305 Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 47:1 Spring 2022 © University of California Regents THE FORNES FRAME: CONTEMPORARY LATINA PLAYWRIGHTS AND THE LEGACY OF MARIA IRENE FORNES. By Anne García-Romero. Tucson: Uni- versity of Arizona Press, 2016. 232 pages. Paperback $24.95, ebook $24.95. Professor and playwright Anne García-Romero provides a groundbreak- ing theoretical framework for understanding twenty-first-century Latinx plays in The Fornes Frame. This framework alludes to Maria Irene Fornes, a prolific Cuban American playwright who is considered the foremother of contemporary Latinx playwrights. García-Romero defines a frame as “a grouping of ideas, a border, a pair of glasses, a human or animal body, a foundational structure, a proscenium arch of a theatre, or a doorway” (5), and she offers “the Fornes frame” as a theoretical lens for analyzing how Latinx plays are or can be written and understood. In explaining the Fornes frame, García-Romero tells us that it comprises four elements and theatrical devices: cultural multiplicity, supernatural intervention, Latinx identity, and theatrical experimentation. She shows how these elements can enrich our understanding of plays by five Latinx playwrights: Caridad Svich, Karen Zacarías, Elaine Romero, Cusi Cram, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Placing the works of these playwrights in conversation with Fornes’s own works, García-Romero explores the four elements of the Fornes frame. The first of the book’s six chapters introduces the Fornes frame and Fornes’s works, and the following chapters apply this theoretical lens to the works of the five contemporary playwrights noted above. The book ends with an epilogue dedicated to the legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (already infirm at the time of the book’s writing, she died in 2018, two years after its publication). Chapter 1 introduces the cultural complexity of Fornes’s plays, their significance, and their circulation throughout the United States, Europe, and India. This chapter helps readers understand García-Romero’s purpose in writing the book: to promote the importance of teaching, studying, and theorizing Fornes’s influential works. The author draws our attention to what she calls Fornes’s “environmental pedagogy,” a term García-Romero uses to “describe the ways in which Fornes has taught a generation of playwrights” (46). This pedagogy departs from Aristotelian principles, embodied in structure and logic, in favor of aesthetics and imagination. In this way Fornes creates a theater of her own—based not on any formula but