preferred to be called Irene) developed an innovative playwrit-
ing method as she taught across the United States, as well as internationally in England, Ireland,
Mexico, Venezuela, Uruguay, and India. Fornés alumni include award-winning playwrights Luis
Alfaro, Brooke Berman, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, Josefina Lopez, Eduardo
Machado, Oliver Mayer, Cherríe Moraga, Ken Prestininzi, Elaine Romero, Sarah Ruhl, Bernardo
Solano, Octavio Solis, Kelly Stuart, and Caridad Svich, all of whom teach or have taught elements
of the Fornés playwriting method in theatres and universities across the country.

Fornés was my teacher and mentor. I studied with her during my first month as a new MFA
playwriting student at the Yale School of Drama in 1992. I had previously studied with her for two
summers in 1989 and 1990 at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in California, co-founded by
Fornés, Murray Mednick, and Sam Shepard. As a professor, I have employed the Fornés pedagogy to
teach playwriting at the undergraduate and graduate levels for the past twenty years. I slowly began
writing plays during and after my undergraduate years, without consistent guidance or mentorship.
When I attended my first Fornés workshop at Padua Hills, I felt I had found a beacon pointing me
toward inspiring and unexpected playwriting discoveries. During this pandemic era rife with loss, I
continually return to the Fornés playwriting method as a guiding light, leading me through the dark-
ness of these days into the creative illumination central to this mode of generating dynamic new-play
material. When I ask myself what is an essential use of my energies during this time compromised
by anxiety, concern, and endless online engagement, I continue to recommit myself to advocating
for the Fornés legacy. Through this essay, I offer a context, history, and analysis of Fornés’s teaching
methodology, as well as an exploration of recent pedagogical contributions, to emphasize the need
for a sustainable model to replicate the Fornés playwriting method.

Fornés taught her method in three arenas: university courses, writing workshops (at theatres,
festivals, and international retreats),2 and a laboratory residency—the Obie award–winning INTAR
Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory (HPRL, 1981–92), which Fornés co-founded and that
represents the most comprehensive expression of her pedagogy (fig. 1). At HPRL, she trained over
forty Latinx playwrights. Their award-winning plays have largely shaped the field of contemporary
Latinx theatre through Broadway, off-Broadway, and regional theatre productions. Each year, INTAR
conducted a national search. Fornés then selected seven-to-ten writers to participate in HPRL’s daily
writing sessions from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm during the fall. Each writer received a stipend while they
resided in New York City for the lab. The students would then continue to develop their plays on
their own through the winter. In the spring, HPRL culminated in a series of staged readings of new

87
88 Anne García-Romero

Fig. 1 Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab at INTAR, 1991: Lorenzo Mans, Caridad Svich, Leo Garcia, Oscar Colón,
María Irene Fornés, Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, and Lorraine Llamas (l-r). (Photo: © James M. Kent.)

work generated during the laboratory. The aforementioned alumni writers studied with Fornés in
these arenas for varying lengths of instruction: HPRL (M. Cruz, N. Cruz, Lopez, Machado, Moraga,
Solano, Solis, Svich), Padua Hills Playwrights Festival (Stuart), Mark Taper Forum workshop (Alfaro,
Mayer), and Latin America Writers Workshop in Taxco, Mexico (Berman, Cortiñas, Prestininzi,
Romero, Ruhl).

A definitive book about the Fornés playwriting method has yet to be published. She did occa-
sionally discuss her pedagogy during interviews about her work and had planned to publish a book
about her methods tentatively titled The Anatomy of Inspiration. However, Fornés did not complete
this project due to her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, which she battled for over a decade. Theatre
studies scholars, including Gwendolyn Alker, Crystal Brian, Scott Cummings, Maria Delgado, Joan
Herrington, Bonnie Marranca, and Caridad Svich, have documented aspects of the Fornés pedagogy
in journal articles, anthologies, and monographs. Yet the Fornés playwriting method largely continues
onward through her former students as they teach at theatres and educational institutions.

