The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes by Anne García-Romero (review)

“All Latina playwrights are in some way Fornes’s theatrical daughters” (53), writes playwright, dramaturg, and theatre scholar Anne García-Romero in her book, The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes. The study has appeared at a felicitous and bittersweet time, with the recent passing of the master playwright herself and the worldwide distribution of Michelle Memran’s much-anticipated documentary, The Rest I Make Up. García-Romero provides an indispensable archive of five contemporary Latina playwrights—Caridad Svich, Karen Zacharías, Elaine Romero, Cusi Cram, and Quiara Alegría Hudes—dedicating a chapter to each, highlighting themes in their major works, and situating them in a genealogy of Latina theatre helmed by Fornes. The Fornes Frame stands out as one of the most accessible and informative critical companions to the work of these five contemporary Latina playwrights currently available. It has great pedagogical value as a contextualization of each playwright’s work with thorough critical sketches of their key plays, all of which have been under-examined in theatre scholarship.

To introduce Fornes as a decidedly Latina playwright and teacher for the purposes of her study, García-Romero narrates Fornes’s founding of the Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Lab at the INTAR Theater and foregrounds Latina themes in Fornes’s plays. The first chapter focuses on Fornes herself and documents compelling elements of her biography and of her artistic and pedagogical styles. García-Romero is meticulous in her chronicling of Fornes’s legacy, including in the book’s appendices a roster of INTAR alumnae and an essential bibliography of plays by Latina playwrights. All of this work is a testament to the scholar’s years of professional and personal immersion in Latina theatre.

García-Romero organizes the book’s analysis around cultural thematics central to Latina theatre: “cultural multiplicity, supernatural interventions, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation” (6). While these are certainly important categories of experience in Latina writing, they often lack specificity in The Fornes Frame. Race and sexuality, two central facets of “Latin@” life experience and identity (the non-binary label García-Romero deploys alongside Latina), seem to haunt the edges of the analysis. Fornes’s work and the work of her inheritors beg deeper engagement with lesbian relationality and racial (rather than broadly cultural) representation. The five analytic categories García-Romero emphasizes seem at times too capacious and nebulous, but what the book’s method might lack in theoretical engagement with recent Latinx studies broadly speaking, it makes up for in its revelations about Fornes’s pedagogical style and its lucid explications of work by Latina theatre’s current trailblazers.

The Fornes Frame is a tribute to the late playwright—heartfelt and critically astute. García-Romero has made a vital contribution to the conservation of Fornes’s legacies as a singular artist and as an iconoclastic and innovative teacher. The Fornes Frame is, likewise, an invaluable teaching resource; each chapter serves as a useful and illuminating critical companion to the playwright’s works. García-Romero’s personal reflections on her encounters with Fornes are not only affecting as we grieve Fornes’s recent departure, but demonstrate an ethics of generosity and intimacy for which to strive in our creative and scholarly work.