“I don’t know of any playwright more intuitive, more reliant on taking stuff from the unconscious, and letting that create form.” — Edward Albee on María Irene Fornés
Playwright, director, and educator María Irene Fornés will be celebrated this month with the screening of Michelle Memran’s documentary THE REST IMAKE UP at the Museum of Modern Art, and a twelve-hour marathon of readings from Fornés’ plays at the Public Theater.
“Writing plays is not a way of earning a living but earning a life… Learning how to become intimate with your own imagination is more important than finishing a piece.” — María Irene Fornés
Fornés—one of the most influential writing teachers of contemporary theater, and an advocate of an oblique approach to the blank page—prepared her students by immersing them in voice and movement workshops. She was, in the words of playwright Brooke Berman, a former assistant, “someone who had spent her whole life devoted to capturing the truth of a moment in theatrical space.”
THE REST I MAKE UP features extensive footage of Fornés in Greenwich Village and Havana and Miami—dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease—as well as interviews with friends, family, ex-lovers, and colleagues—Ellen Stewart, John Guare, Constance Congdon, Migdalia Cruz and many more.
“Her work has no precedents, it isn’t derived from anything. She’s the most original of us all.” — Lanford Wilson on Fornés
Top: Mary Jo Pearson and John O’Keefe in Mud, by María Irene Fornés, at Theater for the New City in 1983.
Above: Scene from The Danube, by Fornés, at American Place Theater in 1984. Stage photographs by Anne Militello.
Below: Fornés (left) with “the love of my life” Susan Sontag.
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