“Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre.” (22, Emma)

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Favorite Line: “Women are restless with each other. They are like livewires.” (15, Fefu)

In reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai and Dionysus’ reference to the “livewire” self. How peculiar that this precise word should be employed in Fefu’s monologue in a play about eight women, and that I should therefore be reminded of an ancient play written by another convention-breaking playwright which also involves a pack of mad women on a mountain.  I love this line, for it reveals Fefu’s perspective on gender as she reflects on the benefit of being a man over a woman and articulates the intense electricity that exists in a room where men are not present. One of the most incredible aspects of Fefu and her Friend is the historization. It was written in 1977, and yet takes place in 1935. However, Fornes takes it a step further, and reaches all the way back to Greek theatre to add another layer of complexity and meaning.

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Favorite Moment: I love the moment in Part III where the women exit the living room to incite a fight over who will be held responsible for the task of doing the dishes. Hasn't every woman who has hosted a party experienced this? There is something magical in the way Fornes is able to take this moment, so often thought of as a painstaking chore, and illustrate the way women often rush to relieve the other of another moment’s work, overly eager to help. The water fight also allows for this bursting moment of play and fun to immediately drop into the darkness of the next moment, when Julia begins to speak about death.

 

Most Important Line and Moment:

“I need his touch. I need his kiss. I need the person he is. I can’t give him up. (She looks into Julia’s eyes.) I look into your eyes and I know what you see. (Julia closes her eyes.) It’s death. (Julia shakes her head.) Fight!” (59, Fefu)

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This line, exchanged between Fefu and Julia, occurs towards the end of the play. I find this line to be deeply important to the play. Despite Fefu’s posturing of power and attempt to wield dominance over the group of women, she still maintains fears of her own that strip away the presentation of strength she holds so dearly. In a way, Fefu and Julia are both fighting for their lives in this moment, although Julia has already resigned herself to the comfort of death.

 

Positives

1. A wide range of emotional life exists within this play

Fefu and her Friends is alive with a bent and brilliant sense of humor, sprinkled throughout the play. It makes an arch across different kinds of humor, from the dark and twisted to the quick and witty. Much like women themselves, the range of emotional depth across this play is expansive and complex. It touches on fear of abandonment, the trauma of lost love, and the burden of defiantly existing as a woman in a world created and run by men.

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   2. A wealth of opportunity to examine and to explore gender with a cast of eight women

The cast calls for eight women, and no explicit recommendations are made. With this flexibility, there is an open road available for casting decisions and there is a true opportunity to have a diverse and inclusive cast of women and non-binary people who align across the masculine and feminine spectrum. 

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   3. An underproduced treasure of a play that is magnificently complex

Fefu and her Friends is a play more often read than seen live on stage, perhaps due to the challenges presented by its unusual structure and plotless storytelling. A company might be unwilling to include this play in its season for fear of repelling its audience. However, I believe that many audiences have begun to crave a departure from the overproduction of other works associated with the avant-garde (Beckett, Pinter, and so on) by men, whose work is no less difficult than the challenges presented by Fefu and Her Friends. The joy of this play is woven into its complexity. It allows the audience true freedom in their takeaways following the end of the play, as opposed to being spoon-fed the morality lessons implicit in the story.

 

Challenges

1. Meeting the challenge of the non-realism as a genre

Fefu and her Friends is considered to be plotless. It does not have the conventional structure of an inciting incident, rising points of action, and climax. Rather, it is a play about what occurs a room full of women together over an evening of conversation, arguing, gossiping, and collaborating. Working with a non-realistic play requires bravery, imagination, and trust in the collaborators who choose to engage with its production. After reading “Dramaturging non-realism” by Tori Harding-Smith, I have a clearer idea of how Fornes blurs the line between boundaries of time and space, between actor and audience, between realism and non-realism. Harding-Smith suggests that “To engage with non-realism, spectators need to become active participants in meaning-making. Because non-realism focuses on the gaps between events and avoids explaining the motivations of its characters in rational terms, the spectators must consciously connect the dots.”