For those who trained with Fornés, numerous questions remain. What are sustainable replica-
tion models for the Fornés playwriting method? Alker, who has offered courses on Fornés at New
York University, reflects: “The binary difference between the archive and the repertoire, as that which
 Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century 89

is stable and certain versus what is ephemeral and fleeting, was challenged in many ways by our
encounter with multiple [Fornés] archives” (216). Thus how does one best document and archive
Fornesian playwriting? How do interested writers gain access to her methods if they do not attend
workshops, colleges, or universities where her work is taught? There are relatively few Fornés alumni
who currently teach in permanent academic positions. Therefore how will her playwriting method
survive and thrive into the mid-to-late twenty-first century when her former students retire and are
no longer teaching? Without a monograph or a sustainable replication model the Fornés playwriting
method risks alteration, erasure, and potential extinction from playwriting pedagogy.

Irene’s Room: The Fornés Playwriting Method

The Fornés playwriting method encompasses an experiential practice based in physicality, oral-
ity, and community. The goal of this practice is to help writers generate new play material that arises
from their unique inner worlds. These playwriting-method elements include centering movement,
guided visualization, basic drawing, found materials (aural, written, visual), and communal writing.
I define Fornés’s pedagogy as a method, from the Latin methodus, meaning “mode of proceeding.”
Fornés invented this artistic mode so that writers could proceed from engaging in physical movement
and creative inspiration to generating innovative theatrical worlds.3 Although material exists in the
archive describing the Fornés playwriting method, I provide this analysis to examine the links among
each element, and to highlight the organic way that the elements work together to guide writers to
create supple, organic, and emergent play material.

I start with an account of Fornés’s typical four-hour teaching session based on my own experi-
ence in her workshops at Padua Hills and Yale in 1989, 1990, and 1992. (I approximate her time
allotments here, and adjust them when I teach during a shorter time period.) Fornés began each
class session with centering movement, involving a sequence of yoga-like poses. As an actor warms
up the body before a rehearsal, Fornés believed that the playwright needed to activate the body to
inspire their writing. For thirty minutes, she led us in a warm-up designed to release physical ten-
sions, exhaust the body, and center the mind to prepare for writing. We transitioned from movement
to writing as we returned in silence to our seats at the table, where we had previously opened our
notebooks to a blank page.

Next, Fornés guided us in the visualization of characters and locations. With her heavily
accented Cuban voice, Fornés instructed, “Close your eyes. Picture a character. This could be a
character you are already working on or a totally new character. Once this character is in your mind’s
eye, picture all aspects of your character, starting with the hair, the color, length, and texture of the
hair, the face, the eyes, nose, and mouth, the body.” The visualization leads writers into an interior
landscape, a subconscious dream-like state where characters and locations from inside can arise,
surprise, and announce their presence. Fornés offered different visualizations each day, providing
a variety of exercises for creating and developing characters such as picturing a character walking
through a wall to enter a new reality, imagining a character merging with an animal to explore wild
unpredictability, and considering a character at different ages to gain insight into how their past
may affect their present.

After the visualization we opened our eyes and Fornés instructed us to commit our visions of
characters and locations to paper through basic drawing, as one might record a dream image. The
drawing helps writers transition between their inner and outer worlds, making tangible the seem-
ingly ephemeral inner visualizations. The ability to draw is not important. My drawings looked like
a grade-school sketch with cartoonish features. However, drawing rudimentary figures on my page
provided palpable evidence of the characters I had just created. For one hour, Fornés repeated visu-
alization and drawing sequences several times as we created and drew one character, then another
character, and then a location.
90 Anne García-Romero

Before starting a scene, Fornés offered verbal prompts to jump-start our writing: text frag-
ments, including a line of dialogue; an action; and an object. She instructed us to incorporate these
into the dialogue or stage directions if it would be helpful to our writing, such as:

Line: I need to see you.

Object: A cup.
Action: Something drops.

