it premiered in Spanish in New York. She never staged the play herself, and it is considered "a precursor" to her work as a playwright. In 1959, about the time she was working on La Viuda, Fornés entered into a romantic relationship with the writer Susan Sontag. Fornés later described how, in the spring of 1961, her career as a playwright was launched when she tried to help Sontag, who was frustrated by her inability to make progress on a novel she was writing. Fornés, by her own account, demonstrated how easy writing can be by sitting at their kitchen table and taking cues found at random in a cookbook to start a short story: "I might never have thought of writing if I hadn't pretended I was going to show Susan how easy it was." Their relationship ended in 1963. Playwright The play considered her first as a playwright was There! You Died, first produced by San Francisco's Actor's Workshop in 1963. An absurdist two-character play, it was later renamed Tango Palace and produced in 1964 at New York City's Actors Studio. The piece is an allegorical power struggle between the two central characters: Isidore, a clown, and Leopold, a naive youth. Like much of her writing, Tango Palace stresses character rather than plot. With it, Fornés also established her production style, which required her participation in the entire staging process. The Successful Life of 3 and Promenade followed in 1965. The pair earned Fornés her first Obie Award in 1965. Both of the New York Times senior theater critics were enthusiastic in their reviews of Promenade. Clive Barnes called it "a joy from start to finish" and praised the show's "dexterity, wit and compassion". Walter Kerr highlighted the collaboration of lyricist and composer along with the show's manipulation of stereotypes and Brechtian juxtapositions that left him admiring the mockery of conventions that evoked affection for those same conventions: "The tenderness is as actual as the slyness.... Inside a put-on, some old pleasures have been restored." She came close to having her work performed on Broadway in April 1966, when Jerome Robbins directed The Office starring Elaine May. But Fornes was so unhappy with how the production misrepresented her vision that she exercised her contractual right to withdraw the script. The show closed after ten previews and she never approached Broadway again. In Fefu and Her Friends (1977), Fornés