Celebrating Legacy and Building Community at the Fornés Institute Symposium

On Saturday, 22 March 2025, the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) and the Fornés Institute convened a lively, daylong symposium to honor and explore the work of visionary Cuban-American playwright, director, and teacher María Irene Fornés. Held at Princeton University’s Lewis Arts Center, the event was designed to galvanize the next wave of critical, creative, and collaborative explorations of the Fornésian tradition. More than fifty scholars, writers, students, and theatre practitioners gathered in person, with many more joining virtually through livestreamed plenary events and online breakout sessions hosted on HowlRound. This hybrid format allowed for a wide and diverse range of participants to engage deeply with Fornés’s legacy.

The symposium was more than a tribute—it was a celebration of Fornés’s immense contributions to the American theatre and a reaffirmation of the community that continues to grow around her influence. The gathering emphasized the importance of creating communal spaces to remember, explore, and build upon Fornés’s enduring impact. The event also honored the late dramaturg Morgan Jenness, who passed away in November 2024 and was both Fornés’s fierce advocate and longtime agent. Her spirit was a guiding presence throughout the day.

In addition to celebrating Fornés’s life and work, the symposium marked the forthcoming publication of María Irene Fornés in Context which will be published by Cambridge University Press in summer 2025, edited by symposium co-organizers Brian Eugenio Herrera and Anne García-Romero. The anthology is poised to be the first major scholarly collection to present a comprehensive portrait of Fornés—placing her writing, teaching, and artistic influence alongside her personal story in a single volume. The book emerged from conversations first sparked during the 2018 Fornés symposium held at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts and reflects many years of evolving scholarship and community building. Although delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s publication now coincides with a moment of renewed energy and interest in her work.

As this new collection documents, Fornés was a seminal figure of the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the 1960s, widely recognized for her innovative, experimental approach to playwriting and directing. Her acclaimed plays—including Fefu and Her Friends, Mud, and The Conduct of Life—earned her nine Obie Awards, including one for Sustained Achievement in Theatre. In 1990, she was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play And What of the Night? Beyond her achievements as a playwright, Fornés was a deeply influential educator who transformed generations of writers through her work with the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival in Los Angeles and the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Lab in New York. After a long battle with Alzheimer’s, Fornés passed away in October 2018. This later chapter of her life is beautifully documented in the 2018 documentary The Rest I Make Up, directed by Michelle Memran, who also participated in the symposium.

Recognizing Fornés’s influence not only as an artist but also as a teacher and mentor, the Fornés Institute continues to promote her legacy through workshops, scholarly convenings, and support for ongoing research. The institute, an initiative of the LTC, hopes to one day create a permanent home for the Fornés archives. Reflecting on the journey from the first 2018 symposium to the present, Brian Herrera noted in his opening remarks that the community of Fornésian disciples has grown tremendously in just a few years. The seeds planted in 2018 have since blossomed into vibrant networks of students, artists, and scholars committed to carrying Irene’s legacy forward.

The day began with an opening address by LTC producer Jacqueline Flores, who offered a powerful meditation on the act of convening as a form of survival, healing, and transformation. “By being a part of this event,” Flores said, “you are part of the commons.” This invocation of the commons, a shared space owned by no one and managed by all, became a thematic touchstone throughout the day, informing the tone and structure of the symposium’s events. The emphasis on collectivity and care resonated through the plenary discussions, breakout sessions, and staged readings that made up the heart of the symposium.

One of the most inspiring aspects of the gathering was its truly intergenerational spirit. In conversation and collaboration, seasoned Fornés scholars and former collaborators connected with students and young artists who had only recently discovered her work. During breaks and lunch, I spoke with several students who had just read or performed their first Fornés play and were excited to delve deeper into her world. Their enthusiasm was palpable and moving—a testament to the continued relevance of Fornés’s artistry, pedagogy, and bohemian approach to life and theatre.

The symposium featured three dynamic staged readings from María IreneFornés in Context, each highlighting a distinct perspective on Fornés’s life and legacy. The first reading, Harriet and Irene: Infinite Muses, written by Elaine Romero and directed by Juliana Frey-Méndez, explored Fornés’s relationship with Harriet Sohmers Zwerling during their time in Paris in 1954. The piece offered an intimate glimpse into Irene’s early life as a young writer and lover, capturing her fierce intellect and budding sexuality.

The second reading, Truffle Pigs, was a collaborative work by Michael Breslin and Catherine María “Cat” Rodríguez of the theatre company Fake Friends. Directed by Rodríguez, the play presented a group of students preparing for an oral theatre exam while wrestling with Fornés’s identity as a feminist writer. The piece cleverly wove contemporary dialogue with archival material, questioning and reframing how we engage with Fornés today.