Just as the drawing helps transition between interior and exterior worlds, these text fragments aid
the writers in shifting from silent film–like visualization to writing dialogue spoken by newly created
characters. In Joan Herrington and Crystal Brian’s Playwrights Teach Playwriting, Fornés explained:
“I give them a line of dialogue to trigger speech and voice, because when you visualize, usually its
silent—it’s an image, a picture. . . . Ideally, a line triggers something, and it seems like the character
actually begins to say one of these lines before I even ask them to begin writing” (9). During the
session, Fornés would also occasionally offer additional verbal text fragments. Periodically provid-
ing these oral found materials assists writers to be open to the unexpected, to let the new words jog
memory, ignite curiosity, or unleash whimsy, thus helping the dialogue mirror the unpredictability
and authenticity of the human mind and voice. After a period of ninety minutes of in-class writing
with pen or pencil on paper, we took a fifteen-minute break and then returned to our seats.

Subsequently, for forty-five minutes writers volunteered to read their in-class writing, with
the proviso that there would be no critical response or feedback. Fornés stated that sharing in-class
writing gave the writers two unique opportunities: to hear their new work aloud in the group, and
to show the variety of creative possibilities generated from the same exercise. Through this lack of
critique, Fornés respected the sanctity and vulnerability of reading raw material aloud, and this in
turn further built our trust in her and the group. This final segment of the workshop reinforces
the value of communal writing. The creative energy evoked around the tables in the room gave me
momentum, strength, courage, and an artistic connection to the diverse group of writers present.
Additionally, Fornés always wrote during each session. Although she never shared her workshop
writing with us, I felt comforted and inspired to know that she wrote alongside us as she formed
her own new theatrical worlds.

Character creation is the cornerstone of the Fornés playwriting method. For her, a play’s shape
is never determined by a premise or outline. Fornesian playwriting eschews traditional, Aristotelian
dramatic structure beginning with a point of attack, then inciting action, climax, and denouement.
She taught that a play’s form must arise organically from its characters in ways that are surprising,
unexpected, and wholly connected to how the characters experience the world. Refining the shape
of that form was often part of her residencies at HPRL, when students had accumulated enough
new material to begin to see the organic form and structure materialize in a full-length play. After
her shorter teaching residencies, Fornés’s students would complete the sessions with voluminous
new-play material that they could then shape into a larger piece on their own.

Replicating Irene’s Room: The Fornés Playwriting Workshop

Sustaining Fornesian playwriting in the twenty-first century continues to be essential. Fornés

stopped teaching early in this century due to the onset of her battle with Alzheimer’s. For over a
decade, while her former students continued to teach her methods, no pedagogical spaces existed
solely dedicated to the Fornés playwriting method. Thus, in 2016, I coordinated and helped launch
the Fornés Playwriting Workshop (FPW) (fig. 2) sponsored by the University of Notre Dame, where
I serve as an associate professor of theatre, with additional support from the Latinx Theatre Com-
mons and the Fornés Institute.4 Award-winning playwright Migdalia Cruz,5 one of Fornés’s longtime
students, taught the summer intensive. Cruz’s completion of five HPRL residencies (1984–91) and
 Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century 91

Fig. 2 Fornés Playwriting Workshop, 2018. Front row (l-r): Cristina Frías, Marilo Nuñez, Mónica Sánchez, Nancy García
Loza, and Anne García-Romero. Back row (l-r): Georgina Escobar, Taeyin Cho Glueck, Javier Luis Hurtado, Nikkita Duke,
Julia Izumi, Migdalia Cruz, Adrienne Dawes, Exal Iraheta, Juan Francisco Villa, Oscar A. Cabrera, and Dolores Díaz. (Photo:
© Paloma Garcia-Lopez.)

her work as Fornés’s assistant make her one of the few playwrights who received sustained, in-depth,
and consistent training with Fornés.

