ABSTRACT
In the 1990s at the Yale School of Drama, I sat in the back of a room with Maria Irene Fornes’s 100-year-old mother, Carmen. The dean at the time, Stan Wojedowski Jr., and I had brought Irene in for weekend workshops with our MFA playwriting students. She is remembered by many for her words: “We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.” Hour after hour we watched Irene conduct her exercises, which expanded not only the students’ “possible” universes but their “impossible” universes. I know now at a distance through the lens of 25 years, those wondrous expansive moments were the origins of this book.
