Celebrating Fornés
A Weekend of Fefu, Feast, FilmSat, Apr 23 & Sun, Apr 24
Celebrating Fornés
Sat, Apr 23 & Sun, Apr 24
A Fornés Feast
Sat, Apr 23, 5–6pm (between Fefu performances)
La Cocina Marketplace (101 Hyde St, San Francisco, CA—brief walk from the Strand Theater)
Presenters: Luis Alfaro, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Migdalia Cruz, Naomi Iizuka, Lisa Ramirez, Anne Washburn
With musical performance by Seleena Harkness-Lee and Thaddeus Pinkston
Playwright Tony Kushner proclaimed that “America has produced no dramatist of greater importance than María Irene Fornés”—a sentiment echoed by prominent theater artists across this nation. This Fornés Feast will give you a taste of her broad body of work, served up by brilliant artists she inspired. A select few of the many playwrights, actors, and directors who credit their artistry to her life-changing influence will share speeches and songs from her works, as well as their reflections on her impact on theater as we know it today.
This event is hosted at local woman-owned restaurant co-op La Cocina—join us for food and drink to make this event a feast in every sense of the word. Doors open at 4:45. We hope you will leave full of delicious food, as well as inspiration, thought, joy, and life.
The Rest I Make Up
Sun, Apr 24, 5:30 p.m. (after the matinee of Fefu)
Strand Theater
With a post-screening Q&A with filmmaker Michelle Memran
Join us for a screening of The Rest I Make Up, a portrait of visionary Cuban-American dramatist María Irene Fornés and the story of her unexpected collaboration with filmmaker Michelle Memran.
María Irene Fornés was one of America's greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, yet she remains largely unknown. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds onstage and pioneered NYC’s Off-Off Broadway theater movement, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards. When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off. “Above all, the movie embodies Fornés’s inherently and irrepressibly creative presence,” wrote Richard Brody in The New Yorker. “The text alone, transcribed, would be a primer in live-wife poetic lucidity.”