Cruz and I crafted a detailed and thorough introduction to the Fornés playwriting method.
During three consecutive summers we invited a group of twelve-to-fourteen writers, selected from
an open admissions process. The writers arrived from across the country and the globe, including
Canada, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, and South Africa. We assembled cohorts comprised of estab-
lished playwrights who are university professors, emerging playwrights with knowledge of Fornés,
and beginning undergraduate playwrights with no exposure to her. We held the workshop in a Notre
Dame satellite classroom in downtown Chicago. Each writer attended the workshop at no cost and
received a modest stipend to help defray some of their travel and housing expenses for the week.
The workshop included four sessions from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm daily, as well as a day of one-on-one
meetings with Cruz. During an off-day, students submitted an excerpt from their workshop writing,
which they further developed on the sixth day both in class and through a cold table-reading with a
company of seven professional Chicago actors. On the seventh day, the playwrights rehearsed their
scenes with the actors, a professional director, and a stage manager, culminating in an evening staged
reading for a public audience at a Chicago theatre.

When Fornés alumni teach, they often contribute their own additions to amplify the peda-
gogical experience. Cruz led us through the previously described Fornés playwriting method each
day and included several new elements: engaging a vigorous warm-up, listening to poetry, crafting
a theme for each day, and sharing unique found materials. Through these amplifications, Cruz
incorporated intense physicality, poetic exactitude, thematic inspiration, and unexpected visual
92 Anne García-Romero

materials to deepen our connection to the Fornés playwriting method. The energetic warm-up, held
in a spacious room, included ritual-like air-boxing with eight punches to the ground, to the space
in front of us, and to the sky, which helped us expel tension from our bodies to prepare ourselves
for writing. After the movement, Cruz instructed us to sit comfortably on the floor and close our
eyes while she read us a poem. The poetry listening provided a transition from physical movement
to writing, preparing us to engage with linguistic creation. Once Cruz finished reading the poem,
we walked silently to our places at tables in an adjacent room. The tables were arranged in a square
with all edges touching, a configuration that Fornés devised at HPRL to help the creative energy
flow among the writers in the room.

Cruz then commenced the visualizations, which began with a sense-memory exercise where
she guided us to remember a childhood or adulthood memory linked to the day’s theme. At the start
of one session, Cruz instructed: “Recall a memory when you experienced a wound before the age
of ten. Picture the wound. This is a time when you realized you were vulnerable.” After visualizing,
we opened our eyes, drew the location, and wrote the memory to capture the feeling. She then led
us through a second visualization where we returned to this memory. Cruz continued: “Observe a
new character walking into this location. Your younger self observes this character and then leaves.
The location might transform. The character also has a wound.” This exercise guided the writers to
create or develop a character infused with the emotional memory of our own personal wound. This
sense-memory work helped connect our characters to a more authentic reality. At HPRL, Fornés
consistently included sense-memory prompts in her visualization exercises. However, during her
other teaching residencies, she sometimes omitted these prompts and focused more on character
development during her visualization exercises.

Each year, the daily themes Cruz chose were slightly different and helped focus the writing,
encouraging us to pursue a deeper thematic exploration. In 2018, the themes included: wound,
hunt, animal, water, and desire. Cruz also chose poems that corresponded to each theme written by
a wide range of poets, such as James Baldwin, Julia de Burgos, Sandra María Esteves, Gösta Friberg,
Demetria Martinez, Cherríe Moraga, Pablo Neruda, and W. B. Yeats. For example, for the theme
of “wound,” Cruz read Neruda’s poem “Walking Around”:

Something shoves me toward certain damp houses, into certain dark corners,
into hospitals, with bones flying out of the windows;
into shoe stores and shoemakers smelling of vinegar,
streets frightful as fissures laid open. (77)

Lyrical lines brought these poets into the room to serve as inspiration, to remind us of the power of
language and to challenge us to generate our own poetic voices.

Throughout the workshop session, Cruz offered unique found materials. Like Fornés, she
shared text fragments that we could incorporate into a scene, such as:

Line: I remember this tree.

Object: A pair of glasses.
Action: Someone putting something under something else.
Sound: A bell.
Feeling: Impatience.