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   2. Securing a director with enough skill and care to handle the task of crafting this strange and beautiful story.

To perform this play successfully, it would be necessary to have a director who embraces (rather than fears) the delicious eccentricities of this play.  While the attention paid to the timing of the play would need to be attended with discipline and rigor, a director with a spirit of exploration and play would be ideal to helm a production, especially someone unafraid of bold choices and risks. With the aforementioned in mind, I’m not certain that needs to be handled with an extreme amount of delicacy. It is not a play made of glass, but it does have sharp edges which must be examined closely by all collaborators involved.

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   3. Five different environments and staging

In Part II of Fefu and Her Friends, four different scenes happen in different rooms, simultaneously. Fornes does not provide explicit instructions on how to practically achieve this, but it is a challenge for a myriad of reasons, including set design, accessibility concerns, and an increase in support from front-of-house staff. Also, solutions will need to be considered for audience members who are either not able-bodied or who have restricted mobility. When most of us go to the theatre, we go to sit in the theatre for about two hours or so, with a small break for intermission in between for practical matters separate from the play at hand. With this play, it is necessary that the audience get up and move to take in the scenes of the play in Part II. An absolutely stellar house management and stage management staff would be necessary to allow for a successful run of this show.

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   4. How to carefully communicate the presence of a gun and the sound of shots

In Fefu and Her Friends there is a double barrel gun which goes off at the beginning and the end of the play. For many, this sound is traumatic, and the presence of a gun alone could be enough to make some uncomfortable and unable to engage with the content of the play. While I personally do not experience such discomfort, I understand and empathize with those who have that experience. Many theatres offer warnings as such to audience members, to alert them that gun shots will be sounded aloud during the show. I think that in the case of Fefu and Her Friends, such a warning would be apt.

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   5. Casting and addressing Julia’s mental and physical condition with care and sensitivity.​

It is critical that the creative team has a full understanding and well-considered plan in place to handle Julia’s casting and the actor’s work in portraying this character. Julia uses a wheelchair, so does this mean that the casting will want to cast someone who moves through their life in this way? If so, how will the scenes of Fefu’s hallucination, in which Julia stands up and walks, be handled? If an able-bodied person is cast in this role, it will be key that both the actor and director both consider what it might mean for Julia to live in the world with her physical and mental conditions and what challenges that could present for her.

 

Questions

1. I have so, so many questions about Fefu as a character. Fefu is beguiling, grotesque, powerful, magnificent – all at once. How would an actor approach her? Is she the hero of the story, the force tying the lives of all of these women together? Or is she better off not placed on such a pedestal, realized for her capacity to bully not only her husband, but also Julia, her friend in a wheelchair?

2. How can we examine the cognitive experience of Julia? How does her mind work and what causes her to experience hallucinations? Is it truly an adverse side effect of her seizures, or is it perhaps meant to mean something more and indicate Julia’s connection to another world beyond? Is she affected by “madness,” the dated term so often used to describe women’s mental state? Or is her mind as it works simply unable to flourish in the oppressive patriarchal laws of her world?

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Crack/Thread

      My first introduction to Fefu and Her Friends and the work of Maria Irene Fornes was perhaps through an unlikely place. In the winter of 2020, I enrolled in a playwriting class at the Irish Arts Center in midtown Manhattan. The class was instructed by the intrepid and piercingly intelligent playwright Beto O’Byrne. Towards the end of the semester, he mentioned that Fefu and her Friends was running at Theatre For A New Audience, and urged us to see it if we were able. He remarked that while Fornes was one of America’s most vital and impactful playwrights, her work was distressingly under-produced, and the opportunity to see her indelible and imaginative work on stage was rare. Meanwhile, I had never heard of her before. Shortly thereafter, I began to hear of this production through other rumblings in the New York theatre community. Embarrassed by the fact that I was entirely unfamiliar with Fornes (and anxious at the likelihood of a sold-out run) I bought what would be the last of many “30 under 30” discount tickets that I purchased in my twenties. At the time, it felt like an early personal birthday present. I did not foresee that Fefu and Her Friends would be the final show I would see while living in New York. Nor could I have predicted that it would be the last time I would sit in a theatre to witness a production for, as of today, sixteen very long months.

