The year I learned to write plays

From October 20 – 24, eight artists gathered in a Zoom room for four precious hours of playwriting each day, under the guidance of fellow playwright Marilo Nuñez. We were led down a path that had been cut by a woman named María Irene Fornés.

Fornés was a Cuban-American playwright and director, and has been called the greatest and the least acknowledged female playwright of our time. From 1961 to 2000, she wrote over 35 original plays, founded the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab and taught her creative methodology, which has transformed the American theatre landscape. A group of her students, including Marilo, have embraced the task of passing down this methodology to the next generation of playwrights.

In this method, participants write in response to prompts that guide us into our memories and our senses. The prompts are simple, even banal, (“We have no more chicken”, “A green shirt appears”) and allow us to write into surprising places where we had never expected to find. During our week together, we brought our breath and our bodies into our writing with meditative stretching and group dance breaks. We were invited to trust our intuition and the simplicity of the moment. This method guided us to release whatever voices emerge (in English, Spanish, and beyond), rather than teaching us how to speak.

We also got to learn about La Maestra herself – how her playful spirit echoed in everything she created, how her feminist politics and queerness influenced in her life and work, and how her relationship to creation constantly smashed convention. Creating in this method felt like I was brushing up against something very alive and beyond me. Maybe it was the legacy of writers dreaming though a door that Fornés left open. Maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe those are the same thing.

On our final day together, each participant’s gorgeous imagination blasted through the screen as we read each other’s work. We wrote so much material that we all ran out of our 10 minutes of presentation time before we were done. It was beautiful to hear how we were each writing as ourselves, and the concept of ‘good’ writing was someone else’s idea we were learning to let go of.

We’ll gather for two more weeks this winter to continue writing in this method. A gift given in love expands beyond the exchange. This method, these workshops, and Marilo’s guidance feels like that.

– Camila Diaz-Varela

Workshop participants (from top left): Camila Diaz-Varela, Marilo Nuñez, Monica Garrido, Sebastian Marziali, Rosalba Martinni, Janis Mayers, Ximena Huizi, Brefny Caribou, Sofia Rodriguez. Photo by Marilo Nuñez.

Aluna’s professional development workshops are presented with support from TD Bank.