In 1978, playwright Murray Mednick founded Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop at Claremont College in Southern California, where it would become an esteemed site-specific summer festival where invited artists were allowed to use any space outdoors or indoors except the campus theatre. For fifteen of the eighteen summers of Padua’s existence, María Irene Fornés taught playwriting while creating her own work. Onsted argues that Padua provided a unique venue of experimentation, a place Fornés could explore her painterly theatrical vision and her interest in spatiality to evolve on a vast canvas before adapting her scripts for New York stages. Onstad explores how Padua’s outdoor setting and unpredictable sonic environment informed the distillation of Fornés’s liguistic and visual aesthetic and allowed her to develop and launch some of her most important plays.