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She was born on May 14, 1930. Born in Havana, Cuba. -
Immigrated to the United States in 1945 with her sister Margarita, and mother Carmen, a former schoolteacher. Earlier that year her father passed away, Carlos, a low-level bureaucrat in Cuba’s civil service, he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three. -
In the early 1950s, she studied with Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann, whose push-pull theory of dynamic visual energies influenced her theatre work. -
By 1954, Fornés had met the writer and artist's model Harriet Sohmers. They became lovers and moved to Paris where Fornés planned to study painting. But moved back to New York when the relationship ended. -
Fornés and Susan Sontag had a romantic relationship from 1959 to 1963. Fornés credits Sontag with inspiring her to become a playwright. Fornés says she was able to start writing a short story by sitting at their kitchen table and using a cookbook for inspiration. -
In the early 1960s, Fornés became a member of the Actors Studio Playwrights’ Unit, where she learned acting techniques from Lee Strasberg and Gene Frankel and applied their pursuit of replicating authentic human emotion and behavior to her playwriting. -
Fornés's first step toward playwriting involved translating letters she brought with her from Cuba that were written to her great-grandfather from a cousin in Spain. She turned the letters into a play called La Viuda (The Widow, 1961). -
Tango Palace was her first produced play. Fornés is often called the American theater's "Mother Avant-Garde". -
She came close to having her work performed on Broadway in April 1966, when Jerome Robbins directed The Office starring Elaine May. But Fornes was so unhappy with how the production misrepresented her vision that she exercised her contractual right to withdraw the script. -
Fornés’s numerous awards include nine Obies, and in 1972 she received a Guggenheim fellowship. -
In 1973, she directed a production of her play, Molly’s Dream, and from then on directed the original productions of all of her own plays. -
Her best-known play, Fefu and Her Friends (1977). -
Fornés, along with Sam Shepard and Murray Mednick, founded the Padua Hills Festival and Workshop (1978-1995) in Southern California, an annual event for experimental playwriting. At Padua, she directed, wrote, and taught, creating early versions of plays like The Danube, The Conduct of Life, Mud, and Oscar and Bertha (1989). -
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) -
Letters from Cuba was the final play Maria Irene wrote. -
Her innovative playwriting method encompasses an experiential practice based in physicality, orality and community, to help writers generate dynamic, new play material. The elements of the “Fornés playwriting method” include centering movement, guided visualization, basic drawing, found materials (aural, written and visual) and communal writing. -
Maria Irene Fornés retired from writing plays in 2001 due to illness. -
She was diagnosed with Alzheimer and moved to a nurse home in upstate New York. -
Although she was dealing with Alzheimer, Fornes collaborated with filmmaker Michelle Memran to explore her remembered past. -
Fornés died at the Amsterdam Nursing Home in Manhattan on October 30, 2018.