     I offer this backstory because for me, it is impossible to read Fefu and her Friends and not consider the weight and impact that seeing this play performed live had on me. I also feel that it is important to mention this personal story because my understanding is that a person’s exposure to Fornes typically comes through study in an academic setting, and not through a live theatrical experience. As my experience was the opposite, I find it pertinent to include. Months after I saw this strange, vibrant, and thrilling show, I would spend a spring afternoon in lockdown completely compelled by The Rest I Make Up, a documentary dedicated to Fornes and the story behind her work. Long before I selected this play for my D-File, Fornes’ life and work began bouncing around in my head.

      With the above considered, I was excited to pick up this play anew and read it for the first time. I am utterly transfixed by this play, and my thread into this play is simply the existence of eight women in one single odd and beautiful story. I was immediately pulled in from the outset, laughing against my better judgement at Fefu’s first line: “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” (7) Does that say something about me? Does that say something about my sense of humor? From there, the play effectively lets itself rip, and the pulse under it is the snappy and intelligent conversation between these women. Having been fortunate enough to have had the experience in my lifetime of being in a large group of female friends, I understand firsthand exactly how challenging and exciting those conversations can be. The chemistry in a room is different when men are not present, and what Fornes does with Fefu is capture that sentiment exactly.

 

Audio and Visual moments

Visual Moments

1. Christina’s glass with a. single ice cube and a few drops of bourbon.

2. Julia’s white hospital gown

3. Emma’s dramatic recitation of her speech while wearing a robe

4. The kiss between Cecilia and Paula

5. “Fefu starts shaking the wheelchair and pulling Julia off the wheelchair.” (60)

6. Julia touching her forehead to reveal blood

7. Fefu’s entrance at the end of the play with a white rabbit.

 

Audio Moments

1. The shot of a double barrel shotgun

2. Cindy and Christina singing “Winter Wonderland” in harmony

3. Schubert’s “Who is Silvia”

4. “All except Paula start singing ‘Cecilia.’” (48)

5. “They put the furniture back as Emma nd Sue jump over the couch making loud warlike sounds.” (49)

6. The sound of laughter, splashing, and screaming coming from the kitchen as the women fight over who will do the dishes.

 

Concretes

• A double barrel shotgun – Fefu regularly engages in a game with her husband, Phillip, in which she shoots at him with a shotgun, filled only with gun powder and not actual bullets, although she claims she’s “never sure.” The presence of a gun could very well be a nod from Fornes to the concept of “Chekhov’s Gun.” According to Anton Chekhov, “If in Act One you have a pistol hanging on the wall, it must fire in the last act.” More broadly speaking as a dramatic principle, it means that every element in a story should be contributing to the final narrative. Is the double barrel shotgun a direct reference to this concept? Is it, perhaps, a tongue-in-cheek reference meant to challenge this concept? In an interview, Fornes stated that:

 

"The source of this play is a Mexican joke: There are two Mexicans in sombreros sitting at a bullfight and one says to the other, “Isn’t she beautiful, the one in yellow?” and he points to a woman on the other side of the arena crowded with people. The other one says, “Which one?” and he takes his gun and shoots her and says, “The one that falls.” In the first draft of the play Fefu explains that she started playing this game with her husband because of that joke. But in rewriting the play I took out this explanation."

 

Also, in an interview with Bonnie Marranca, Fornes was asked if she was directly influenced by Chekhov in writing Fefu and Her Friends, and responded, “I think so, even though I didn’t think of Chekhov when I wrote it. I don’t know if one could analyze it technically and find similarities. What would be similarities? The way dialogue proceeds, the presentation of a section of an event. I haven’t studied Chekhov. But I think in spirit it is very Chekhovian, and also, though it is realistic, Fefu is very abstract, as Chekhov is.”

