SOURCE: A preface to Maria Irene Fornes: Plays, PAJ Publications, 1986, pp. 7-10.

In the following essay, Sontag extols Fornes' growth as a dramatist. "The plays, " she states, "have always been about wisdom: what it means to be wise. They are getting wiser. "

Mud, The Danube, The Conduct of Life, Sarita—four plays, recent work by the prolific Maria Irene Fornes, who for many years has been conducting with exemplary tenacity and scrupulousness a unique career in the American theatre.

Born in Havana, Fornes arrived in this country with her family when she was fifteen; in her twenties she spent several years in France (she was painting then), and began writing plays after she returned to New York, when she was around thirty. Although the language in which she became a writer was English, not Spanish—and Fornes's early work is inconceivable without the reinforcement of the lively local...