biography
| name: |
Fornes, Maria Irene
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1930– )
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| biography:
| Playwright and director, born in Havana, Cuba. After attending the public schools in Havana, she emigrated to the USA (1945). In 1954 she went off to Europe to be a painter, then returned to New York City (1957) to work as a textile designer. By the early 1960s she had turned to writing experimental plays and musicals and began to get them produced off Broadway, often under her own direction. Her first notable success was a musical, Promenade (1965), but her major success came with Fefu and Her Friends (1977), which brings a feminist perspective to female friendship and women's roles in a patriarchal society. She won an Obie (off Broadway theatre) award for both plays and went on to win four more, including one for Eyes on the Harem (1979). In 1982 she won a special Obie for ‘sustained achievement’. The quintessential off-Broadway playwright, with a combination of zany whimsical humour, innovative cinematic stagecraft, and strong ideological themes, in later years she took up directing the classic repertoire, and wrote and directed her own avant-garde plays. |
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