These prompts could serve as dialogue or stage directions and often help energize the writing,
especially when fatigue set in. Additionally, Cruz distributed physical materials, such as small SAT
vocabulary cards. Each of us chose a card. My card said “oblivious.” Then Cruz instructed us to close
our eyes again and visualize a second character, who had qualities of the word on our card. Once
we opened our eyes we began to write a scene between our two characters using a prompt as a first
 Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century 93

line: “And my father?” As we continued writing, Cruz circulated a legal-sized envelope with small
slips of paper inside containing handwritten words. Each paper listed the name of a location. Once
each of us chose one, Cruz instructed that “the location you pick is the location of your next scene.”
During the workshop she also shared images of modern paintings, vintage playbills, and pages from
a graphic novel. After writing for two hours, we took a much-needed fifteen-minute break.

Next, Cruz led us in a check-in process. Each writer briefly shared reflections about their
writing that day responding to questions like: Did you learn something new about your characters?
Were there challenges? Were there surprises? This check-in brought everyone’s experience into the
room as a source of information and inspiration. Afterwards, with the remaining time, Cruz asked
for volunteers to read from their in-class writing, with the same ground rules set down by Fornés:
the writer reads their work and there is no critique afterward. Occasionally, Cruz might comment
on themes or issues in the check-in or readings. After the four-hour session, the writers departed into
the summer streets of downtown Chicago, to make their way back to homes, hotels, and Airbnbs.

After four workshop sessions we held a screening of The Rest I Make Up, the award-winning
2018 documentary by Michelle Memran that chronicles her friendship with Fornés, as well as
providing an overview of Fornés’s career. We wanted the writers to experience Fornés’s presence
through this moving film. We had shared a few video and audio clips of Fornés during the week,
but Memran’s documentary offered an opportunity to witness Fornés in depth. Many writers com-
mented how this documentary helped them appreciate and understand the spirit, creativity, and
career of Fornés more keenly.

The final phase of the workshop entailed the preparation and presentation of short scenes. The
director selected an ensemble of professional actors before the scenes were written. The scenes were
later cast across lines of gender, race, and ethnicity, as Fornés often employed nontraditional casting.
We then moved to the theatre and spent the day rehearsing each scene with the director, the actors, a
stage manager, and a producer. The workshop culminated in an evening of staged readings of these
scenes, with a public audience of colleagues, friends, family, and community members. The 2016
FPW reading was directed by Sandra Marquez, who is an actor, director, Steppenwolf and Teatro
Vista ensemble member, and Northwestern University professor, and was held at Chicago Dramatists,
the forty-year-old play-development organization. Carlos Murillo, a playwright, director, DePaul
University professor, and Fornés alumnus, directed the 2017 presentation held at the Greenhouse
Theater, a leading Chicago storefront complex. Ending the 2018 workshop was a professional pre-
sentation at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago’s Tony award–winning institution, directed by Cheryl
Lynn Bruce, an award-winning, Chicago-born, veteran actor, director, and educator.

The workshop gave the writers a significant, transformative introduction to Fornesian playwrit-
ing. Many left longing for a continued connection to Fornés’s methodology. The intense experience
of the daily workshop sessions culminating in a public reading created a palpable sense of commu-
nity among the culturally diverse, like-minded theatre artists committed to their ongoing growth
as writers. After the successful three-year cycle, FPW went on hiatus in 2019 to regroup, recharge,
and reexamine best practices. We continue to assess the sustainability of this model to perpetuate
Fornés’s legacy and hope to offer another FPW in the near future.

Beyond the Room: Fornés Playwriting Workshop Alumni

After the playwrights completed the workshop, they returned to their communities to con-
tinue to engage and develop their playwriting craft. Several of the participants teach at universities
and colleges or recently completed MFA programs. Additionally, some participants were part of
professional playwriting groups, such as the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers, the Clubbed Thumb
Emerging Writers, Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit, and the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists.
94 Anne García-Romero

After experiencing the Fornés playwriting method and generating dynamic play material, many of
these writers began to create their work in a new way. FPW writers have completed twenty full-length
plays that have been developed and produced across the country at theatres such as Denver Center
Theatre, Goodman, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Primary Stages, Project Y Theatre, and Victory
Gardens Theater. To further explore the impact of FPW, I would like to consider the new work of
three playwrights, Cusi Cram, Georgina Escobar, and Nancy García Loza, who represent the range
and experience in all three years of the workshop.

