María Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés was born in Havana, Havana Province, Cuba on May 14th, 1930 and is the Playwright. At the age of 88, María Irene Fornés biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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María Irene Fornés (May 14, 1930 – October 30, 2018) was a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director, who was a leading figure of the off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s.
Always an iconoclast, each of Fornés's plays was its own world, all vastly different from each other.
Whereas contemporary playwrights developed a signature style, the critical factor identifying a Fornés play is not tone or structure, but an intense, relentless and compassionate examination of the human condition—especially the way intimate personal relationships are affected and infected by economic conditions. 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 is also recognized as a brilliant and exacting director and one of the most significant teachers of playwriting of her time.
Her methodology was influenced by acting exercises she encountered at the Actor's Studio, and focused on getting writers into their bodies and creative unconscious minds to become intimate with their imaginations. A documentary feature about Fornés called The Rest I Make Up by Michelle Memran was made in collaboration with Fornés, and focuses on her creative life in the years after she stopped writing due to dementia.
Awards and recognition
- 1961 John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship
- 1965 Obie Award for Distinguished Plays: Promenade and The Successful Life of 3
- 1972 Guggenheim Fellowship, Drama and Performance Art
- 1977 Obie Award for Playwrighting: Fefu and Her Friends
- 1979 Obie Award for Directing: Eyes on the Harem
- 1982 Obie Award for Sustained Achievement
- 1984 Obie Awards for Playwrighting: The Danube, Sarita, Mud
- 1984 Obie Awards for Directing: The Danube, Sarita, Mud
- 1985 Obie Award for Best New American Play: The Conduct of Life
- 1985 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature
- 1986 Playwrights U.S.A. Award for translation of Virgilio Piñera's Cold Air
- 1988 Obie Award for Best New American Play: Abingdon Square
- 1990 New York State Governor's Arts Award
- 1992 Honorary doctorate, Bates College
- 2000 Obie Award Special Citation for Letters From Cuba
- 2001 Robert Chesley Award, for lifetime achievement
- 2002 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist