Irene Fornes
| María Irene Fornés | |
|---|---|
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Fornés c. November 2011
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| Born |
May 14, 1930 Havana, Cuba |
| Citizenship | American (1951) |
| Occupation | Playwright, Artist |
| Organization | INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory INTAR (International Arts Relations, Inc.) |
| Notable work |
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| Partner(s) | Harriet Sohmers, Susan Sontag |
| Awards | 9 Obie Awards, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award |
María Irene Fornés (born May 14, 1930) is a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director who was a leading figure of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Fornés' themes focused on poverty and feminism. Moreover, on personal and artistic levels, her lesbian identity has been central to her art.
In 1965, she won her first Distinguished Plays Obie Award for Promenade and The Successful Life of 3. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with her play And What of the Night? in 1990. Other notable works include Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, Sarita, and Letters from Cuba. Fornés became known in both Hispanic-American and experimental theatre in New York, winning a total of nine Obie Awards.
Fornés was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14, with her mother, Carmen Collado Fornés and sister, Margarita Fornés Lapinel, after her father, Carlos Fornés, died in 1945. Maria Had two older sisters, Margarita and Carmencita and three older brothers Rafael (noted cartoonist), Hector and Raul. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951. When she first arrived in America, Fornés worked in the Capezio shoe factory. Dissatisfied, she took classes to learn English and became a translator. At the age of 19, she became interested in painting and began her formal education in abstract art, studying with Hans Hofmann in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
By 1954, Fornés had met the writer and artist's model Harriet Sohmers. They became lovers, and she moved to Paris to live with Sohmers and study painting. There, she was greatly influenced by a French production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, though she had never read the play and did not understand French. This shifted her creative ambition to playwriting. She lived with Sohmers in Paris for three years, after which Fornés lived with writer Susan Sontag.
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