 with our show, which is opening tonight. I'm in fifth grade, you are in kindergarten, two one act plays in tribute to Maria Irene Fornes, written by some of these lustrous people I'm standing in front of right now. Let me just get out of the way and just say thanks to the Lewis Center, thanks to, you can look on the website at arts.princeton.edu slash Fornes and get a full list of this weekend's activities as well as our full list of funders. And so thanks to all of those folks and thanks for being here. But I would like to turn it over to my friend and colleague, Ann Garcia Romero. Ann Garcia Romero is a playwright, a scholar and an educator who has been working as a playwright for decades and is also in a very distinctive category of scholars. She is a professional playwright who is also a PhD holder and an assiduous scholar and critic of contemporary Latinx and other traditions of playwright. And so she's an incredible presence in the field and it's an incredible honor to introduce her today to guide us in this conversation of the playwright's pedagogic legacy. So I'll turn it over to my colleague, Ann Garcia Romero. This afternoon, I'll give some brief introductions to my two illustrious guests on my right and my left and we'll talk a bit about their plays, a bit about their teaching and then open it up to all of you for some question and answer toward the end. To my left, Medellia Cruz is a playwright, lyricist, translator and librettist, a new drama alumna. She was a New York Foundation of the Art Fellow and the Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright. She's been nurtured by Sundance, The Lark and by her mentor, Maria Irene Pornes at Intar. To my right, Mac Belman is a playwright and novelist, a new drama alumnus. He received his third Obie Award 2003 for Lifetime Achievement. He received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. He is a Donald A. Fine Distinguished Professor of Playwriting at Brooklyn College, where he's the coordinator of the playwriting program. Please let me welcome Medellia Cruz and Mac Belman. Begin today talking about both of your plays that are in this evening, this plays that Brian mentioned, I'm in fifth grade. You are kindergarten, two-shore plays to honor Maria Irene Pornes and your play, the new new Mac and your play, Medellia, The Book of Meow. Can you talk about how your plays were influenced and inspired by the work of Irene Pornes? Well, this particular play because I knew I had, it's a new play and it was a commission play for Princeton. So I knew what my task was but I didn't know how to go about it. So I started, I decided I wanted to take a play of Irene's and work on a script that I worked on when I first met her in 1984, when she accepted me into her workshop, even though she thought it was a really bad play. She told me so. But she said, thought I had potential. So I thought, well, I'm gonna rewrite that play which was based on a short story by Colette called Grubish. I'm gonna take that play and I'm gonna take Irene's play Promenade and I'm gonna write Fantasia Cabaret about memory loss and constellations. So I did it. So I did it. So the way I used Irene's work, I had read about how she had written Promenade on from index cards. So I took all the characters from both sources from the Colette and from Pornes. I put all the characters on index cards and I put all the scenes on index cards and I put lines from each of the original sources on this cousin. I'm just gonna mix it all up and see what scenes are right. And from the random find the specific which is what Irene was all about. So that's, I mean, it's a pretty direct influence. But. Thanks for telling me that. I never took a class with her but I knew her on and off is a colleague in the theater. Actually, I saw, definitely her friends in the original production Broadway on Eath Street. As I was going up to see the show, the elevator stopped in between two floors and I had to climb through the top of the elevator and drag three people out of the elevator to the floor where the show was going on. I got a standing ovation. And I also enjoyed to play a lot. I admire her work a lot. What I particularly admire about her is she's not a pretentious, she was not a pretentious playwright as a lot of people are. And she was very collegiate. Every time I ran into her teaching we would have very good discussions about the people we were mentoring. I ran into her, I think the last time was at the book party for a book of hers. And I happened to have a play called Fulu La Loo being done at Soho Rep. And I said, I really want to come see my play. And nobody would ever come see. I mean, no one does that, but she did. So she came to see my play and said nice things about it. I think I remember. But I remember most of what a wonderful presence she knows. And also have the few directors, who are writers, who's really a great director as well. So I think the world of her. And really in both of your works I'm really struck how your exploring intersections of both culture and history, and you kind of riff on both of those. I know MacDally, you were saying how you use index cards for the various aspects. And in your piece you mentioned it's a Fantasia cabaret. And there's influences of French cabaret, Cuban cabaret. And then Mack in your piece said in Ebor City, Florida you have influences of sort of Cuban culture, Florida culture. One of the ways that those cultural