 

• Ice tray with sticks – reinforces that this is a play which takes place in late spring or early summer. In the beginning of the play, Christina asks for a bourbon and soda, changes her mind to just soda, then changes her mind again to request an ice cube with bourbon for “something to suck on.” Fefu observes her and suggests that she needs a stick in the ice so her fingers won’t get cold, and prepares some popsicle stick ice cubes for her.

• Julia’s wheelchair – Julia suffered an accident prior to the start of the play. Christina explains that a hunter aimed at a deer and while Julia was not shot, she hit her head and suffered a spinal nerve injury, resulting in petit mal seizures. As a result, Julia is wheelchair bound and unable to walk.

• A serving tray with a bowl of soup – In Part II, Sue brings a bowl of soup on a tray to Julia, breaking the liminal space that both Julia and the audience have existed in during the section of the play in the bedroom.

• A white rabbit – potential symbol of fertility, but also meaningful as it could point to Julia’s death. In addition to the reference to fertility, the rabbit could also stand in as a reference to Easter, a Judeo-Christian holiday centered around the death, burial, and return of Jesus Christ. A possible interpretation is the idea of Julia as a Christ-like figure, although ultimately the symbolic meaning if left as an unanswered mystery.

 

Echoes, Repetitions, Returnings

• Hallucinations – In this play, both Fefu and Julia suffer from hallucinations. Fefu hallucinates a vision of Julia standing up and walking across the room in a brief moment. Julia, however, endures a full scene of hallucinatory visions in which she responds to her male interrogators. Although not directly referenced, this scene reminds me of the final scene of the novel 1984, in which the main character succumbs to his captors and absorbs his training to believe that 2+2=5.  

• En Attendant Godot by Samuel Beckett: In 1954, Fornes was living in Paris and saw the original production of Waiting for Godot/En Attendant Godot, directed by Roger Blin. Although the play was performed in French and Fornes did not understand the language, she was utterly compelled and inspired by the play to enter the world of theatre. This semester, I have had been learning about the life and work of Samuel Beckett and I find there to be several compelling parallels of his experiences with her. Beckett was born in and raised outside of Dublin, Ireland, but spent the majority of his life living in France. He was fluent in French and chose to write in this second language to crack open new ideas in his plays. I find it compelling that Fornes, too, was a woman with identity was tied to her country of origin, Cuba, as well as America and France, where she briefly lived. Not only this, but she wrote in her second language, English, as well. My understanding of Fefu and her Friends was directly fed by my immersive study of Waiting for Godot. I have a tendency to push against the category of “absurdism” as a concept to label the work of playwrights who did not cosign to have their work titled as such, but I think it’s not far off to suggest that perhaps the plays of Beckett and Fornes live in very similar spiritual worlds.

• Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen: These two plays, written by Henrik Ibsen, rattle throughout Fefu and her Friends in corners both readily apparently and more subtle. In both of these plays there is a woman struggling to change her circumstances and decide her fate, which heretofore has been dictated without her consent by a patriarchal society. Most immediately, Fefu and her shotgun instantly recall Hedda and her shotgun.

• Repetition of Space: In Part II, the audience is instructed to move through four different spaces, while four different scenes happen simultaneously. The actors themselves repeat their individual scenes four times, while the audience sees each scene only once.

• Fight: In Part III, Fefu repeatedly urges Julia to “fight!” against her condition, asking her six times to fight, while Julia utters a prayer-like blessing to Fefu for no harm to come to her.

• The character Emma/Emma Sheridan Fry: In Part III, the women rehearse for their fundraiser, and Emma reads a section from Educational Dramatics, a landmark book written by early twentieth century visionary and educator Emma Sheridan Fry. Fry wrote this book to assert the guiding principles of teaching theatre and her pedagogical theory, which is that theatre was not merely the practice of rehearsal and performance, but a full examination into the purpose of human beings, akin to a calling from God. It is no coincidence that the expressive and vibrant character of Emma should be the one to recite this work.