The final staged reading of the day was The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus, one of Fornés’s last plays. Directed by Katie Pearl, the previously unstaged work offered an imagined conversation between Gertrude Stein, her lover Alice B. Toklas, and their friend Pablo Picasso in 1932 Paris. As the characters discussed art and relationships, the play subtly reflected Fornés’s own aesthetic interests and affinities. Each reading was skillfully performed and thoughtfully directed, offering fresh and engaging windows into the Fornésian world.

The day’s closing plenary, moderated by Herrera, featured insights from Katie Pearl, Anne García-Romero, and Gwendolyn Alker. Pearl spoke about the growing number of Fornés productions on college campuses, emphasizing the need for intimate, flexible spaces that can support the idiosyncratic rhythms of her plays. García-Romero, herself a former student of Fornés, emphasized the ongoing value of her teaching methods and the necessity of continuing to share them with new generations. Alker, currently at work on the first biography of Fornés, spoke about the complexity of writing about such a multifaceted figure and the vital role that community plays in preserving her memory.

This final plenary also underscored the urgency of documenting the reverberations of Fornés’s work, including through the preservation of ephemera, letters, teaching notes, and personal archives. The panelists addressed the bilingual nature of Irene’s life and writing, pointing to the need for further engagement with her Spanish-language materials. The call to continue these recuperative projects—to recover what has been lost, ignored, or marginalized—rang out clearly as the symposium drew to a close.

Fornés now exists as a constellation of gestures, teachings, and stories rather than a single, unified image.

Between plenaries, attendees were invited to participate in breakout sessions focused on specific themes, including “Playwriting Methods,” “Translation,” “Teaching Fornés,” “Staging/Adapting Fornés,” “Memory/Legacy,” and “Post-Reading Discussions.” As a scholar particularly interested in questions of legacy, lineage, queer kinship, and aging, I participated in both the morning and afternoon sessions of the “Memory and Legacy” group. The morning session was facilitated by Katie Pearl and Michelle Memran; the afternoon by Gwendolyn Alker.

In both sessions, participants were encouraged to “locate themselves” within the Fornésian world—sharing stories, reflections, and memories of how Irene’s legacy lives on in their lives and work. The morning discussion centered on the fragmentation of memory, exploring how Fornés now exists as a constellation of gestures, teachings, and stories rather than a single, unified image. A particularly moving moment came when participants reflected on the life and influence of Morgan Jenness, whose strong advocacy and unwavering care for Fornés added a layer of collective mourning and reverence to the session. An installation in the room paid tribute to Jenness, reminding us of the shared labor that sustains this community.

The afternoon discussion delved even deeper into the living, breathing presence of Fornés in the memories of her students and collaborators. Participants recalled the improvisational, intuitive quality of her pedagogy—how she could unlock a writer’s creativity through seemingly simple but profoundly generative exercises. One key takeaway was the recognition that Fornés left behind no fixed methodology—no codified curriculum or instruction manual—making the act of documentation both more difficult and more essential. As Alker continues to work on her biography, these memories and oral histories are crucial tools for capturing the ephemeral essence of Irene’s teaching.

Bonnie Marranca, Fornés’s longtime editor at PAJ, was also present and spoke to the importance of embodied practice, companion archives, and the informal, unrecorded moments that defined much of Fornés’s influence. Across both sessions, a consensus emerged: Fornés was a queer elder, a fiercely original voice whose impact cannot be easily categorized. Her identity and work transcend neat labels—feminist, Latinx, queer, avant-garde, bohemian—yet resonate powerfully across all those registers.

Throughout the symposium, conversations returned again and again to this “slipperiness” of Fornés’s identity. She often resisted being labeled a feminist, Latina, or lesbian writer, and yet her work—especially plays like Fefu and Her Friends—is undeniably feminist in its form, structure, and content. Participants debated how best to teach Fornés’s plays in varied educational contexts, how to account for the complexities of her identity, and how to address the persistent challenge of her being one of the only Latina playwrights taught in many curricula. These conversations were rich, nuanced, and underscored the need for more scholarship, more archives, and more platforms for Fornés’s voice.

Fornés’s legacy lives on not only in her plays, but in the passion with which people teach and remember her. It lives in the interplay between life and art, in the bodies and voices of her students and collaborators and those who write about her, and in the radical intimacy of her creative and pedagogical practice.

The 2025 María Irene Fornés Institute Symposium was a powerful testament to the enduring vibrancy of Fornés’s life and work. It was also a reminder of how communities form around legacies—not just to remember, but to activate, to build, and to imagine what’s next.

For me, a central theme emerged from the entire symposium: Fornés’s legacy lives on not only in her plays, but in the passion with which people teach and remember her. It lives in the interplay between life and art, in the bodies and voices of her students and collaborators and those who write about her, and in the radical intimacy of her creative and pedagogical practice. As we look ahead, the task of remembering Fornés remains inseparable from the work of making her present again and again—in classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and beyond.