CRITICAL ARTICLES
While several annotated articles are included below for perusal, below are the three I believe to be most essential:
Elinor Fuchs, Fefu and Her Friends, A View from the Stone
Ann M. Shanahan, Playing House: Playing House: Staging Experiments About Women in Domestic Space
If a single article is to be read from this list, let it be this remarkable essay by Elinor Fuchs, which cracks open the play to new heights of understanding. In this essay, Fuchs sheds light on not only the themes of the play, but the innerworkings of what Fornes has intentionally crafted. Elinor Fuchs, who also wrote the essential work “Visit to a Small Planet,” has a gift for clearly and beautifully gripping what must be understood about any given play, and it is a good fortune that she wrote about Fefu and Her Friends. In this essay, Fuchs articulates several relationships and dualities at work in this play: interior and exterior, gathering and dismembering, environment and individual. She also expertly draws the characters in the play to their historical counterparts: Fefu and Voltairine De Cleyre, Julia and Isadora Duncan, and Emma with Emma Sheriday Fry. She also examines the final scene of the play between Julia and Fefu, tying it back to both Greek theatre and the Passion play.
Wordscapes of the Body: Performatice Language as Gestus in Maria Irene Fornes's Plays | Deborah R. Geis
If Elin Diamond’s work ties the practice of feminism and Bretchtian theatre together, this article by Deborah Geis goes even further and ties the work of Fornes together with the gestic language of Brecht. She offers analysis for several of Fornes’s plays, but especially Fefu and Her Friends. She acknowledges that “nearly all of the monologues in Fefu, up to emma’s lecture, dwell on the characters’ senses of identity as defned in relationship to (or, more accurately, in contradiction to) their view of men.” Brecht asks us to examine the story we are watching and see it anew. In the case of Fefu and Her Friends, Geis argues that the female body itself is inherently gestic in nature. The body itself speaks as a sign of the world it inhabits and the society which affects it. Geis also highlights a concept that I believe in worth centralized when considering this play on the group of women, stating that “such a community is transgressive, and it is capable of generating enormous power.”
The author of this article details her experience as a female professor in the Women’s Studies and Gender Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago. As part an ongoing set of workshops dedicated to gender research, a workshop of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends. The production of A Doll’s House was performed by undergraduate students, while Fefu was performed by faculty members. Shanahan observed the many layers of meaning that were uncovered by enlisting these specific performers and the ways in which both plays connected with one another. She pays special attention to the concept of women in a house, and how this space may simultaneously serve as a domain for creativity while also trapping a woman within the walls. She also explores the meaning of interior and exterior spaces with respect to Fefu, as well as the liminal space she found present in these workshop performances. As the women performing were all portraying women in academia as real-life women in academia, a new strand of interplay was discovered and reinforced the “spatial dramaturgy” of the play. The concept is fascinating and sheds light on how someone might choose to develop a concept for a production of Fefu.
A remarkable and rare quality of Fornes was her willingness to lend insight into her process to others. In this interview with Robb Creese, Fornes shares aspects of her writing process and discusses how she allows a play to come to her, through pieces of dialogue written on a paper napkin, to imagining characters in vibrant technicolor. She also describes the spark of creation for Fefu and her Friends – she had a fantasy about a woman with a rifle and a Mexican joke about two men speaking at a bullfight! She also describes Fefu as being a deeply intimate play to her heart, one which required painful delving into personal pain. In order to “reinforce” the intimacy of the play, Fornes would play Olga Guillot and sift through her folder of “sufferings.” This interview is deeply valuable to anyone who wishes to explore the world of Fefu and Her Friends and understand the process of the woman who wrote it.