and historical aspects influence the writing of the play, the inspirations for the plays. My play was commissioned by a theater company in Tampa, Florida. So I went down there and snooped around and did a lot of research and found out there are a lot of connections in Ebor to Cuba, but also to the anarchist communities of Spain and Italy. And that interested me a lot. Che Guevara and Castro both came to Tampa. The anarchists were very powerful there. And in the 20s, it was one of the first cities in the south to drive out the KKK. Because the KKK came to town like in 2122 and all the anarchists were up on roofs with rifles and told them to get out of town and they did and they never came back. So all of these weird connections made a huge impact on me. And I just studied a lot of the local history. First up is a play called Why the Why and then I worked on the script a lot more and it was done so a rep a few years later. But she, I never studied with her but I certainly was influenced by her work. And I think at that point in New York she was certainly one of the most influential playwrights. I wish she still were. But she's a remarkable presence in the American theater. Great, thank you, Matt. So the question is what were the cultural? Well, how did the cultural and historical influences that you explore and you riff on in your play how did that inspire the writing or inspire the creation of the world? Well, you know, I feel like it all came out of my head so I would say this is the influence. But it's more like what I know of Irene especially in her, as she got ill with Alzheimer's what I saw that she still reacted to and her sense of music and fun and you know, listening to either Pia off and Compai Segundo and, you know, Astor Piazola those are the things that excited her. When she could still, when she was still talking she would be singing, you know, one Tana Metta alongside East Side West Side all around the town. It was just like, it's like, where are we? Where is Irene's head? And so I sort of focused on what is her head? Like what is going on and what does it mean when you lose your memory? And what are the memories you do remember and what do you remember them completely? And how do you, as a writer, how do you hold onto your story? So that was really my influence. I was thinking about disease and intellect and how they moved in this weird plane once you sort of get removed from the world and into your body, into your head. Yeah, because I'm struck by how memory works in both of your plays. Memory, you said of sort of, in your case, thinking about like what is Irene's memory? But how does that kind of collage of memory also impact form? So both of your plays have songs. They both have a variety of locations. Structurally, they kind of are very expansive. So how, does memory in some way influence the form of the actual play? I think so, but I mean, you have to write using memory. How you use it is up to you. I admire the way she used memory because it was not simple-minded. It was not what gets taught in most schools. It was more interesting and it was more surprising. I think the most interesting way of approaching by writing now is to use epiphany rather than narrative. Epiphany's like a slap in the face that wakes you up. In her plays, often do that slap in the face and wake you up, like that. And that to be as interesting, predictable of theater narratives don't do very much for me. And I don't think they did very much for her. I remember talking with her. She said she got into playwriting because at the time she was living with Susan Sontag, who took a great writing course and was baffled by this course and gave an assignment to Irene to look at and was about writing a play. So she wrote a play, and then she turned into a playwright. God help her. And I think it's always things happen to you and it's how you respond to them that's interesting. That is something that interests me a lot. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, and I think memory is full of lies. Things you think you remember. You don't remember them correctly. Then you go back to think about the beginning and you remember another detail that maybe is false, but it seems so vivid. So it's like, for me, memory and dream world are lived side by side. So I think as a writer, you're constantly looking for those, for me, anyway, me as a writer, I'm always looking for those places where they live in a parallel space. And not so much remember things, but re-remember to dream things. Yeah, another notion of sort of epiphany and truth telling, I guess I'm gonna circle back again to kind of issues around aesthetics and form, because with Fornes's plays, every play was formally very different. And she never ascribed to a particular narrative model it was feeling, what does this play have to be? And I'm kind of curious, maybe as playwrights in general, like how does the form of the play reveal itself and how do we have some of these two plays, how do the form reveal itself and the writing? Well, for me, I followed Irene's guidebook to promenade. So I followed that form, but it could have taken any direction because that's the beauty of Irene, is that it can't go in any direction. It could have been a musical, it could have been a monologue. I didn't know, but as I started to write it, I realized that for me, the most important part of Irene's character now is this idea of music and what her music