Pittsburgh Maria Irene Fornes Event Featuring Michael Cerveris

"The Rest I Make Up", a film about Maria Irene Fornes by Michelle Memran Presented by RealTime Interventions and Women Make Movies Monday, October 8th, 7-9 PMScreening and panel moderated by playwright Molly Rice, featuring Michelle Memran, co-producer Katie Pearl, Broadway/ TV/ film performer Michael Cerveris, & others.

Maria Irene Fornes is one of America's greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many only know her as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds onstage and taught countless students how to connect with their imaginations.

When she gradually stopped writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignited her spontaneous creative spirit and triggered a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off. This film documents the evolution of that relationship. In the film, theater luminaries such as Paula Vogel, Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes's important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.

The director writes:

[This is] a story about the power of friendship and creativity, and what it means to remain an artist through all the vicissitudes of one's life...but I am also making this film because it confronts a prevailing attitude about aging and Alzheimer's disease that I feel passionate about challenging...There's a pervasive view that people lose their value as they lose their short-term memories, which confines multitudes of elders to a life of invisibility and isolation while they are still capable of meaningful relationship. The Rest I Make Up counters that assumption by inviting us to live for a while with an irrepressibly vital and generative playwright who­­-even in the face of eroding memory, even as she no longer formally writes and teaches­­-is experiencing a remarkably creative period of her life.

The film has received an explosion of interest this summer, from write-ups in the New York Times and New Yorker to a sold-out run at the MoMA and corresponding Fornes marathon at NYC's Public Theater (for press, please visit http://therestimakeup.com/the-film/press/). Pittsburgh Production Company RealTime Interventions is thrilled to bring the film and its maker to Pittsburgh, making our city one of the first outside of New York to experience this extraordinary new work.

Ticket info: The event is FREE, but space is limited. Please RSVP at http://www.alphabetcity.org/events/the-rest-i-make-up/