• The physical, sexual, medical, and intellectual confinement and suppression of women: In Fefu, the way in which women move in interior and exterior spaces alike is examined in a myriad of ways. Whether the women are inside or outside, the exist in a world that is designed for men and structured to keep men in the dominant position. These women navigate a patriarchal world with varying levels of acceptance and submission.

 

Summary

       In the spring of 1935, eight women come to meet at the New England country home of Fefu, to organize a performance for a fundraiser event. Some of the women are friends, others friends of friends, and still others more than friends. In the first part of the play in the living room, each of the women arrive: Cindy, Christina, Julia, Emma, Sue, Paula, and Cecilia. 

       In Part II, the action takes place in four different locations simultaneously: the lawn, the study, the bedroom, and the kitchen. On the lawn, Emma and Fefu debate the influence of sexual activity on a person’s entrance into heaven or condemnation into hell. Fefu tells Emma that she has been experiencing great and undefinable pain lately, represented by the disturbing visit of a diseased black cat who visits her in her kitchen. In the study, Cindy and Christina discuss the meaning of the phrase “to be swept off one’s feet,” and Christina expresses her confusion over Fefu - is she a risk taker and breaker of conventional norms, or is she just dishonest and dangerous? Cindy admits a strange dream she had. In the bedroom, Julia is wearing a white hospital gown and experiences a hallucination, in which she experiences terror and muses on the nature and consequences of her inability to walk. In the kitchen, Paula discusses with Sue the exact mathematical equation behind a love affair, deducting that the length of a love affair is seven years and three months. Cecilia enters, Sue exits to take a bowl of soup to Julia, and the temperature in the room changes. Cecilia and Paula once meant a great deal to one another, and it seems that Paula has been left with a broken heart. 

       In Part III, the women rehearse the speech for their fundraising event, fight over who should do the dishes, and discuss mental fragility. Fefu hallucinates Julia walking on her legs to the coffee table, holding the sugar bowl. Following this, Sue, Emma, Paula, and Julia all muse on their past experiences in academia as women. Fefu, spurred on and shaken up by her hallucination, asks Julia if she can walk. In a painful admission, she relates to Julia that her strength is mere presentation - she fears that her husband has let her and the need she has for him is too much to bear. Fefu challenges Julia to fight to walk, and after Christina interrupts, asks for her forgiveness. Fefu grabs her gun and goes to the lawn. A shot is heard, and Julia puts her hand to her forehead, drawing blood. Finally, Fefu enters the living room with a white rabbit. The final image of the play is of the seven women, surrounding Julia as the lights fade.

 

Theatre History Connection

• While this play was first produced in 1977, it takes place in 1935. In an interview, Fornes cites that the reason for setting the play during this time period is due to it being prior to the rise of Freud, which she believed to the infiltration of suspicion and emotional deception brought about his theories. I have copied this from an interview printed at the end of my edition of Fefu, which was taped in November 1977 by Bonnie Marranca on the American Place Theatre.

• Fornes was born in 1930 in Cuba. She immigrated to the United States the age of fifteen, which would place her arrival in 1945, directly after the end of World War II. While Fefu was not written until 1977, it’s place in history comes directly off of the heels of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. The concept of women’s freedom and place in society ripples throughout the story and characters of Fefu. As a young adult, she studied art and painting in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, and traveled to Paris to continue her studies. While in Paris, she attended a production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, which deeply impacted her.

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Excerpt from Maria Irene Fornes’s 1978 interview, conducted by Bonnie Marranca: 

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MARRANCA: There is a contemporary perspective in the characters. Yet the play is set in 1935. Why?

FORNES: The women were created in a certain way because of an affection I have for a kind of world which I feel is closer to the ’30s than any other period. Simply because it is pre-Freud, in the way that people manifested themselves with each other there was something more wholesome and trusting, in a sense. People accepted each other at face value. They were not constantly interpreting each other or themselves. Before Freud became popular and infiltrated our social and emotional lives, if a person said, “I love so-and-so,” the person listening would believe the statement. Today, there is an automatic disbelieving of everything that is said, and an interpreting of it. It’s implied that there’s always some kind of self-deception about an emotion.