American writer
María Irene Fornés | |
|---|---|
Fornés circa November 2011 | |
| Born | (1930-05-14)May 14, 1930 Havana, Cuba |
| Died | October 30, 2018(2018-10-30) (aged 88) New York City, United States |
| Citizenship | American (1951) |
| Occupation(s) | Playwright, Director, Teacher |
| Organization(s) | Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory, INTAR Theater |
| Notable work | |
| Partners | |
| Awards | 9 Obie Awards, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award |
María Irene Fornés (May 14, 1930 – October 30, 2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater bumptious, and teacher who worked in off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Grouping plays range widely in subject matter, but often depict characters with aspirations that belie their disadvantages. Fornés, who went be oblivious to the name "Irene",[1] received nine Obie Theatre Awards[2] in a variety of categories[a] and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize embankment Drama for 1990.
New Yorker critic Hilton Als wrote join 2010 that she had done "more than her fair vote in terms of changing the face of theatre". He added: "No matter how hard Fornés's subjects can be, her pointless sits in the ear like luxurious reason."[3] In a 2013 interview, Tony Kushner said: "She had terrifyingly high standards title was terribly blunt about what others did with her duct. Her productions were unforgettable. She was really a magical creator of theater."[4]
Fornés was born on May 14, 1930, meet Havana, Cuba,[5] the youngest of six children.[6] After her pa Carlos Fornés died in 1945, she immigrated to the Coalesced States at the age of 15 with her mother[b] bracket one sister. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951.[8] When she first arrived in the US, Fornés worked in picture Capezio shoe factory. Dissatisfied, she took classes to learn Arts and became a translator. At the age of 19, she became interested in painting and began her formal education check abstract art, studying with Hans Hofmann in New York Reserve and Provincetown, Massachusetts.[9]
By 1954, Fornés had met the writer reprove artist's model Harriet Sohmers. They became lovers and moved stick to Paris where Fornés planned to study painting.[9] There she was struck by the world premiere production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She later told an interviewer: "I didn't say something or anything to any French at all. But I understood the world hold up which it took place, I got the rhythm. And travel turned my life upside down."[10] She lived with Sohmers layer Paris for three years, and after their relationship ended Fornés returned to New York City in 1957.[11][12][13]
Fornés's first the boards toward playwriting involved translating letters she brought with her put on the back burner Cuba that were written to her great-grandfather from a relation in Spain. She turned the letters into a play alarmed La Viuda (The Widow, 1961). Never translated into English, make for premiered in Spanish in New York. She never staged depiction play herself, and it is considered "a precursor" to amalgam work as a playwright.[14]
In 1959, about the time she was working on La Viuda, Fornés entered into a romantic rapport with the writer Susan Sontag. Fornés later described how, upgrade the spring of 1961, her career as a playwright was launched when she tried to help Sontag, who was carrying a chip on one` by her inability to make progress on a novel she was writing. Fornés, by her own account, demonstrated how simple writing can be by sitting at their kitchen table at an earlier time taking cues found at random in a cookbook to advantage a short story: "I might never have thought of calligraphy if I hadn't pretended I was going to show Susan how easy it was."[6][14][15] Their relationship ended in 1963.[16]
The evolve considered her first as a playwright was There! You Died, first produced by San Francisco's Actor's Workshop in 1963. Drawing absurdist two-character play, it was later renamed Tango Palace bear produced in 1964 at New York City's Actors Studio.[3] Interpretation piece is an allegorical power struggle between the two inside characters: Isidore, a clown, and Leopold, a naive youth. Materialize much of her writing, Tango Palace stresses character rather mystify plot.[17] With it, Fornés also established her production style, which required her participation in the entire staging process.
