MUD/DROWNING by María Irene Fornés to Return This Fall at Mabou Mines

Mabou Mines and Weathervane Productions, in association with Philip Glass' Days and Nights Festival, will present a return engagement of their acclaimed revival of
Mud/Drowning, two intimate works by legendary playwright and director María Irene Fornés.

Philip Glass' transformation of her five-page play Drowning into an opera and a version of Fornés'acclaimed Mud (which also features original music composed by Glass) - both directed again by JoAnne Akalaitis - will return to Mabou Mines (150 First Avenue) for a limited engagement from September 21 October 9, 2022, with an official opening night on September 24.

The cast of Mud will feature Paul Lazar, Sifiso Mabena, Tony Torn, and
Wendy Vanden Heuvel. Drowning will feature Tomas Cruz, Gregory Purnhagen, and Peter Stewart.

The engagement will also feature a free screening of The Rest I Make Up, the 2018 documentary about Fornés and her unexpected friendship
with filmmaker Michelle Memran. The screening will take place Monday, October 3 at 7:30 PM at Mabou Mines and will be followed by a talkback with Memran. Tickets are complimentary, but reservations are required. Reservations can be made via maboumines.org.

The Mud/Drowning production team includes Kaye Voyce (Scenic and Costume Designer),
Thomas Dunn (Lighting Designer), Gabrielle Vincent and Anne Ford Coates (Makeup Designer), Kate Croasdale (Production Stage Manager), Sage Reed (Associate Scenic & Costume Designer) and Kendra Bator & Tom Casserly (Executive Producers).

Earlier versions of Mud/Drowning were first performed in 2019 at the Circle Theatre in Carmel, CA, as part of the Days and Nights Festival.

Edward Albee called Fornés "America's most intuitive playwright." Akalaitis notes that Fornés "is also known as La Maestra-the teacher of a generation of playwrights. She creates worlds within worlds and then hurls audiences headlong into them: rural poverty, secret brutality in the center of banal households, angry eccentric women, violence and humiliation, sexual obsession-and often through the voices of those who dream of a more fulfilled life or love, articulating their longings in Fornés' beautiful, terse, emotional language, which is both highly stylized and surprisingly natural."

Drowning, Fornés' little-known surreal short play, written in 1986, finds a new voice in the New York premiere of Philip Glass' "pocket opera," which ignites its unconventional spark into a small glowing fire. In The Telegraph, Philip Glass has described his "pocket operas"-a form for which he has a continued fondness-as "pieces for just a few singers and
players."

Mud gives voice to those at the "bottom" of society with a surge of humor, compassion, and magical lyricism. Akalaitis dubs this version of Fornés' 1983 masterpiece a [table work]
performance, an ironic nod to the immersive textual work actors and directors
do in early rehearsals and simultaneous description of the style of the performance itself, around an actual table.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of Drowning and Mud take place at Mabou Mines (150 First Avenue) from September 21-October 9 on Wednesday-Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 2pm, with an additional performance on Tuesday, September 27 at 7:30pm.
Please note: There is no performance on Wednesday, October 5.

Tickets, on sale today, are $25 ($20 for students and seniors)
and can be purchased at https://maboumines.org.

Seating is general admission.

María Irene Fornés (Playwright)

has been called the greatest and least known dramatist of our time. She
wrote over 40 plays, won nine OBIE awards, and mentored thousands of playwrights across the globe. Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre devoted its entire 1999-2000 season to her
work, and her epic What of the Night? was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize. Theater luminaries like Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson and Edward Albee have credited Irene as an inspiration and influence. "Her work has no precedents; it isn't derived from anything," Lanford Wilson once said of Irene. "She's the most original of us all." Paula Vogel contends: "In the work of every American playwright at the end of the 20th century, there are only two stages: before she has read María Irene Fornés and after."

But Fornés did not set out to become a playwright. After arriving in New York City from Cuba in 1945, she worked mostly in textiles and even traveled as a painter to Paris in the 1950s. Not until the 1960s did Fornés write what she considered to be her first real play-Tango Palace-which catapulted her into the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway theater movement and a downtown DIY aesthetic that continues to thrive today. Often
referred to as the American theater's "Mother Avant-Garde," Fornés steadfastly refused to adhere to any rules or formulas in playwriting, choosing instead to follow her characters' lead in order to better get at her core question: What does it mean to be a human being? As a teacher and director of the INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab in the 1980s, she mentored a generation of Latino/a playwrights, including Cherríe
Moraga, Migdalia Cruz, Nilo Cruz, Caridad Svich, and Eduardo
Machado. In 2005, while presenting Fornés with the Theater Practitioner Award at TCG's conference in Seattle, Machado said: "She told us that we were going to change the theater, that we were going to create a world where Latino writers in America had a voice, and she willed it into all of us. And none of us would be here without her. She is the architect of how we create theater, how we teach, and the way we lead our lives."
Fornés died on October 30, 2018, at the age of 88, in Manhattan.

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