One of Off-Broadway's best-loved plays, originally directed by the author. The audience follows the lives of eight women. For this play, Maria Irene Fornes received one of her nine Obie awards. "A wonderful, important play." Susan Sontag "Fornes is America's truest poet of the theater." Erika Munk "An extraordinary play of uncommon insight and wit." Los Angeles Herald Examiner "One of the most powerful plays written about the mysteries and shared hallucinations of the female experience." L A Weekly "Though written in 1977, the message of FEFU AND HER FRIENDS remains ever the same: women don't know what to do with feminism. Or rather, they don't know what to do with themselves. It's a strange, unsettling play, not least because the strong women characters are at a loss with each other and with themselves. Without a man to center around, they disintegrate into cattiness and then madness. Fefu is probably deranged to begin with. She 'pretends' to shoot her husband with a gun that may or may not be loaded. She likes men better than women and in fact finds women 'loathsome.' Fefu and her friends are a group of society women, circa 1935. They're bored and affected in the manner of wealthy women who have too much free time. The play begins with plans for a charity benefit being planned at Fefu's New England estate. During the second part, four different scenes play simultaneously in four different rooms. The audience is led around to each in no particular order. In the final act, the women turn giggly, then bitchy, and then everything takes a tragic turn. Though not a realistic play neither is it strictly allegorical...at the heart of the play [is] 'a provocative statement about women to this day.' Fornes's self-loathing, self-doubting women only gradually come to understand the glossy surface and the dark underbelly that is the dual reality of their lives. It's thought-provoking but challenging, not for those who enjoy escapism in their theatre." Jenny Sandman, CurtainUp"

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America comes this powerful portrayal of individual dissolution and resolution in the face of political catastrophe. “It’s brash, audacious and...intoxicatingly visionary.”—Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune

A key way to view Latina plays today is through the foundational frame of playwright and teacher Maria Irene Fornes, who has trained a generation of theatre artists and transformed the field of American theatre. Fornes, author of Fefu and Her Friends and Sarita and a nine-time Obie Award winner, is known for her plays that traverse cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic borders. In The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes, Anne García-Romero considers the work of five award-winning Latina playwrights in the early twenty-first century, offering her unique perspective as a theatre studies scholar who is also a professional playwright. The playwrights in this book include Pulitzer Prize–winner Quiara Alegría Hudes; Obie Award–winner Caridad Svich; Karen Zacarías, resident playwright at Arena Stage in Washington, DC; Elaine Romero, member of the Goodman Theatre Playwrights Unit in Chicago, Illinois; and Cusi Cram, company member of the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York City. Using four key concepts—cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latina identity, and theatrical experimentation—García-Romero shows how these playwrights expand past a consideration of a single culture toward broader, simultaneous connections to diverse cultures. The playwrights also experiment with the theatrical form as they redefine what a Latina play can be. Following Fornes’s legacy, these playwrights continue to contest and complicate Latina theatre.

Maria Irene Fornes provides an enlightening introduction to a pivotal figure in both Hispanic-American and experimental theater. From her theatrical origins in 1960s Cuba to her precedent plays for the US stage, this book presents an important guide of work of this politically-charged playwright.

Maria Irene Fornes is PAJ's top-selling author, with three volumes in print for two decades.

World Theatre: The Basics presents a well-rounded introduction to non-Western theatre, exploring the history and current practice of theatrical traditions in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, the Caribbean, and the non-English-speaking cultures of the Americas. Featuring a selection of case studies and examples from each region, it helps the reader to understand the key issues surrounding world theatre scholarship and global, postcolonial, and transnational performance practices. An essential read for anyone seeking to learn more about world theatre, World Theatre: The Basics provides a clear, accessible roadmap for approaching non-Western theatre.

One type of analysis cannot fit every play, nor does one method of interpretation suit every theatre artist or collaborative team. This is the first text to combine traditional and non-traditional models, giving students a range of tools with which to approach different kinds of performance.

Kyeoung has spent her entire life negotiating the double standards imposed on her as an Asian-American woman. Bullied by boys in childhood, ostracized by girls as a teen, and gas-lit by men as an adult, her experiences with sexuality grow more and more challenging. As we trace Kyeoung from the insecurity of puberty to the disenchantment of her adult life, USUAL GIRLS chronicles the wonder, pain, and complexity of growing up female.