María Irene Fornés (May 14, 1930 – October 30, 2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Her plays range widely in subject-matter, but often depict characters with aspirations that belie their disadvantages. Fornés, who went by the name "Irene", received nine Obie Theatre Awards in various categories and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for 1990. New Yorker critic Hilton Als wrote in 2010 that she had done "more than her fair share in terms of changing the face of theatre". He added: "No matter how hard Fornés's subjects can be, her work sits in the ear like luxurious reason." In a 2013 interview, Tony Kushner said: "She had terrifyingly high standards and was terribly blunt about what others did with her work. Her productions were unforgettable. She was really a magical maker of theater." Biography Early years Fornés was born on May 14, 1930, in Havana, Cuba, the youngest of six children. After her father Carlos Fornés died in 1945, she immigrated to the United States at the age of 15 with her mother and one sister. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951. When she first arrived in the US, Fornés worked in the Capezio shoe factory. Dissatisfied, she took classes to learn English and became a translator. At the age of 19, she became interested in painting and began her formal education in abstract art, studying with Hans Hofmann in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. By 1954, Fornés had met the writer and artist's model Harriet Sohmers. They became lovers and moved to Paris where Fornés planned to study painting. There she was struck by the world premiere production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. She later told an interviewer: "I didn't speak any French at all. But I understood the world in which it took place, I got the rhythm. And it turned my life upside down." She lived with Sohmers in Paris for three years, and after their relationship ended Fornés returned to New York City in 1957. Early writing Fornés's first step toward playwriting involved translating letters she brought with her from Cuba that were written to her great-grandfather from a cousin in Spain. She turned the letters into a play called La Viuda (The Widow, 1961). Never translated into English,