Cram, an award-winning playwright, television writer, and associate chair of the Department of
Dramatic Writing at New York University, attended the 2016 workshop. Trained at Brown University
and Julliard, she represents the workshop participants who are established in the field and teach at
the university level. Cram had first been inspired by Fornés while performing in a production of
Fefu and Her Friends at Brown, and had wanted to learn more about her. She describes how FPW
continues to inform her work: “I use the visualization method a lot both when I teach and when
I write. I now write long and fast without interruption when I am creating a first draft and shape
after the fact. . . . The whole practice really taught me to trust my instincts and let my thoughts
and language shape a story, rather than pushing those two things into a structure” (García-Romero
and García). Based on her writing during FPW, Cram wrote a full-length play, East of West Town,
which was subsequently developed at the Cape Cod Theatre Project and in the Barn Series of the
LAByrinth Theater Company, where she is a member. Her play also received an honorable mention
in the 2017 Kilroys List.6

Set in present-day Chicago and on the Cyclades islands in Greece, East of West Town explores
Audrey, a 26-year-old, all-American school teacher who lives in West Town, and rents an Airbnb
room in her apartment to Ava Payaso Ness, a mysterious middle-aged woman who is “from many
places and is so complicated she may be quite simple . . . her accent should be complicated and
hard to place” (1). Audrey also speaks on FaceTime to Stelios, who is in his thirties or forties, her
Greek boyfriend whom she met while vacationing in Greece months ago. Complications ensue when
Audrey reveals to Ava that she is pregnant and Stelios is the father. Past and present collide as these
three characters’ lives intersect in Chicago, leading to a tragic conclusion.

In the final 2016 FPW presentation, Cram shared a scene titled “In the Company of Desire,”
in which Audrey speaks nonstop about her Greek boyfriend and lights shift to the past to reveal
Alexandros, the embodiment of her desire. This cross-cultural relationship becomes the focal point
of Cram’s full-length play (with a name change to Stelios), and the presentation scene forms the
basis for East of West Town’s final scene. She deftly explores the complexities of her characters through
poetic language, whimsy, humor, pathos, and intercultural interactivity, while creating a compelling
theatrical world in which her characters are constantly searching for the unexpected.

Georgina Escobar, playwright, director, and visiting professor of practice in the Department
of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), attended the 2017 and 2018
workshops. Starting in 2018, we opened the admission to participants who had taken the workshop
in 2016 and 2017, as Fornés often invited HPRL writers to return to continue to grow and deepen
their knowledge and practice of her playwriting method. Escobar, an award-winning theatre artist
who trained at UTEP and the University of New Mexico, represents the workshop participants
who are emerging in the field and now teach at the university level. Regarding her FPW experience,
Escobar reflects that

my thoughts about Irene guide me towards an imaginary fountain where she plays in the water
as I make a wish with my back turned to it, hopeful to return. My thoughts about her are filled
with crystalline light, so that in her state she may find some solace and clarity in the lucidity of
her dreams. I connect with her in a form unknown, and only in the unknown, in the mystery,
can the potential for creativity forever flow. I thank her for that. (García-Romero and Cruz)
 Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century 95

Based on her writing during FPW, Escobar wrote a full-length play, Stoneheart, which was subse-
quently developed at the Milagro Theater, Project Y Theater, Sol Project, and Two Rivers Theater.
The play was also selected for the Kilroys List, in 2019.

Set in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in three time periods (present; 1987; 1969), Escobar’s play
explores the Zermani family, who own a school and a ranch. Beatriz “Birdie” Zermani, the middle-
aged matriarch, confronts the deterioration and death of the family’s legacy. Her fortunes shift when
Samara Ramos, a twenty-something woman from the high desert, enters their home as a new live-in
maid and student at their school. Birdie takes Samara under her wing, much to the consternation of
her daughters, Josephine and Madeline. Escobar describes her sweeping family drama as “Hollywood
Western meets Henrik Ibsen meets Samuel Beckett” through which she explores the Zermani family
trying to survive during the waning years of twentieth-century Mexican society.