Fefu's Friends, Old and New, American Theatre Magazine | Diep Tran & Caridad Svich
It is stunning and sad that so few theatre companies have attempted to produce Fornes’ work, considering the vitality and impact of her plays. In New York, the only revival of Fefu and her Friends since the original 1977 production in forty one years has been at Theatre for a New Audience in 2019. Upon Fornes’ passing in 2018, many theatre companies had a renewed interest in producing her work. Many of the team members from the original production are still alive, and in this insightful article, artists from both the original production and revival compare their notes to one another and exchange their experiences. The conversation was moderated by playwright and former student of Fornes, Caridad Svich, and includes Lileana Blain-Cruz, (director of the 2019 TFANA Production), Rebecca Schull (the actress who played the title role in both the 1977 and 1978 productions of Fefu), Gordana Rashovich (the actress who played Emma in both the 1977 and 1978 productions of Fefu), and Amelia Workman (the actress who played the title role in the 2019 TFANA production. The interview provides extraordinary insight into the challenges of both acting and staging Fefu, and what the play has meant and continues to mean to women. There is a particularly striking observation from Amelia Workman in which she observes “Women like this did exist and do exist, and I think representation matters, and seeing people that look like you in different kinds of life, aspects of life, experiencing different things with different kinds of people is important in the path forward in terms of understanding each other.”
This article is very straightforward and readable, while also honoring the complexity of Fefu and Her Friends and the themes of the play. Farfan posits that Fefu and Her Friends is a Lehrstück, or learning play. Incidentally, the term Lehrstück was developed by Bertolt Brecht, predicated on the idea that theatre is a potential educational tool that can spur an audience to action, once they have learned more of the world around them and their place in it. Farfan examines the role of Julia and Fefu in relationship to the patriarchal forces that oppress them. Farfan suggests that Fefu’s desire to align with what she perceives to be male qualities is not any more a successful strategy for resisting these forces and developing a more equitable world than Julia’s panic. Farfan also beautifully describes the mise-en-scene at play in Fefu and Her Friends, and examines the way that travelling to other worlds takes places for both the characters and the audience members witnessing this play. Finally, this article refers to several other academic articles included in this bibliography, which allowed my reading of them to become clearer. Much of the writing on Fefu and Her Friends is in conversation with each other, as I discovered.
It was an exciting discovery to find that Sarah Ruhl, now widely known as an acclaimed writer, once wrote about Fornes as a recent graduate of the MFA program at Brown University. In this article, Ruhl explores a variety of exciting concepts that, although they do not directly refer to Brecht, echo many of his concepts and criticisms, especially as they pertain to capitalism and Westernized dramatic concepts. She uses not only Fefu, but the entire body of Fornes’s work available to her to illustrate her argument. She states, “I would aruge that Fornes’s theatre is a theatre of desire and pleasure rather than a theatre of intention, and that her plays are populated by willful subjects rather than by characters constructed by psychological motivation.” (189) This reminds me so immediately of Brecht’s Short Organum. Ruhl beautifully examines what separates motivation from pleasure, and what actors might truly be aiming at beyond mere “want.” I found there to be echoes of other dramaturgical concepts as well, specifically, the concept of Proehl’s dramaturgical sensibility, a concept which I feel could be a guiding essence for any rehearsal process, but especially Fefu: “There are things in the world, and in the theatre, that we don’t know, and even things that we don’t know we don’t know.” There is something freeing and exciting about the idea of applying this lack-of knowledge concept and allowing it to guide the rehearsal process.
This documentary, created by Michelle Memran, is a beautiful and moving film detailing Fornes’ life and her history. Memran began filming Fornes in 2003, unaware that the work would lead to a finished product in 2017. The film captures an intimate and tender friendship between two creative people as it evolved over the course of fifteen years. It is an indispensable and profound celebration of an artist’s life and the magic of creativity. From the outset, Fornes is shown to have been suffering from memory loss, and heartbreakingly, she is diagnosed with dementia. In the film, Fornes and Memran travel to Cuba to visit Fornes’ family, run into fellow playwrights on the streets of New York, and swim in the Atlantic Ocean. The film brilliantly displays the brilliance, vivacity, and spirit of Fornes.