Fornes, Maria Irene (1930- )

Cuban-born US playwright and director. Success came with Fefu and Her Friends (1977), which brings a feminist perspective to female friendship and women's roles in a patriarchal society. She won several Obies, awards for off-Broadway theatre, including one for ‘sustained achievement’.

She was born in Havana. By the early 1960s, she was writing experimental plays and musicals and she began to get them produced off-Broadway, often under her own direction. Her first notable success was a musical, Promenade (1965). A quintessential off-Broadway playwright, she combined zany, whimsical humour, with innovative, cinematic stagecraft, and strong ideological themes. In later years took up directing the classic repertoire as well as writing and directing her own avant-garde plays.