SOURCE: "The Real Life of Maria Irene Fornes," in Performing Arts Journal, Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1984, pp. 29-34.

In the following essay, Marranea describes the essential characteristics of Fornes' drama, praising the "warm delicacy and grace that distinguish it from most of what is written today."

Ever since Fefu and Her Friends Maria Irene Fornes has been writing the finest realistic plays in this country. In fact, one could say that Fefu and the plays that followed it, such as The Danube and now Mud, have paved the way for a new language of dramatic realism, and a way of directing it. What Fornes, as writer and director of her work, has done is to strip away the self-conscious objectivity, narrative weight, and behaviorism of the genre to concentrate on the unique subjectivity of characters for whom talking is gestural, a way of being. There is no attempt to...