María Irene Fornés

María Irene Fornés (May 14, 1930 – October 30, 2018) was a Cuban-American avant-garde playwright and director.

Fornes (2012)

Quotes

• Having a play directed by someone else is like going to a religious school when you’re a child, you listen and obey…
  • On the loss of creative control if you’re not directing in “María Irene Fornés by Allen Frame” in BOMB Magazine (1984 Oct 1)

• My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…
  • On avoiding the typical play structures in “María Irene Fornés by Allen Frame” in BOMB Magazine (1984 Oct 1)

• Art is something you don’t just reproduce—what you see everyday doesn’t seem to be inspiring to them. But you do something with it so that it’s not bound by the law of reality. My work has always had that influence. I’ve never felt that it was necessary at all to write realistic plays…
  • On how her work (and other Latin American artists) tend to gear towards surrealism in “María Irene Fornés by Allen Frame” in BOMB Magazine (1984 Oct 1)

• Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright.
  • On the fickle nature of theater in “Moment to Moment: with Maria Irene Fornes” in The Brooklyn Rail (Autumn 2002)