In the final 2017 FPW presentation, Escobar shared a scene titled “The Stoneheart Chronicles”
that explores the initial meeting of Birdie and Samara, highlighting the primacy and privilege of the
Zermani family. This scene establishes the connection between these two women that forms a central
tumultuous relationship in the play. As Birdie grows more attached to Samara, the family’s fortunes
decline until Birdie herself expels Samara from their home. Throughout the play, Escobar examines
cultural intersections (Aztec, French, Italian, Mexican, and US American), mentorship, class, sexu-
ality, and spirituality as the Zermani family faces economic collapse in northern Mexico, while the
drug trade begins to encroach on and ultimately destroy the lives of this influential Mexican family.

Playwright Nancy García Loza attended the 2017 and 2018 workshops. An early career
playwright based in Chicago, she studied at DePaul University, and represents the workshop par-
ticipants who are at the start of their professional playwriting journey. García Loza reflects on her
FPW experience:

As a self-taught playwright without any exposure to teatro in youth and early adulthood, finding
Fornés, her plays, Memran’s documentary, her methods, her legacy helped me find and own the
power of my voice and instinct, because in moments when I thought that I was not enough, a
painful symptom of being a Mexicana, Fornés’s legacy taught me that I am, alguien muy grande,
genial, y brave. . . . Tengo un hilo y no lo suelto [someone very important, wonderful, and brave.
. . . I have a thread and I will not let it go]. (García-Romero and Cruz)

Based on her writing during the 2018 workshop, García Loza wrote a full-length play, Rust, which
was commissioned and developed by the Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit.

Set in Chicago during the summer of 1990, Güera, a 9-year-old Mexican American girl (to
be played by an adult actor), must confront the reality of growing up in the patriarchal world of her
grandfather, father, and two brothers. Güera begins to learn the tenderness and pain that coexist
as she tries to obey the men in her family while asserting her female identity. The play examines
how gender roles inform one immigrant family’s struggle to sustain their new life in the United
States. Written in “pocha . . . Mexican Spanish, Spanglish, English, and Pocha-Inglish” (5), García
Loza’s poetic dialogue reflects the liminal spaces where her characters exist between Mexico and the
United States, between Spanish and English, and between immigrants and their US-born children.
She thus offers a poignant exploration of a young Latina trying to find her voice in a masculine
Mexican American world.

In the final 2018 FPW presentation, García Loza shared a scene titled “Rust” that explores
Güereja (later Güera) and her family on a trip to a local shopping center to see a popular forty-foot
sculpture in which a giant spike impales eight automobiles. The scene highlights the family patriar-
chal dynamics as young Güereja injures her knee and must deal with her father’s and grandfather’s
conflicting views on her care and state of being. This scene serves as the penultimate one in her
96 Anne García-Romero

full-length play, in which this childhood wound becomes a metaphor for the pain and sacrifice that
Güera must confront as she faces the seemingly insurmountable legacy of machismo. In the play,
García Loza movingly explores how this Mexican American, US-born girl tries to assert herself in a
family where her Mexican father and grandfather hold onto Old World, Latin American traditions
of male dominance.

These three plays exemplify aspects of the Fornés playwriting method that emphasize depth
of character exploration leading to linguistic exactitude in the dialogue and experimental dramatic
structures. The plays all exhibit rich imaginative landscapes with complicated characters who traverse
paths with unexpected turns as they journey toward a deeper sense of personal identity. All three plays,
which began as FPW scenes, have been developed at prominent theatre companies. Additionally,
while not all FPW writers were Latinx, these three Latina playwrights exhibit a complex dramatic
range of work that, like Fornés’s own, defies categorization and amplifies what a Latina play can be.

