A key way to view Latina plays today is through the foundational frame of playwright and teacher, Maria Irene Fornes, who has transformed American theatre. Considering Fornes's legacy, Anne García-Romero shows how five award-winning playwrights continue to contest and complicate Latina theatre.

A key way to view Latina plays today is through the foundational frame of playwright and teacher Maria Irene Fornes, who has trained a generation of theatre artists and transformed the field of American theatre. Fornes, author of Fefu and Her Friends and Sarita and a nine-time Obie Award winner, is known for her plays that traverse cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic borders. In The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes, Anne García-Romero considers the work of five award-winning Latina playwrights in the early twenty-first century, offering her unique perspective as a theatre studies scholar who is also a professional playwright. The playwrights in this book include Pulitzer Prize–winner Quiara Alegría Hudes; Obie Award–winner Caridad Svich; Karen Zacarías, resident playwright at Arena Stage in Washington, DC; Elaine Romero, member of the Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit in Chicago, Illinois; and Cusi Cram, company member of the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City. Using four key concepts—cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation—García-Romero shows how these playwrights expand past a consideration of a single culture toward broader, simultaneous connections to diverse cultures. The playwrights also experiment with the theatrical form as they redefine what a Latina play can be. Following Fornes’s legacy, these playwrights continue to contest and complicate Latina theatre.

Decentered Playwriting investigates new and alternative strategies for dramatic writing that incorporate non-Western, Indigenous, and underrepresented storytelling techniques and traditions while deepening a creative practice that decenters hegemonic methods. A collection of short essays and exercises by leading teaching artists, playwrights, and academics in the fields of playwriting and dramaturgy, this book focuses on reimagining pedagogical techniques by introducing playwrights to new storytelling methods, traditions, and ways of studying, and teaching diverse narratological practices. This is a vital and invaluable book for anyone teaching or studying playwriting, dramatic structure, storytelling at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, or as part of their own professional practice.

Major new collection of Latina/o contemporary work for the stage.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Maria Irene Fornés and Multispatial Theater is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

A compelling exploration of materiality and semiotics in Latinx inscriptions Writers and artists from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Latinx New York operate under the pressures of inscription: the material and semiotic entanglement of making a mark as a marked artist. By employing layered material tropes and figures, such as stone, dust, viscera, and animality, their works do not represent a singular Latinx experience and instead, must be read at the margin of language and matter. Matters of Inscription explores feminist and queer inscriptions of Latinidad, encompassing the intersections of materiality and semiotics in art, performance, poetry, plays, and fiction. By delving into these figural matters, Christina A. León highlights how writers and artists such as Zilia Sánchez, Ana Mendieta, Manuel Ramos Otero, María Irene Fornés, Justin Torres, and Roque Salas Rivera forge material inscriptions that transcend individual lives and call for a broader analytical perspective unmoored from biographical anchors. The book urges readers to reevaluate the notion of difference, which has momentarily sought solace in identitarian terminology. León engages in rhetorical analysis that reassesses how the terms of Latinx studies have been challenged and how they are failing. Rather than categorizing texts based on predetermined taxonomic terms or individual subjects’ lives, the book tracks figures situated at the edges of materiality and semiosis. This approach addresses the continuous marginalization and dispossession that shape the phenomenon of Latinx identity (“latinidad”) by recentering conceptual questions of origin, diaspora, pedagogy, and belonging. The book contends that losses and deprivations should be rendered incommensurate to avoid collapsing the richness of different experiences or scales of ontological debasement. By focusing on the interplay of materiality and semiotics, Matters of Inscription challenges conventional approaches that seek to homogenize and anticipate what Latinx might mean and instead calls for a more capacious and nuanced analysis that goes beyond individual biographies.

The Decades of Modern American Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: David Mamet: Edmond (1982), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed-the-Plow (1988) and Oleanna (1992); David Henry Hwang: Family Devotions (1981), The Sound of a Voice (1983) and M. Butterfly (1988); Maria Irene Fornès: The Danube (1982), Mud (1983) and The Conduct of Life (1985); August Wilson: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1984) and Fences (1987).