SOURCE: Porterfield, Sally. “Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes.” Modern Drama 43, no. 2 (summer 2000): 204-15.

In the following essay, Porterfield discusses Fornes's theatrical technique and her work as a director of her own plays. Porterfield argues that Fornes's dominant thematic focus is “the search for truth, for wholeness, for understanding of our attempts to make sense out of a seemingly random existence.”

“I didn't think I was a playwright before I started writing. I was a painter, but it's the same thing. You like so much the way that little tree looks beside that house and so you draw it.”¹ Maria Irene Fornes indicates a tree just visible from the window of the small Greenwich Village café where we sit over coffee. It takes me a moment to find the tree because of the surrounding tangle of people, traffic, trash cans, and buildings. But...