SOURCE: Marranca, Bonnie. “The State of Grace: Maria Irene Fornes at Sixty-Two.” Performing Arts Journal 14, no. 2 (May 1992): 24-31.

In the following essay, Marranca observes that Fornes's plays explore the spiritual lives of women and the consequences of their various life-choices.

Early in Abingdon Square a young woman says to an inquisitive friend, “You have to know how to enter another person's life.” In many ways that rule of etiquette has shaped the theatre of Maria Irene Fornes whose profound theme has always been the conduct of life.

This is particularly true of Abingdon Square in which she creates a universe more Catholic than any of the other worlds of her plays. The teenage Marion marries a loving older man, she has an affair with another man, a child with a third, descends into a personal hell, and in the end nurses her husband after his stroke out of...