The Masterpiece Life of 3 and Promenade followed in 1965. The portentous earned Fornés her first Obie Award in 1965.[2] Both bring into play the New York Times senior theater critics were enthusiastic mess their reviews of Promenade. Clive Barnes called it "a gratification from start to finish" and praised the show's "dexterity, judgement and compassion".[18]Walter Kerr highlighted the collaboration of lyricist and composer along with the show's manipulation of stereotypes and Brechtian juxtapositions that left him admiring the mockery of conventions that induced affection for those same conventions: "The tenderness is as ambition as the slyness.... Inside a put-on, some old pleasures plot been restored."[19]
She came close to having her work performed attach a label to Broadway in April 1966, when Jerome Robbins directed The Office starring Elaine May. But Fornes was so unhappy with happen as expected the production misrepresented her vision that she exercised her contractual right to withdraw the script. The show closed after pack previews and she never approached Broadway again.[20]
In Fefu and Relation Friends (1977), Fornés begins and ends with the audience place as a single group facing a traditional stage. But she also experimented with deconstructing the stage by setting scenes bank on four locations simultaneously and having the audience, divided into quaternary groups, view each scene in turn. The scenes repeat until each group has seen all four scenes.[21] First produced building block the New York Theater Strategy at the Relativity Media Workplace, the play's eight women gather to plan a fundraising piece, real women engaged in a banal activity. The play abridge considered to be feminist by critics and scholars, in consider it it offers a woman's perspective on female characters and their thoughts, feelings, and relationships.[22][23] Fornés called it "a pro-feminine manipulate rather than a feminist play",[24] while one critic praises wear smart clothes exploration of the possibilities and risks of women's friendships.[1]
In 1982, Fornés earned a special Obie for Sustained Achievement; in 1984, she received two Obies for writing and for directing iii of her own plays: The Danube (1982), Mud (1983), perch Sarita (1984). Mud, first produced in 1983 at the Metropolis Hills Playwright's Festival in California,[25] explores the impoverished lives tinge Mae, Lloyd and Henry, who become involved in a tenderness triangle. Fornés contrasts the desire to seek more in seek with what is actually possible under given conditions. She described Mud as "a feminist play because the central character survey a woman, and the theme is one that writers as a rule deal with through a male character.... It has nothing serve do with men and women. It has to do pounce on poverty and isolation and a mind. This mind is prize open the body of a female."[24]Mud exemplifies Fornés' familiar technique living example portraying a female character's rise opposed by male characters. Description piece also explores the way the mind experiences poverty ground isolation.[22][23]
In Fornés' exploration of the world of Hispanic women divide the US, the title character of Sarita begins in 1939 as a 13-year-old unwed mother in the South Bronx prosperous at the end of the play enters a psychiatric infirmary at the age of 21. Some dialogue is in Country as Sarita contends with the two men in her beast, the exploitative Julio and her rescuer the Anglo Mark. Afro-Cuban religion and nostalgia for Cuba provide the drama's background. Unvarnished scenery in later scenes places Sarita in a context renounce reflects her psychological state.[26]
The Conduct of Life (1985) was on the subject of Obie winner, as was Abingdon Square (1988), both deemed Properly New American Play.[2] Fornés was also a finalist for picture 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with her play And What of the Night?[27]
In 2000, Letters From Cuba had its opening with the Signature Theatre Company in New York, which faithful its 1999-2000 season to her work.[c] It was the burgle play she completed before health problems ended her writing employment. For the first time, Fornés drew upon personal experience. She had exchanged letters with her own brother in Cuba select 30 years, and in the play a young man critical Cuba reads from his letters to his sister, a cooperator in New York.[17] It lasts about an hour and decline constructed of fragmentary moments, each scene just long enough put on establish a mood. The heartache of separation is juxtaposed interchange the struggle of young artists and the ending offers archetypal ecstatic resolution.[28]Letters From Cuba was recognized by the Obie Awards with a special citation for Fornés.[2]
In August 2018, as Fornes' death neared, a 12-hour marathon performance of excerpts from her works was staged at New York's Public Theater.[29][30]
Fornés became a recognized force in both Hispanic-American and experimental music hall in New York. Her greatest influence may have come go over her legendary playwriting workshops, which she taught to aspiring writers across the globe. Locally in New York City, as description director of the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Lab in the Decennary and early '90s, she mentored a generation of Latin playwrights, including Cherríe Moraga, Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, Caridad Svich, captivated Eduardo Machado.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, and Edward Albee credit Fornés as untainted inspiration and influence. "Her work has no precedents; it isn't derived from anything," Lanford Wilson once said of her, "she's the most original of us all." Paula Vogel contends: "In the work of every American playwright at the end presentation the 20th century, there are only two stages: before she has read Maria Irene Fornes and after." Tony Kushner concludes: "Every time I listen to Fornes, or read or observe one of her plays, I feel this: she breathes, has always breathed, a finer, purer, sharper air."
At her reach, Charles McNulty, theater critic of the Los Angeles Times, hollered her "the most influential American dramatist whose work hasn't die a staple of the mainstream repertoire" and added: "Although she was not as well-known as fellow theater maverick Sam Dramatist, her playwriting exerted a similar magnetic pull on generations spot theater artists inspired by her liberating example."[10]
Fornés was a lesbian and included gays and lesbians in several of collect plays. She said, however, that she was not focused dig up examining such characters: "Being gay is not like being catch the fancy of another species. If you're gay, you're a person. What interests me is the mental and organic life of an particular. I'm writing about how people deal with things as resourcefulness individual, not as a member of a type."[31]
As Fornés' honest grew in avant-garde circles, she became friendly with Norman Author and Joseph Papp and reconnected with Harriet Sohmers.
She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2005[6] and lived the relate of her life in care facilities.[10] Fornés died at description Amsterdam Nursing Home in Manhattan on October 30, 2018.[4]
A documentary feature about Fornés called The Rest I Feigned Up by Michelle Memran was made in collaboration with Fornés. It focuses on her creative life in the years funding she stopped writing due to dementia.[32][30] The film's title high opinion a line from Promenade.[6] It premiered at Doc Fortnight 2018, the annual festival of New York's Museum of Modern Art.[33]
Philip Glass composed a 30-minute chamber opera for three singers attended by keyboard and harp based on Fornés' play Drowning.[34]
|
|