Maria Irene Fornes believed in love. She described herself as “a romantic — very tough in some ways but with a taste for the feminine.” Susan Sontag called Irene’s work “theatre of heartbreak.” 

In Conducting a Life, Scott T. Cummings shares a post-rehearsal anecdote about Irene ordering an amber beer at a bar:

She insisted that love alters perception, that being in love makes everything different, and that light, for example, streaming through a glass of beer, shines with a new radiance. “It is more beautiful,” she said “It isn’t that you want it to be more beautiful or that you are lying to yourself. It is. Your senses are sharpened” 

If love sharpens our senses to radiant beauty, it can also sharpen our senses to vulnerability, anxiety, and insecurity. Love makes us a little bit insane, right? In Springtime, we meet characters with senses as sharp as daggers. The play becomes a microscope for examining multiple complex strands of love DNA: adoration, lust, jealousy, betrayal, and desire. 

Maria Irene Fornes believed in love, and so do I! If there is a purpose to our short time on Earth, I think it is to create love, in as many different ways as we can. Love of our art, love of our people. Irene embodied this ideology in her artistic practice, in her boundless fascination with the world around her, and in “writing for the sake of exorcism.”

Irene’s work asks us to experience romance in the minutiae of our world. It emboldens us to move with curiosity, to brace for impact. I love Springtime because it is a study in love: how it creates us, destroys us, and makes us human.