On a Saturday afternoon in Williamsburg, I find Cynthia Hopkins perched on a piano bench in her studio, shuffling through compositions for a special musical celebration she’ll perform on May 4 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO, what will be the theater’s final (non-gala) concert in that space before it moves to nearby Jay Street.

“As we’ve gone into rehearsal here, the Occupy Wall Street protests have happened almost around the corner,” Kipp Osborne, owner of the Canal Park Inn and Playhouse, tells me. “We never could have planned such a thing, but it’s so connected to it—it’s like the forces of society are wanting to hear this play.”

At 6 a.m. on the morning of October 14, as news spread of Mayor Bloomberg’s intended “cleanup” of Zuccotti Park, hundreds of union members amassed on the corner of Liberty and Broadway, carrying brooms, buckets, and signs to show their support for the growing grassroots political movement against corporate greed in Manhattan.

The year is 1972. The doorbell rings and a boisterous Betty Dodson, nude, answers it. “Come on in,” she says to the stream of 13 women, aged anywhere between recent Smith grad and New Jersey grandmother, as they enter the large spare living room of her mid-Manhattan apartment.

If there is any action, it takes place primarily in the West Village, mostly around Bleeker and Christopher Streets. The action, if there is any, is centered around the publication of Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off Broadway Movement by Stephen J.

"Americans travel like they go to Disneyland," I overheard K say in the kitchen. K taught a class on Grimm’s Fairy Tales at a nearby college in Berlin and was preparing to give a lecture on the American phenomenon of Disney, aka "How Disney destroys everything."

If angels exist, they surely have not forgotten Maria Irene Fornes. Mother Avant-Garde. Sappho of the Stage. Maria “call me Irene” Fornes. The Cuban playwright and director, now 72 years old, has been called the greatest and the least acknowledged female playwright of our time.