Future Rooms: The Fornesian Playwriting Legacy

Fornesian playwriting made a considerable impact on the US theatre world in the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries. How can the Fornés playwriting method continue to inform
the next generation of US theatre artists? García Loza says that “I yearn for a Fornés experience
like what Migdalia described from years ago [that is, HPRL]. What would happen if I dove into a
Fornés’s workshop for several months in a row? What would that play be? How would this continue
to transform my writing and myself?” (García-Romero and Cruz). An urgency exists to develop
the next sustainable replication model as a majority of Fornés alumni are now in their fifties and
sixties. Will universities continue to provide pedagogical spaces for the Fornés playwriting method?
Could a laboratory arise, such as HPRL, to provide a year-long immersion in her method? Will a
definitive book be published that offers an in-depth consideration of it (including writing exercises,
reflections from Fornés alumni, detailed descriptions of each element of the method, and so on)
to be used in conjunction with teaching? Can future training models for the method be developed
akin to the acting training models for the Meisner technique, the Michael Chekhov method, and
the Linklater voice method?

During the COVID-19 pandemic many educational institutions pivoted to online learning,
with endless Zoom sessions as the only mode of live communication. In September 2020, I offered
a brief, two-hour introduction to the Fornés playwriting method via Zoom to a group of students
at UTEP. Even in the truncated, mediated digital format I could see elements of the Fornés exercises
inspire creativity in the participants. Until we can safely travel, interact, and communicate in person
without masks and distancing, many of us will rely upon these digital means to share the essential
Fornés pedagogy. However, in the future, we must continue to develop new sustainable replication
models and pedagogical resources to teach the Fornés playwriting method to subsequent genera-
tions of playwrights so that Fornesian playwriting will survive and thrive in the twenty-first century.

Anne García-Romero is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the
University of Notre Dame. Her teaching and research interests include playwriting, dramaturgy, and
Latinx and Latin American theatre. Her book The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and
the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (2016) explores the work of six award-winning Latina playwrights.
Her plays have been developed and produced at NYSF/Public Theater, Eugene O’Neill National
Playwrights Conference, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Theatre Center, and
South Coast Repertory. Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, NoPassport Press,
and Playscripts. She holds an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, a PhD in theatre
studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a founding member of the Latinx Theatre
Commons, where she contributes to the Fornés Institute.
 Replicating Irene’s Room: Sustaining Fornesian Playwriting in the Twenty-first Century 97

Notes

1. For a fuller account of this anecdote, see “Irene Fornes, Teacher” by Alan MacVey, in Maria M. Delgado and
Caridad Svich, eds., Conducting a Life, 161–62.

2. For additional Fornés teaching highlights, see “Teaching and Lecturing (Selected)” by Maria M. Delgado
and Caridad Svich, eds., Conducting a Life, 298–99.

3. For an analysis of Fornés’s artistic formation, see Scott T. Cummings, Maria Irene Fornes, 3–11.

4. For information on Latinx Theatre Commons and the Fornés Institute, see https://howlround.com/ltc and
https://fornesinstitute.com.

5. For more on Cruz’s career and plays, see https://www.migdaliacruz.com.

6. For the Kilroys Lists, see https://www.thekilroys.org.

Works Cited

Alker, Gwendolyn. “Teaching Fornes: Preserving Fornesian Techniques in Critical Context.” Theatre Topics
19.2 (2009): 207–19. Print.

Cram, Cusi. East of West Town. 2017. Playscript.

Cummings, Scott T. Maria Irene Fornes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Delgado, Maria M., and Caridad Svich, eds. Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theater of Maria Irene
Fornes. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1999. Print.

Escobar, Georgina. Stoneheart. 2018. Playscript.

García-Loza, Nancy. Rust. 2020. Playscript.

García-Romero, Anne. The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene
Fornes. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2016. Print.

———, and Lucas García. “Fornés Playwriting Workshop Impact Survey.” 5 Oct. 2019.

———, and Migdalia Cruz. “Fornés Playwriting Workshop Questionnaire.” 3 July 2018.

Herrington, Joan, and Crystal Brian. Playwrights Teach Playwriting. Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2006.
Print.

Neruda, Pablo. Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. Trans. Ben Belitt. New York: Grove P, 1977. Print.