is and what her music used to be and how, and the musicality of her characters. It was less about what shape it was gonna take was more like how it's gonna sound. What's the soundscape inside her head? That's what I was focused on. So that's what informed the form, I guess. I wrote The New London a long time ago and I remember what I was thinking about at the time, formally was a Greek play called The Amenities, which was about the creation of a political state. And the fact that you had Castro, Che Guevara and all these anarchists in Tampa, Florida, that interested me a lot. And I'm very interested in political theater but not in the kind of lectures. I don't think that's a waste of time. I'd rather create plays that get slapped in the face, make you doubt what you think you believe in. But I just let it go where it wanted to go and a lot of it had to do with places in Tampa. Basically the set in the Italian blood, but there were all these incredible places there that are still there. And it's a, you go almost to any place and there are wonderful stories in every look and cranny. So kind of moving towards now, you're both teachers of playwriting. And Fornes's playwriting method, she taught in theaters, universities, arts organizations and she used very unconventional means, a unique combination of visual art techniques, acting techniques such as visualization, drawing, yoga, sense, memory to help her students generate new play material. I'm kind of curious as both of you as long time playwriting teachers, what are ways that you help your students access that unique voice that they have as writers? You know, when I first started teaching, I thought I had to teach them what I knew and since I didn't know anything it made me feel very embarrassed. So I would have them write a monologue with the same number of words as to be or not to be monologue. But as things progressed, I began to get dubious about that. At one point I had an experience. I was offered a commission to write a play and I knew the play would get some attention because of who was doing it. So I was sitting down in the New York Public Library trying to figure out what the hell I would do and I basically didn't know what the hell I was doing and it occurred to me, what would I do if I didn't know? What if I were Shakespeare or Escalus or somebody like that? And all of a sudden I felt more confident. And I wrote a play and it actually did get some attention. And then so that made me change my notion of what creative writing was all about. I don't think it's about teaching people rules for how to do things. The thing that it's about is getting you to create the ego that can create. The other thing that's happened more recently I began to notice all of these people who were coming to these writing programs. I was trying to figure out what the hell is this all about. I mean it's all over the country too. And then finally it occurred to me when I came to New York, you could rent an apartment for $200 a month on 14th Street. You'd get a job on a coffee shop. You'd have to have a job. That world was long gone. The only way you can meet your own generation is go to one of these programs. And that's why people go to them. It's not to have me tell them how to write a play. It's to meet other people of their generation. Because theater changes every 10 or 15 years. So the thing that I've focused on now is introducing people to each other. And I'm very good at that, but it's important because what my generation wanted to do is we sort of did it. But there's a two or three newer generations come along since then. And that to me is very interesting. I think when I teach, I teach the only way I know that I actually learned from, because I had two degrees in playwriting and I still didn't know how to write a play until I met Irene. Because I learned how to, I don't know, lead people to find their own voices. I don't know exactly how I do it, but I think I do a lot of like, I don't know if it's like conjuring and visualization of Irene. Like I always think about her voice when I teach. And she had a tiny little Cuban accented voice that was just as small as it was, it was fierce. So I think about all that energy that she brought with her into the teaching, into the teaching, into the classroom. And I think about the things that she valued. And I also, the one thing I do that she doesn't do is I also bring in poetry because I feel it's important to start with words you know are good before you start to try to find your own voice. Like listen to how someone, a poet picks precise words in a precise order, at a precise order, at a page. So when you see, when you read a good poem, you kind of begin to understand the value, I think, of imagery and starkness. And you know, it's like how many words does it take to really write a good image? Not that many. People like Irene did it beautifully with two words. There are other people who take 25 pages to write the same thing. To me that's not good writing. Then it's sort of like, it's like expensive and it's like, that's a novel, that's something else. But in a play you want it to be alive and you want to create its breathing art. So for me it's like allowing people to find their own voice and dissuading them from thinking that it has anything to do with plot and taking them out of the academy in their heads. Because I feel like what is taught now is how to critique each other in most play.