A lecture on María Irene Fornés at Emerson College

Emerson College in Boston presented a lecture entitled María Irene Fornés: America's Greatest Living Playwright by Dr. Scott Cummings, Chair of the Theatre Department at Boston College livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Thursday 20 February at 11 a.m. PST/ 1 p.m. CST/ 2 p.m. EST/ 19:00 GMT. To participate in online conversation, use Twitter hashtags #cafeonda & #howlround.

Tony Kushner has written, “America has produced no dramatist of greater importance than Maria Irene Fornes.” Paula Vogel adds, “In the work of every American playwright at the end of the 20th century, there are only two stages: before she has read Maria Irene Fornes–and after.”

Scott T. Cummings is Associate Professor and Chair of the Theatre Department at Boston College. His research on María Irene Fornés began at the Yale School of Drama in the mid-1980s when he interviewed her for Yale’s Theater magazine. He went on to write his dissertation on Fornes, several essays and reviews, and a 2012 book on Fornes in the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists series. He is also the author of  Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and the co-editor (with Erica Stevens Abbitt) of The Theatre of Naomi Wallace: Embodied Dialogues (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Scott holds degrees from the Yale School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan’s Residential College.

Sponsored by Emerson College, Department of Performing Arts.

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